False.
Ideas (I presume you mean formulations of scientific hypotheses and theories) are not arrived at in high schools. They are formulated in technical journals and other interactions among established scientists.
High schools are near the bottom of the food chain--they are consumers, not originators, of scientific thought. High school students, and most high school teachers, are simply not equipped to evaluate a "competition of ideas." They fall short by several years to decades of intensive study.
You could add to your list Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, Curie (both of them), Mendel, Priestly, Pasteur, and pretty much any scientist who's dead. That's how science works. The prevailing theory is the one that best explains the available evidence, and new prevailing theories emerge as does new evidence. It's a method, not a doctrine.
And as an aside, Marx and Malthus were social scientists, not scientists (despite the use of the word), a field that is much more subjective.
On closer examination, I believe the same may apply to Charles Darwin. This is hard to see because we have been indoctrinated to believe in evolution.
Clearly not, because so many Americans still do not. It would take one simple thing to debunk Darwin, and that is to debunk Darwin. That is, to find an alternate explanation that better fits the available evidence.
The competition of ideas has not taken place on a level playing field in high school and elsewhere for many decades.
High schools are not where scientific progress occurs. You might as well say that American literature is moribund because of the limited literature taught to kindergartners. The purpose of primary and secondary education is to lay the groundwork, to teach the method. Innovation comes later.