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Bryan Caplan has a book on education, one of the things he found going through the research is that "transfer of learning" is very low. Like learning Latin does not help most students learn a Latin derived language.
Students tend to learn the thing for the test then quickly forget it.
The idea of teaching epistemics sounds nice, but I don't think it would have much practical effect.
I think just awareness of the existence of epistemics might be helpful.
It's like math. Most people can't remember half of what they learned in high school math classes. Many can't even do basic algebra, but they're at least aware that algebra can and probably should be done to explain why an answer is correct.
Sometimes I'll be in conversation with a person and they'll make an assertion. I'll ask them why they think that. How do they know? Suppose I didn't agree. How would they convince me? Then their eyes narrow and their lips curl. I can see the gears turning as they mentally brand me enemy and then they just assert the thing again, but louder and with edge to their voice.
My guess is that person will remain unchanged by an epistemics class.
And the people that might benefit from an epistemics class will hate the subject and think it is dumb, because the way it will end up being taught will be dumb. They won't be learning how to think. They'll learn the major philosophers in epistemics, they'll memorize some vocab words, and they'll do a few story puzzles.
This is my fundamental complaint with K-12 education. You sit in a chair for hours a day filling out worksheets. It isn't clear to me that actually teaches most people very much.
I spent years filling out Spanish language vocabulary and verb conjugation worksheets. At no point did I learn to speak Spanish nor was I on a path to learning to speak Spanish. I suppose someone learning Spanish could benefit from some of those worksheets, as a very small part of a larger effort.
I had a good language teacher in highschool. She taught German with full immersion. People would come from all over the state to observe this amazing teaching method. I'm terrible at learning languages, but after 4 years I can kind of have basic conversations in German. My thinking at the time was "yeah of course this is the only way to actually learn the language".
What I hadn't spent those four years of German class doing was learning how to pass a test that verified my German speaking skills. So when I got to college and tried to test into a higher level German, I couldn't get past the entry level requirements. I would have had to entirely start over. My frustration at that led me to never take a language class in college.
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