I'm not sure how you think critical thinking works. Do you have some sort of magical logic flow that doesn't requiere some base understanding of facts?

Guy trying to sell quartz as "energy enhancing crystals" -> no understanding as to how body energy works -> might be legit, let's give it a try

Guy trying to sell quartz as "energy enhancing crystals" -> knowing that available body energy is dictated by ATP and has nothing to do with crystals -> this smells like a scam

Critical thinking is about being able to apply knowledge of what you know to what you are currently being told. You need some basis of real, provable facts for it, which is why if you had a bio course, you also likely had some lab component to it as well.

Sure, I hear you cry, but all of that information isn't something I need to know basically ever! Well, you're correct, but a fun thing about learning is that the deeper you cut into a subject, the more you remember. You probably wouldn't remember much if the entire unit only said "mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell".

And doing these deep cuts to reinforce the basics of understanding work. There is a reason that "mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell" is a meme, and it's because everyone remembers that part, not nessessarily the part that they have their DNA that is always inherented from your mother and is referred to as mDNA.

I hope this helps you to think critically against the continued push against critical thinking, particularly to the claim that what you learned in school has nothing to do with doing it.

I see what you're getting at, and you're not wrong to think about how the lessons we teach kids from the minds and skills we want them to have. There's positives and negatives to the liberal arts education, and it could be said that it is just as much of what is left out then what is kept in. The choice to teach about mitochondria and not the Krebs Cycle is odd from a scientific perspective, but if you know about endosymbiosis then it's a lot harder to accept that all organisms appeared independently a few millennia ago. But once you view a liberal arts education from this perspective then you see these biases everywhere. For example, how many world history classes talk about the Tamil Kings, or the Warring States period of China? It's a lot easier to other a region you don't know the history of.

So we have to ask, what purpose should education serve? What knowledge and skills should we expect people to have by the time they reach adulthood? Add what is the best way to disseminate those?