“Schools have to hold out that they are educational establishments,” she said. “They are not surrogate psychologists or mental health professionals.”

But Jane wrote “what I want is to teach them how to figure out if the author of the op-ed is in favor of abortion or against it, and whether the article on autism and vaccinations says that vaccinations cause autism or not.”

She calls that learning to read. I’d call it learning to think. You can certainly take an op ed or article and dissect it for the class or assign it as homework to be dissected by the student. But that is very much like what math or physics professors do.
They can’t turn people into mathematicians or physicists.

I doubt you can get turn students into critics who will apply your teaching outside the classroom.

I do understand that you think psychologists and their amateur companions – teachers, social workers etc – have too much power. I think you may be right, but I don’t think that they are entirely worthless, and I don’t think that that psychology should be eliminated because it’s not science, or because it can’t prove its claims like science.

Psychology is not a physical science. Even with physical science, there are often questions to which the answers are ambiguous and which experts argue passionately over what exactly has been proved. Medicine operates in much the same way, but with fewer certainties than physics although more than psychology. I think that the excessive power given to those supporting poor psychological theories needs to be challenged, but to eliminate psychology entirely would be to throw out the baby with the bathwater – you’d be eliminating any benefit that comes from an attempt to understand human thinking that, although it may be in its infancy, is still of value. Psychiatry, with its advances in knowledge of the effects of brain chemistry on behaviour and emotions, is a bit more advanced, although still far from being able to prove things with the certainty of some branches of physical science, or even the semi-certainty of other branches.

And if you’ve got people who think checklists of that sort, probably hardly better than those produced by writers of articles in women’s magasines and almost certainly neither validated nor tested and the reliability determined, they shouldn’t be taken too seriously by the legal or medical authorities.

Well-designed and tested checklists can be useful. I believe there are some which are of use in both medicine and psychology, and there were news reports recently that using checklists before surgery have been proven to reduce mortality in the patients by ensuring that the right patient is on the table, the right operation is carried out and the right number of tools are outside the patient after the operation.