I agree with some of what you've said here Vida May. But a few points concern me. For example, I don't know how education for technology prepares young people to rely on authority. What does understanding technology have to do with bowing down to authority? Or was that a reference to the 'authority of following the science' as it were? Or maybe in some cases, following 'the facts of a situation'? If it's the latter, surely that shouldn't be a problem. I would hope that in any issues in question, science/facts would be the basis for decisions that anybody makes, whether young or old.
The short answer is yes, 'the authority of science" but it includes all authority because of specialization and the change in how we have prepared the young to think. I don't think that short answer will help anyone understand how much our world and our consciousness have changed so I am providing the long answer.
Before 1917, the purpose of education was to prepare the young for good citizenship and to help everyone understand the principles of democracy. Textbooks focused on literature. The only technologies taught were reading, writing, and arithmetic. Then came WWI and as the quote said in my past post, Germany under the Prussians was organized for war and had advanced military technology and was walking over Europe with very little resistance.
Keep in mind, at this time the US was not concerned about military power. It was protected by oceans and Canada and Mexico didn't present a threat. Coming from the Enlightenment our goal was to use education for creating a better life for humans and that meant preparing the mind, not advancing technology. We had education for well-rounded individual growth and individual authority.
When the US began mobilizing for war, Industry wanted to close the schools claiming they were not getting their money's worth from education because they still had to train their employees. They also argued the war caused a labor shortage and they needed the child labor they had used only a few years earlier before laws keeping children out of the factories during school hours.
Teachers argued an institution good for making good citizens is also good for making patriotic citizens and they did! Schools were very involved in the first and second war efforts. They also argued it was our best, those who understood why democracy must be defended who were the first to sign up for military service and if we did not replace them by educating our young, even if we the war, we would not have the engineers, doctors, etc. that a nation must have.
Please understand, that our national defense depended on patriotism not technology until the military technology of WWII.
We were unprepared for war. Especially unprepared for the First World War which demanded new technologies. We did not graduate young people ready to be typists, engineers, and mechanics and we needed an army with typists, engineers, and mechanics and we needed them immediately!
The quote I posted before mentioned the errant lips- that was the conflict between education based on literature to develop the whole person, or education for technology that better served Industry and the economy. The best thing about shifting to technology was the huge economic benefit! Now parents who kept their children home to work the farm, sent their children to school so they could get better jobs with higher pay. Our middle class grew. We now take the change for granted.
What does this have to do with bowing down to authority? There are different forms of authority. We taught children to be their own authority. That does not work with advancing technology. With technology comes experts. We rely on experts. We do not go through the steps of testing a truth but rely on the authority of those who have done the research. And as you noticed, our young stopped questioning who is telling the truth and who is lying, because their brains are not prepared to ask the questions and making independent decisions.
What we are failing to understand is the change in how we teach children to think.
First they reject the Pope's authority and then the King's authority and when they get to the new land they developed a completely new social order with no authority above them. They teach their children to read so they can read their bible and be their own authority about God's word. Europe did not expect this new social/political order to succeed. 
Thank God.