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Just out of curiosity, is 'critical thinking' a thing in other languages also? I'm a native speaker for two other languages and learned a couple more, but it's never mentioned or is an issue in other languages. I feel it's just a way to call other people stupid, but the reader isn't, creating another chasm or us vs. them.

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I don’t think I’ve encountered it in French. It’s just thinking. How you do it depends on what you what to achieve, but not a state of mind or a capability. Critical thinking seems close to “raisonement scientifique” or “raisonement logique”, so scientific reasoning or logical reasoning.

School teaches the principle of logic (and scientific method) and how to apply it in debates and learning, but not critical thinking. There were words count requirements sometimes, but essays was always about logical arguments for or against some opinions.

"Esprit critique" ? "Sens critique" ?

Those do work, but I don't think it's used that often out of literature, pedagogy, and philosophy circles.

It covers what I think other languages may consider a subset of literacy. The point is to carefully avoid calling anyone stupid, while acknowledging that the ability to deeply think through what other people are communicating is a learned skill which often must be explicitly taught.

Yep! My essays in schools had prompts like “Describe the similarities between the Pocahontas story and the first Avatar movies”. The point was not the produced text, but the activity itself. And as a teacher, I believe it’s quite easy to catch cheaters, because producing a stellar text one day and a crappy piece another is an anomaly.

Definitely a thing in Russian and Polish. What are those languages you're talking about?

It's a meaningless, empty phrase. Even worse, the focus of the OP is on a RAND survey of some "youth panel" where they asked them how they felt about other kids' relationship to this empty phrase.

It's like when they poll people to ask them how the economy is doing. How the hell would they know? And what do you mean by the economy?

If you ask someone how the economy is your asking about how your expenses are growing, income is keeping up with it, savings and investments, job stability. That all goes onto someone's sense of the economy.

And critical thinking isn't an empty phrase, it's like thinking about the accuracy of statements and analyzing them your self.

Do you take things literally generally? Or struggle with understanding people?

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