From Critical Thinking to Critical Theory

In June 2026, Priten Soundar-Shah and Aidan Kestigian published an opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed with an uncomfortable title: "We Have Never Taught Critical Thinking." Their argument is simple and hard to shake. Ninety percent of faculty surveyed by the American Association of Colleges and Universities say generative AI will erode students' critical thinking. But if a chatbot can dissolve a skill that fast, they ask, did we ever actually teach it? Their answer is no. Most of us inherited what they call a "by-product model." We assigned hard readings, demanded evidence, graded rigorously, and hoped critical thinking would emerge as a residue of the content. At least 45 percent of students show no measurable gain in critical thinking, reasoning, or writing over their first two years of college. The hope did not pan out.

Their piece concerns undergraduates, but the diagnosis lands just as hard, in my estimation harder, on doctoral education. PhD students are expected to arrive already thinking critically and to leave capable of critical theory: a more demanding, historically situated, discipline-specific practice that most programs also never teach directly. If critical thinking has been a by-product all along, critical theory has often fared worse: assumed, name-dropped, or reduced to citing Foucault in a literature review without ever asking what the theory is actually doing in the argument. In this post, I will argue that both practices are teachable and must be taught on purpose, by showing 1) what critical thinking is, 2) what critical theory adds to it, and 3) how doctoral education can cultivate both intentionally instead of hoping they show up.

What Is Critical Thinking, and Why Does It Matter? #

Critical thinking, in its narrow and familiar sense, is a skills-based practice. It asks: is this argument valid? Is the evidence reliable? Where are the contradictions? It is portable. You can apply it to a philosophy seminar, a news article, or a colleague's grant proposal, and the moves stay roughly the same. That portability is exactly why the skill is valuable and exactly why it is so easy to assume rather than teach.

The Inside Higher Ed piece names three things students actually need before this skill sticks: vocabulary, deliberate practice with feedback, and metacognitive scaffolding. Vocabulary means being able to identify a conclusion, name a premise, and describe an argumentative structure out loud. The demand sounds basic, but the piece notes it is not a universal skill even among first-year students, and in my experience it is not universal among doctoral students either. Deliberate practice with feedback means the thinking itself has to become the object of instruction, not just a by-product of grading a paper about something else. Metacognitive scaffolding means learning to monitor your own reasoning as you do it, especially when you hit unfamiliar material.

For a doctoral student, critical thinking is the baseline discipline that makes everything else possible: reading a source correctly, distinguishing a claim from an assumption, noticing when your own argument has quietly shifted its terms halfway through a chapter. It is necessary. It is also, on its own, generic. It tells you nothing about power, history, or who gets to set the terms of the conversation in the first place. That lacuna is where critical theory enters.

What Is Critical Theory, and Why Does It Matter? #

Critical theory asks the same questions as critical thinking, then keeps going. Why does this argument appear plausible in this particular society at this particular time? Whose interests does this evidence serve? What institutions make this form of knowledge count as authoritative? What suffering gets made invisible by this conceptual scheme? Max Horkheimer, writing as director of the Frankfurt School's Institute for Social Research beginning in 1930, draws the line clearly: traditional theory treats the researcher as a detached observer organizing facts under concepts; critical theory insists that the researcher, the facts, the concepts, and the institution of research itself are all socially situated. This insistence is not a rejection of evidence. Horkheimer's own program was built on interdisciplinary cooperation across philosophy, psychology, political economy, and social research. The question was never evidence versus critique. It was evidence gathered under which categories, in service of which understanding of society?

The stakes here are real. A theory of education that ignores class, race, gender, and institutional power is not neutral; it is partial in a way that can end up reproducing the very domination it claims to study. A theory of media that studies audience behavior without studying ownership, platform incentives, and algorithms is not neutral either; it is truncated. Horkheimer's real contribution was linking theory to historical responsibility: knowledge is not neutral if neutrality means indifference to domination.

