I agree with this, its a great summary of the situation.

My personal belief is the following:

School (at least in my home country of Australia) focuses on rigid learning that is not about building understanding and interest in a subject but just stating facts.

An example of this is the girl in my grade that did the best had a photographic memory. She was a whizz at answering questions about things straight from the book, and scored really well in her exams. When she was asked questions that involved combining knowledge from multiple classes she was stumped! I don't think she more/less "smart" that other peers in our grade but I do think the way school nurtured and measured academic ability focused on her style of intelligence, and having a high recall unfortunately doesn't make you better at discriminating truth from fiction.

We live in the age of everyone "doing my own research" but these very same people don't actually understand the basics to really comprehend and assess the information they are ingesting. I think that school taught us that "smart" means "remembering things well", and in the age of social media that's sometimes that the world is flat, or that more people die from COVID vaccines than the virus.