critical thinking: not all that critical

Critical Thinking basically says to be suspicious of everything, except the fad known as Critical Thinking. It is perhaps best understood as a new and watered-down version of an earlier fad called Deconstruction. That was just a fancy word for debunking. After you strip away all the high-minded rhetoric, Critical Thinking is typically used to tell students that they should not trust conventional wisdom, tradition, religion, parents, and all that irrelevant, old-fashioned stuff. Critical Thinking, somewhat surprisingly, also turns out to be highly contemptuous of facts and knowledge. The formulation in public schools goes like this: children must learn how to think, not what to think. WHAT is, of course, all the academic content and scholarly knowledge that schools used to teach.