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They key to unlocking this mystery lies in the minds of children. When you are born, you have an unusually high ability to learn and adopt reasoning skills. Humans take so long to become self-sufficient because there's so much to impart that children need to be like little intellectual sponges. Before we, as babies and young children, are exposed to formal science and logic, we are exposed to a great deal of biases and misunderstandings coming from our parents, extended family and friends. Our intuitive understanding of the world comes partially from very basic innate understandings and our environment, therefore the shape our intuition takes for the rest of our lives can be formed in those early, precious days. Sometimes we get good data from parents, so that we can intuitively understand systems correctly when we're older, but not all of what we take in is going to be correct because no one is perfect.
Imagine getting an unscientific contextual framework for medicine because your parents believe in the power of prayer (and don't believe in modern medicine). Even if, as you individuate as a young adult, you strip yourself of this bias on a conscious, intellectual level, you still may have intuitive biases from the early understanding of how the world works. In other words, though you've overcome your parent's unscientific beliefs about medicine, the bias that's rooted inside you may crop up elsewhere.
Take Bill Maher as an example. Maher has recently become a leader in the vaccination skeptic movement (or whatever you want to call it). When you listen to the case he makes, it becomes clear that he doesn't quite understand the science behind immunotherapy. I've been guilty of this myself, so I'm guessing this could be related to his religious upbringing in which he became an atheist. When you become a skeptic in a religious society at a younger age, you tend to adopt certain concepts about being the smarter outsider, the person who's freedom from a great bias somehow endows us with better skepticism; like our skepticism is super fly. When tackling a new subject, if our intuition tells us to be skeptical, that skepticism actually becomes a bias if unchecked.
Fortunately, there's an easy fix. Very young children aren't passive intellectual sponges, they actively seek out new information upon which to base their understanding of the world. This provides you with a wonderful opportunity to allow them to access how the world works. Let your child take things apart or get dirty in the mud. As he or she gets older, teach them the basic rules of how science works, from (very simplified) Newtonian physics to human biology to zoology and evolution to very basic chemistry. If they can develop scientific contextual frameworks, they not only will be able to intuitively learn science much more effectively in school, but will also as adults be better prepared to deal with the real world.
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