That's surprising, I almost never encountered that in school. It's only when I had a course on epistemology at the faculty that the idea really seemed to emerged. Then I read two books that influenced me in some way : Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman by Richard Feynman and The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb where the ideas to not trust experts and to go try to understand the roots of a problem connected with me.

It's funny that you mention the respect to authority because it's true that in France, whether it's at school or at work, we really have a "structure" around that and I feel it's slowing down the whole process of thinking and achieving understanding by ourselves. We "learn" and don't "understand", we "trust" and don't "verify". It's true that we definitely try to go up the chain of command when injustice is felt though, but I guess a part of it comes from our national motto 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity': if inequality is felt at a level where we can have direct power/action towards it, we are going to try to solve it.