Your points on this issue are excellent. And this is potentially a very productive approach to raising sanity waterline, however my concerns are more or less covered by this comment I made to a similar proposal.
But I will add that I fear you may be implicitly overestimating the cognitive capacity of say the average 12 year old. I'm pretty sure many children in primary schools can get a lot of out of learning the "methods of rationality", but I'm not that sure they would be the majority. For most at that age I believe you would get more people just internalizing right answers rather than fixing their thinking. It was Aristotle I think who said that often the people with the most correct opinions don't make the most correct decisions.
Kids have less invested in their beliefs. If you're married to a theist and raising your kids in the tradition of a particular religion, it's a lot harder to suddenly change your mind about the foundations of your life. Similarly, people who've already experienced the loss of people close to them seem to have a lot more invested in the idea that death is the natural cycle of life.
Your opinions converging with those of someone who is above average in rationality on a number of particular issues, such as say Atheism or P-zombies will probably be a net boost, but its hard to figure out if this is getting us anywhere at building skills that let people make their own better maps rather than just trusting or being impressed by someone more capable than themselves . School is nominally partially about teaching kids a whole bunch of true beliefs. But does it markedly improve rationality?
Also on a unrelated note, I hope what you learned here will produce practical benefits for you as well as that you will continue to try and be well... less wrong. :-)
The reason I say this is because we live in a pretty insane society, and we're pretty crazy ourselves. So I wanted to warn you that eventually you will hit on something that will cause you quite a bit of mental anguish or at least risk the socially approved self image you have of yourself... or you most likley are not trying to be as strong as you can be.
I would agree that teaching elementary schoolers proper "rationality" is probably impossible, but I think there would be a lot of benefits to encouraging curiosity and interest in the world generally. When I was 12, my science teacher gave us all pendulums and told us to figure out how they worked. Everyone was annoyed at him - we'd plodded dutifully through the public school system for years by then, and everyone knew that the teacher had to tell you what variables to test, and which one was independent, and which one was dependent. We ended up ...
I remember the moment when I became an atheist.
I was reading Religion's Claim to Be Non-Disprovable, an uneasy feeling growing in my head, and then I reached the bottom of the article, stared at the screen for a couple of seconds, and got it.
"There is no God," I whispered. (Then I braced myself to be hit by a thunderbolt from the sky, so the belief was still paying rent, right to the very end).
No thunderbolt came. I tried again, a little louder. "There is no God."
It was...
kinda obvious, actually. I mostly felt disappointed in myself for needing someone to explain it to me, like I'd failed a test and hadn't even realized it was a test until it was too late. Friendly AI? Never would have figured that one out myself. But it shouldn't have taken Eliezer-level intelligence to point out that there's no one sensible in charge of the universe. And so - without a crisis of faith, without worry, without further drama - I changed my mind.
Over the last 6 months, I've changed my beliefs about a lot of things. I get the impression that's pretty standard, for a first read-through of the sequences. The interesting part is that it wasn't hard. After reading everything on How to Actually Change Your Mind, I'd expected letting go of beliefs I'd held my entire life to be a bit of an ordeal. It really wasn't. I didn't agree with the LessWrong consensus on every issue (I still don't), but whenever I came to agree (or to modify my position in that direction) I said so, and reevaluated the appropriate assumptions, and adjusted my model of the world, and then went on to the next article.
When I started the Sequences, I was 16. I don't think I'm generalizing from one example in terms of my ease of accepting new ideas; when I've explained these concepts to other smart teenagers, they usually also get the implications immediately and change their mind without apparent difficulty. It may be that most people rarely change their mind, but teenagers - at least the teenagers I know - change their mind a lot. I've watched my friends change their mind on life-changing decisions - colleges, careers, religion - every couple of weeks. Eliezer writes in "We Change our Mind Less Often Than We Think":
I haven't asked my friends to specify the probability they'll make a given decision (typical people find this annoying for some reason), but I've routinely heard them express high levels of confidence in a choice, only to have made a totally different decision the next day.
There are both advantages and disadvantages to changing your mind easily, but I think it's worth looking at the reasons it's easier for younger people to change their mind, and whether they have any implications for changing your mind in general. I've identified a couple reasons why it seems to be easier for teenagers to change their mind:
Lessons for Rationalists: Social pressure to be consistent is one of the big reasons why people don't change their minds. Don't state opinions publicly if you'll later feel pressured to stick by them; ask yourself how much of your attachment to a belief is related to what other people will think of you; foster a community where changing your mind is expected and encouraged. I think LessWrong does really well at all of these.
Lessons for Rationalists: It's been suggested before (as a way of avoiding the sunk cost fallacy) that you imagine you've been teleported into this life, and have to decide what paths to take (independent of what the person-who-used-to-be-here was doing with their life). Ask yourself what you have invested in your current beliefs and what you would give up if you changed your mind. Try to find a third alternative between rejecting everything you once believed and clinging stubbornly to a lie; those are rarely really the only options.
Lessons for Rationalists: We really should start teaching this stuff in elementary schools. The more people learn about rationality before they get good at clever arguments, the better the odds they'll internalize it. LessWrong has discussed this a fair bit, but not done a ton about it. If people agree this is important, I'm planning a couple more posts on outreach to teenagers.
What other explanations are there?
tl/dr: Changing your mind is easier when you're younger. When you want to change your mind, try thinking like a teenager; if you want to be involved in rationality outreach, teach kids.