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I have come to the opinion that critical is a terrible word choice (but possibly deliberately so). The different meanings of "heralded to critical acclaim", "critical decision to save the world", "in critical condition", and "overly critical diatribe" are so disparate that despite years of supposed education, I'm not sure which "critical thinking" refers to.
Naively, we should be teaching students to fairly evaluate ideas, and to make important decisions. But sometimes it seems like people lean into the criticism aspect to justify nihilism and tearing down everything without any thought to improving the human condition.
Political as well as social revolutionaries often seek to destroy and delegitimize the dominant framework because chaos and confusion are fertile soil for planting the seeds of a new framework. That's the implicit goal of efforts to "attack structural whiteness" or whatever. Once "whiteness" has been made radioactive and repellent enough, activists can offer their CRT framework as a path to redemption for those benighted souls who had been ignorant enough to use the old framework to understand the world.
You can see this strategy play out in every leftist movement since the French Revolution. It's a good one, the right seems to have no defense against it.
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