The push for AI-era critical thinking risks overlooking what students need most

Indeed, the common refrain that teachers should focus on abstract critical thinking skills, disconnected from content, risks de-emphasizing the very thing — fluency with a broad set of facts — that supports critical thinking.

“Domain knowledge is a crucial driver of thinking skill,” wrote University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham in 2020 for the American Educator, a publication of the American Federation of Teachers. “Critical thinking for open-ended problems is enabled by extensive stores of knowledge.”

In the era of AI, schools want students to think critically. Experts say they need knowledge to do so.

SS: Critical thinking with AI, at the expense of content knowledge, doesn't seem to make sense. How would you know AI was making up a fact, without knowing the fact?

Submitted May 30, 2026 at 02:51PM by ddgr815 https://ift.tt/iIroqXT