I took a semester long Critical Thinking course in college as part of a Philosophy major prerequisite (which I later dropped.) I was already familiar with the material, which was pretty sparse and underdeveloped compared to the Sequences, but I think every other student left that class having learned a lot about avoiding some major pitfalls of reasoning which affected their lives on a regular basis, and every student including myself agreed that something like it ought to have been a mandatory class in high school.
Individual benefits might be easier to sell than societal benefits, but honestly, I think that the societal benefits of general rationality education would utterly dwarf the benefits of intensive rationality training in a small sector of the populace. Biases hampering our ability to productively debate policy, to evaluate initiatives empirically, to design programs to attain their actual intended purposes, etc. all harm the social structures around which all people, from the most rational to the least, are forced to build their lives.
Does anyone know of a good article that illustrates how society is generally irrational, and how making society more rational would have huge benefits, because it'd be a very high level action?
I'm writing an essay about how to improve education, and one of my proposals is that a core part of the curriculum should be rationality. I believe that doing this would have huge benefits to society, and want to explain why I think this, but I'm having trouble. Any thoughts?
Edit: Part of Raising the Sanity Waterline talks about common ways in which people are irrational. However, they're all links to longer Less Wrong articles. Preferably, I'd like to illustrate it in a few sentences/paragraphs.