It was for some. I’m an eighties kid. In English class from middle through high school, we’d read literature and there were questions literally entitled “critical thinking” that would make you think critically about the excerpt.

Now it wasn’t super deep critical thinking. We weren’t asked to examine the role of race in American society, the merits and failures of capitalism, the patriarchy, or any of the really big concepts that affect society. It did attempt to teach us to critically think about new information, although few students took it seriously. Anti-intellectualism runs deep in the United States.

Science classes taught us to evaluate the validity of sources of information. Even more than English class, though, science classes were scoffed at by students with the oh so common line of “I’m not going to be a scientist, I don’t need this”. Now we have generations of science illiterates with no critical thinking skills. It figures.