It shouldn’t take 4 years to learn those skills though. Just the fundamentals of identifying what the biases of the authors and institutions are is something that should be taught for a year in high school.
It’s not complex and doesn’t require 4 years of classes, but it does require practice and it’s better to start early before you develop a bunch of political views and ideological blind spots.
> It shouldn’t take 4 years to learn those skills though.
No skill is binary. You can learn some of this in a single class. You get more practice if you take two dozen classes. You get even more practice if it is your profession.
Quality humanities education teaches empathy and the ability to analyze and judge sources created by humans, especially written text. That can absolutely happen at an earlier age. I'm certainly on board with increasing the amount of history education offered to high schoolers, though I suspect that many people are not.
I would posit that 4 years is way too long and much of that 4 years is too much inward facing bullshit based on a huge pile of flawed science (social psychology).
My friends that went down the 4 year history/literature path appear to be just as susceptible to spreading biased bullshit full of logical fallacies on social media as anyone else.
It’s not complex and doesn’t require 4 years of classes, but it does require practice and it’s better to start early before you develop a bunch of political views and ideological blind spots.