It is absolutely taking their freedom away. Informed consent is important, but your consent cannot be informed if you have been systemically indoctrinated into bullshit heuristics and myths and haven't had an opportunity to really develop your critical thinking skills. It's a profound counter to popular power, though not because they are "brainwashed" as such as some might say (not you, necessarily), but because their mental development gets completely stunted. It can be surprisingly easy to get someone to abandon a lot of this shit if they are placed in a different environment that doesn't reinforce it, but that doesn't make up for all the education they didn't receive that they should have. It's crippling the population in a way not unlike the chronic lead poisoning does in other cases.