In California at least, skeptical analysis is in the curriculum from sixth grade onwards. I was under the impression it was there in all states, although I could be mistaken.

Now that's interesting. There's a delay between when a curriculum stream is adopted and when its students start participating in civic affairs. My understanding (unconfirmed) is that participation in Twitter and Facebook is dominated by older age groups who may not have learned that material.

How long since this curriculum was adopted state-wide in California? And what's it officially called? I couldn't find any information about it when I searched for "skeptical analysis" on the California Dept of Education website.

It's officially called "expository critique" in the oldest document I'm familiar with (https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/elacontentstnds.pd...), but I don't know if it was there before 1997 or not. More recent standards e.g. (https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/finalelaccssstanda...) don't appear to use a specific term for it, but they still include things like "Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text" and "identify false statements and fallacious reasoning".

My high school in Indiana in the 1990s taught skepticism; there were two required classes called “citizen’s government” and “social criticism”.

We watched Dr. Strangelove in Social Crit and had a two-hour discussion following. It was awesome.