The “teach critical thinking” narrative is backwards

A recent article calling for schools to teach critical thinking earlier assumes something important: that this hasn’t already been attempted at scale.
But in Australia, it has.

The Australian Curriculum explicitly embedded Critical and Creative Thinking as a general capability more than a decade ago. The intention was clear, to develop transferable thinking skills students could apply across subjects and contexts.

In policy terms, it was a bold move. In practice, it has struggled.
Not because teachers ignored it.
Not because schools resisted it.
But because the premise itself, that critical thinking can be taught as a generic, transferable skill, is deeply flawed.

The idea sounds appealing: teach students how to analyse, evaluate, and question, and they’ll apply those skills anywhere.
But thinking doesn’t work like that.

Students don’t “do critical thinking” in the abstract. They think critically about something: history, science, literature, mathematics, social issues. And the quality of that thinking depends heavily on what they already know.

This is where attempts to treat critical thinking as a transferable capability run into trouble. Detached from subject knowledge, it becomes vague, difficult to assess, and hard to enact in real classrooms.
You cannot critically analyse a historical event without historical knowledge.
You cannot evaluate a scientific claim without understanding scientific concepts.
You cannot critique an argument without vocabulary and background knowledge.

The curriculum recognised the importance of thinking but overestimated the extent to which it could be taught independently of content.

Prolific education writer & school leader Dr Greg Ashman captures this idea succinctly: "Knowledge is what we think with."

​Cognitive science reinforces the same point. Working memory is limited. We rely on what we already know, stored in long-term memory, to interpret, analyse, and evaluate new information. When knowledge is secure, thinking deepens. When it’s absent, thinking stalls.

This is why “critical thinking programs” often fail to transfer. Students may learn a process in one context, but without domain knowledge, they struggle to apply it elsewhere.

Critical thinking isn’t a general-purpose tool you can hand to students early and expect them to use forever. It’s the product of knowledge built over time.
Calls to “teach critical thinking earlier” miss two realities:

1. Schools have already tried embedding it as a transferable capability.
2. The strongest lever for improving thinking isn’t generic skills; it’s knowledge.

When we focus too heavily on abstract skills, we risk sidelining the very thing that makes those skills possible: a rich, coherent, knowledge-based curriculum.
This doesn’t mean critical thinking isn’t important. It’s essential.
But it grows out of learning. It isn’t separate from it.

If we want students capable of analysis, evaluation, and reasoned judgement, the path is well established:

• Teach knowledge systematically across disciplines.
• Build vocabulary and background knowledge deliberately.
• Model thinking within subjects, how historians analyse sources, how scientists evaluate claims, how writers construct arguments.
• Give students repeated practice applying knowledge in increasingly complex ways.

That’s not abandoning critical thinking.
That’s grounding it in reality.

Australian educators don’t need another call to “start teaching critical thinking.” Our curriculum frameworks already tried to position it as a transferable capability.
The lesson from that experience isn’t that critical thinking doesn’t matter.
It’s that it cannot be separated from knowledge.

We can’t teach critical thinking skills first and expect knowledge to come later.
We need to teach knowledge first, because that’s what makes critical thinking possible.