The tradition did not stop with Horkheimer, and it was never meant to. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer study how the culture industry organizes desire itself, why people come to love what harms them, and why rebellion so easily gets packaged and sold back as a lifestyle. Herbert Marcuse extends that analysis to "one-dimensional" thought, in which alternatives become hard to imagine, while still insisting that emancipation includes art, play, and joy, not just procedure. Hannah Arendt, never officially part of the Frankfurt School but indispensable to it, distinguishes thinking from knowing: knowing pursues results; thinking pursues meaning, and it can be disruptive and inconclusive. Her account of the "banality of evil" argues that Adolf Eichmann's failure was not demonic wickedness but thoughtlessness, an inability to think from another's standpoint. Jürgen Habermas relocates emancipatory potential in communication itself, arguing that critical thinking is not something you do alone in your head but something built through public reason. Nancy Fraser then asks the question that reshaped the field: what is critical about a critical theory that fails to account for gender? She pushes the tradition toward redistribution, recognition, and the unpaid labor that holds households together. Axel Honneth theorizes recognition as the moral grammar of social struggle. Rahel Jaeggi renews immanent critique, arguing that a form of life fails not because it violates an external standard but because it cannot solve the problems it generates or learn from its own crises. Amy Allen pushes further, arguing that even Habermas, Honneth, and Rainer Forst retain Eurocentric narratives of development that do not hold up against anti-colonial, Black, and Indigenous traditions. bell hooks makes critical thinking itself a pedagogical practice of freedom in the classroom. Angela Davis connects the tradition to abolitionism and prison abolition.

None of this tradition is a closed canon; it is an ongoing conversation about how critique should respond to its own moment, which is exactly why it stays useful. As Dr. Biko Mandela Gray reminds his students, critique is an act of care. To respond to the current moment and to situate one's intellectual inquiry is to do so with care and precision.

How Do We Cultivate Both? #

The by-product model fails for the same reason in both cases: it treats a demanding, teachable practice as something that should simply happen if the content is hard enough. The fix is not a new required course bolted onto every program. The fix is making the thinking visible, named, and practiced in the venues that already exist.

Start with vocabulary and genealogy together. A doctoral student should be able to state an author's conclusion accurately and trace the origins of the concepts in that conclusion. Words like race, gender, religion, secularism, and normality are not neutral categories. Asking who gets included or excluded by an analytic category, and how that category was built, is critical thinking and critical theory operating at once.

Build a methods section as an exercise in citing your genealogy honestly, not decoratively. A student might write: "Following Horkheimer, I treat theory not as detached description but as historically situated analysis oriented toward emancipation. Following Fraser, I ask how critique must be accountable to the gendered and institutional forms of domination it studies." The point of a passage like this is not to name-check theorists. It is to show which thinkers you are working with and, specifically, what each one does for the project, so that a reader could push back on that choice. In the age of accelerationism and AI, I urge deliberate thinking and nuanced engagement with theory.

Practice immanent critique on your own field before you practice it on anyone else's. Ask what a discipline promises and where it falls short of that promise on its own terms, rather than importing an external standard from outside. If a university promises education, examine its labor conditions and debt structures against that promise. This move, borrowed from Jaeggi and from Horkheimer's original method, transfers to nearly any subject.

And treat your own position as data, not as a bias to bracket away. Where and when you were born, who raised you, and which institutions trained you all shape which questions look urgent to you and which look irrelevant. Critical theory does not ask you to pretend otherwise; it asks you to account for it in the work.

A Response to "We Have Never Taught Critical Thinking" #

Soundar-Shah and Kestigian are right that critical thinking needs to move from a hoped-for by-product to an explicit focus, with real vocabulary, real feedback, and real reflection on how we reason. Doctoral education needs that shift too, and arguably needs it more urgently, since a dissertation is a long-term argument that has to hold up under sustained scrutiny.

But for humanities and social science doctoral work, I argue that critical thinking by itself is not the finish line. A student can master formal validity and evidentiary reliability and still produce research that never asks whose interests a category serves or what history made a concept feel natural. Critical theory is what keeps critical thinking from stopping at the first plausible answer. The reverse also holds: critical theory without the underlying discipline of critical thinking collapses into jargon and name-dropping, theory performed rather than used.

Neither skill is a residue of hard reading. Both have to be surfaced, practiced, and evaluated on purpose, in dissertations, in coursework, and in the ordinary work of learning to ask why an argument seems reasonable before asking whether it is valid.