Spend enough time in discussions about education and artificial intelligence (AI), and critical thinking will inevitably pop up sooner rather than later. AI is changing how students learn and how educators assess learning, and in the face of this shift, critical thinking is often presented as the right pedagogical response.
But as technology reshapes the way we learn and teach, it’s easy to overlook one crucial question: what does critical thinking actually mean in today’s world?
There is a real danger of it becoming a hollow buzzword, an oversimplified, supposedly universal antidote to this new reality in which information, explanations, and increasingly sophisticated outputs are just a click away.
Expanding definitions
Critical thinking is broadly understood as a complex and valuable set of skills and habits. It includes the ability to evaluate evidence, assess arguments, identify assumptions, distinguish stronger claims from weaker ones, and draw reasoned conclusions.
These skills are still vital, but they do not fully capture what students need to confront the cognitive challenges of an AI-powered world.
Recent research has begun exploring this distinction through concepts such as digital critical thinking, which incorporates the idea that online environments, shaped by opaque algorithms, personalisation and platformed information, require people to interpret not only the content they encounter, but also how they ended up seeing it in the first place.
As the environments in which we learn and live evolve, so too should our understanding of critical thinking. As a researcher of civics education, I believe the answers lie not in abandoning traditional definitions of critical thinking, but in expanding them.
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Reflection and judgement
Critical thinking happens in two steps. The first is reflection, that vital micro-moment of pause and consideration that comes before the second step of forming a judgement.
Reflection requires people to question evidence, examine assumptions, compare competing interpretations, recognise the limits of their own perspective, and be willing to revise their conclusions in light of stronger arguments or new information.
But modern digital spaces aggressively shape our attention. Digital platforms decide what is visible, trustworthy, and worthy of engagement, then offer content to users in bite-sized videos, short blurbs, and eternally scrollable feeds.
Critical thinking is difficult within these digital spaces because the time and space needed for reflection disappears. Instead, users are likely to skip directly from consumption to judgement.
However, we can still nurture the crucial first stage of reflection outside of these digital environments. And just like any meaningful educational aim, this habit is not acquired through instruction alone. It is cultivated gradually through repeated practice, feedback, reflection, and revision across the curriculum.
While critical thinking begins with disciplined reflection, it does not end there. Reflection prepares us to exercise judgement.
Judgement is where thinking begins to orient action. It is where we decide what deserves our attention, how much confidence to place in our knowledge, and what responsibilities follow from it. It determines how we ultimately participate alongside others in situations where we cannot be 100% certain of what we know.
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The key ingredient: intellectual humility
One of education’s less trumpeted achievements is that it helps students discover the limits of their own understanding. Wrestling with difficult ideas, constructing arguments, making mistakes, and revising one’s thinking all do more than just produce knowledge. These processes gradually calibrate judgement by teaching students the difference between reaching an answer and meaningfully understanding a topic.
With AI-powered tools, it is easier than ever to produce work that appears superficially thoughtful, persuasive and sophisticated. A person can sound informed and articulate without ever doing the difficult cognitive work of developing real understanding.
Students must therefore be taught to distinguish between an answer and real understanding. The ability to write fluent, proficiently constructed text is a completely separate skill to crafting a sound argument. Indeed, slick prose can often mask or distract from the absence of clear understanding.
But the risk is not that the use of AI produces students who cannot think. The risk is that it becomes increasingly easy to mistake polished performance for intellectual depth, both in ourselves and in others.
This is where intellectual humility comes in. Neither modesty nor a lack of confidence, this is the ability to recognise the limits of your own understanding, be open to revision, and calibrate confidence based on what you actually know. Intellectual humility is what prevents judgement from hardening into blind certainty.
This ability makes critical thinking more than a collection of cognitive skills. It becomes part of a broader educational project, one that prepares students to exercise judgement responsibly in relation to other people and the shared world they inhabit.
Protecting democracy
Democratic societies depend on people who can weigh competing claims, recognise uncertainty without becoming paralysed by it, and revise their views when necessary.
These capacities do not emerge on their own. But they can develop through educational experiences that repeatedly ask students not only what they think, but also how they reached a particular conclusion, what evidence might lead them to reconsider it, and how much confidence it truly deserves.
Viewed in this broader way, critical thinking cannot be reduced to a singular skill, embedded within a single course, or measured through one assessment. It is cultivated across disciplines, through experiences that force students to revise their conclusions in light of new evidence, defend competing interpretations, explain the reasoning behind their decisions, and reflect honestly on the limits of their own understanding.
In practical terms, this looks like a science experiment that disproves a student’s hypothesis, a history class comparing conflicting interpretations of the same event, or a literature discussion that explores multiple readings of a text.
These kinds of tasks all ask students to practice the same habit: exercising judgement with intellectual humility. The goal is not simply arriving at the correct answer, but learning to recognise when their own thinking should be questioned, refined, or changed.
Ultimately, this habit prepares students for the modern-day real world, where challenges rarely have clear answers or complete information. Like all adults, students will have to navigate competing claims and public debates, often hosted on algorithmically curated platforms filled with AI-generated content. In these spaces, confidence tends to outpace understanding.
Democratic societies need citizens who have practised the difficult work of revising their opinions. The classroom offers a safe, low-stakes environment to train this skill before exercising it in the real world.
Schools and universities have a duty to teach students to exercise sound judgement in the face of uncertainty, disagreement, and complexity. That work begins not with teaching critical thinking as a separate skill, but by designing learning experiences that repeatedly invite students to question, revise, justify, and reconsider their own thinking across every discipline.
By doing this, intellectual humility becomes not just an academic exercise, but a deep-rooted civic habit.
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