Critical Thinking Has Been Hijacked: How the Left Quietly Rewired the Way We Teach Reason

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

                                           -- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

In the past, I’ve talked about the left's deliberate shift of language, but I’ve never mentioned the foundational shift I’m going to talk about now. This one is different. It doesn’t just twist one word or one idea — it changes the ground we stand on.

This shift attacks logic itself. It strikes at the roots of reasoning, the process by which we decide what is true. It happened quietly and almost no one saw it occur.

The term critical thinking has been redefined.

For decades, parents were told schools would teach their children to “think critically.” That sounded good. It once meant something solid: learning to reason, to weigh evidence, to tell sense from nonsense. Today, many, too many, schools and universities use the same words to describe a different practice, one that looks like thinking, but isn’t. It no longer teaches students how to reason. It trains them what to suspect.

That single redefinition changed how an entire generation was taught to think. It is one of the most profound and dangerous shifts in modern education, and almost no one noticed. When language changes, the change hides inside the words. People think they’re still talking about the same thing. They’re not.

When the meaning of “critical thinking” is rewritten, the meaning of truth itself is rewritten with it.

What “Critical Thinking” Used to Mean

For most of the twentieth century, critical thinking meant something simple and specific. It was the disciplined use of logic and evidence to reach sound conclusions. You questioned assumptions, tested arguments, and identified fallacies. The goal was truth: not victory, not ideology, not emotion, but truth.

This was the tradition of Socrates, of the Enlightenment, of the scientific method. It shaped the way the free world learned, governed, and advanced. To think critically was to think clearly.

Students learned to separate fact from opinion, cause from correlation, and reason from rhetoric. They practiced asking questions: What do I know? How do I know it? What follows logically from what I know? The process could be difficult and humbling, but it taught intellectual honesty. John Dewey described it as “reflective thought,” the opposite of reflex. You paused before you judged. You examined evidence before forming conclusions. You accepted that being wrong was possible, and that correction was part of learning.

That was critical thinking, a disciplined skill that quite literally built the modern world.

The Quiet Redefinition: From Logic to Ideology

Critical thinking still means what it has always meant, at least according to the dictionary: the disciplined use of logic and evidence to reach sound conclusions. The meaning hasn’t changed in mainstream language usage. What changed is what certain groups of people mean by it.

Beginning in the 1980s, education schools and teacher training programs quietly attached the old, trusted phrase to a new idea. Instead of teaching students how to reason, they began teaching them how to critique power.

The shift traces back to Paulo Freire, a Marxist educator from Brazil whose book Pedagogy of the Oppressed reshaped modern education theory. Freire argued that the purpose of education was not knowledge or understanding but “liberation” — raising political consciousness and challenging systems of oppression.

When his ideas merged with the language of critical thinking, the result was confusion. “Critical” no longer meant careful, logical analysis. It meant political awareness. It meant viewing truth itself as a construct shaped by power.

By the 1990s and 2000s, this new version was written into teacher accreditation standards and course rubrics. Words like logic, reason, and evidence were quietly replaced with interrogate, deconstruct, and examine privilege. To the public, it sounded scholarly. To students, it became training in ideology.

The difference is stark:

Educators never announced the change. They borrowed the moral authority of the old phrase and used it to sell the new philosophy. Parents and citizens assumed everyone still meant the same thing. They didn’t.

The meaning of critical thinking remains intact, but in the institutions that teach our children, the practice has been replaced.

The Evidence: Where the Change Took Root

This wasn’t rumor or paranoia. The shift can be traced through documents, standards, and syllabi, the paper trail of how a civilization changes its mind.

Teacher accreditation standards.
In the late twentieth century, accreditation bodies such as NCATE (the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education) rewrote their benchmarks. Teachers were no longer expected to cultivate reasoned thought in students but to become “agents of social change.” The phrase appeared in mission statements, rubrics, and evaluation forms. It sounded compassionate. In practice, it turned teacher training into ideological formation.

Bloom’s Taxonomy (overview).
One framework made this new thinking especially powerful: Bloom’s Taxonomy, the universal chart of learning objectives used from elementary school through graduate programs. Originally created in the 1950s to map the climb from memorization to reasoning, it shaped every lesson plan and assessment rubric in the country. Later revisions kept its familiar pyramid and verbs, so few noticed when the intent behind them began to shift.

Because this change is so central — and so well hidden — it deserves its own explanation. We’ll return to it in the next section.

University syllabi.
The same linguistic drift spread through universities. Courses called “Critical Thinking” once taught logic and argument. Over time, the titles stayed while the content changed. Students were told to “interrogate” texts for hidden bias instead of testing claims for validity. Reading lists dropped logic and rhetoric manuals and replaced them with Foucault, Derrida, and bell hooks. The words critical and thinking remained; the practice no longer matched the meaning.

Educational psychology.
By the early 2000s, educational psychology journals were measuring something new: critical consciousness, Freire’s term for political awakening. The goal was no longer reasoning but awareness. A student who could identify “systems of oppression” scored higher than one who could construct a valid argument. Ideology became a learning outcome.

Each of these shifts, small, bureaucratic, and slow, stacked together until the entire system leaned away from logic and toward belief. But the shift with Bloom's Taxonomy was shattering.

Bloom’s Taxonomy: Rewritten from Within

Bloom’s Taxonomy is one of the most influential tools in modern education. Created in the 1950s by psychologist Benjamin Bloom, it outlined how people learn — moving from simple recall to complex reasoning.

The original model described six stages: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. It guided teachers to help students climb from memorization to reasoning and independent judgment. The goal was clear: to teach students how to think, not what to think.

In 2001, a revised version updated the language but kept the same structure: Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create. On paper nothing changed. In practice, teacher colleges infused the framework with critical theory. The familiar words remained, but their meanings shifted. Analyze became “analyze systems of power.” Evaluate became “evaluate social impact.” Create became “create change.”

The pyramid stayed the same. The rungs led somewhere else.

The words are unchanged; their intent is not. Parents and school boards still see the same chart they remember from childhood, unaware that the verbs have been repurposed to reward ideology instead of logic.

This is how the language of reason became the language of indoctrination.

The Consequences: A Civilization Unmoored

When a culture changes how it teaches people to think, every institution built on reason begins to fail. The results are all around us.

Graduates can recite ideological slogans, but can’t construct a logical argument. They’ve been trained to “interrogate power,” not to test claims. In classrooms and offices alike, disagreement feels dangerous because logic itself has been recast as aggression.

Public debate has fractured. People use the same words, but mean entirely different things. Truth, justice, equality, even reason, each now carries competing definitions. Conversations collapse not because participants lack intelligence, but because they no longer share a common language.

Journalism reflects the same decay. Reporters once aimed to verify facts; now they aim to “speak truth to power,” which often means choosing sides. Facts are filtered through moral narrative. Analysis becomes advocacy.

Science, too, is affected. Research once sought objective knowledge. Now, entire fields preface their work with declarations of identity and positionality. The assumption that truth can exist outside ideology is treated as outdated, even suspect.

The ultimate social cost is enormous. When people can’t reason together, they can’t govern themselves. Law becomes politicized, education becomes propaganda, and trust collapses. A civilization that forgets how to reason cannot remain free for long.

The damage didn’t come from a single law or decree. It came from a thousand small shifts in meaning, each one eroding the habit of logic that held the culture upright. The result is a society adrift, convinced it is thinking critically while it quietly forgets how.

How to Reclaim Real Critical Thinking

The good news is that the original meaning of critical thinking still stands. It was never erased from the language, only buried under jargon. We can dig it back out.

• Reclaiming it begins with awareness. Parents, teachers, and citizens must learn to ask a simple question whenever they hear the phrase: Which kind of critical thinking do you mean? The classical kind seeks truth through reason. The new kind seeks power through ideology. The difference is everything.
• Demand transparency from schools. When a curriculum claims to teach “critical thinking,” look at the examples. Are students learning logic, argument, and evidence? Or are they learning to detect oppression and bias? The two are not the same.
• At home, teach logic directly. Read simple reasoning texts. Practice identifying fallacies in news stories and political speeches, even advertisements. Encourage children to defend both sides of an argument, not because all views are equal, but because understanding opposing views strengthens the mind.
• Support schools that value reasoning and truth. Classical academies, debate programs, and quality STEM curricula still rely on the genuine model of critical thought. Reward them.
• Finally, resist the habit of cynicism disguised as intellect. Real critical thinking is not about tearing everything down; it’s about finding what holds true. A mind trained only to doubt becomes useless. A mind trained to reason becomes free.

This recovery will take effort. Generations of students have been taught suspicion instead of logic. But truth has a way of resurfacing. It doesn’t vanish; it waits to be rediscovered.

The Theft of a Common Language

This entire deception depended on language. The words never changed, only the intent behind them. That is why so few noticed.

Language is a commons. It belongs to everyone who speaks it. We build our understanding of reality through shared words. When someone quietly alters those meanings, they steal not just vocabulary, but the framework of reason itself.

To redefine critical thinking without public debate was not an academic experiment. It was an act of intellectual vandalism. Every teacher trained under the new system, every student taught to confuse suspicion with logic, carries the cost of that theft.

A civilization can survive bad ideas. It cannot survive the loss of a shared language. When words such as truth, justice, and reason are rewritten, communication becomes impossible. Logic turns into accusation. Thought itself dissolves. Those who twisted this language did more than distort education. They undermined the ability of free people to reason together — and reasoning together is the foundation of liberty.

To deliberately and systematically change the meanings of words that shape thought is a crime against humanity. Reclaiming our language is not optional. It is the first act of resistance, and the first step toward cultural sanity.

• Editor's Note: Here at PJ Media, we believe words matter. That's why we need you to help us continue to protect our language from those who would change the very meaning of words to steal our culture. Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.