Critical Thinking, AI, and the Boogieman
Hello Responsible Educators,
There’s a common belief in education right now: If students use AI, they’ll lose their ability to think critically. It’s a fear that’s easy to understand, but it paints AI as a boogieman—a lurking threat to student growth and creativity.
If you think AI will lead to a generation of students who lack critical thinking, you don’t fully understand AI yet.
Don’t get me wrong–we must guard against this fate by implementing AI responsibly.
But AI isn’t necessarily an automatic shortcut for students to avoid thinking. When used thoughtfully, AI is a powerful tool that can promote and enhance critical thinking skills in ways we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago.
AI, when used correctly, has the potential to enhance critical thinking, not erase it.
AI as a Catalyst for Critical Thinking
AI’s greatest potential lies in its ability to serve as a thought partner. When students engage with AI, they aren’t abandoning critical thinking—they’re being asked to engage it differently.
Here’s how:
- Challenging Outputs: Students can use AI to generate ideas or solutions, but they still need to evaluate the validity of those outputs. Does it make sense? Is it accurate? Does it align with their argument?
- Exploring Perspectives: AI can suggest counterarguments or alternative viewpoints that challenge students to expand their thinking.
- Iterative Refinement: AI can help students revise and refine their work, encouraging them to think critically about how to improve clarity, logic, or style.
Instead of reducing critical thinking, AI invites students to engage with it in new ways—to question, analyze, and refine rather than simply accept.
A Call for Change
As educators, we have a responsibility to guard against the boogieman of fear. Fear tells us to ban AI tools outright, to reject them as a threat to learning. But fear doesn’t lead to innovation—it leads to stagnation.
Instead, we need to take a human-centered approach, one that champions creativity, judgment, and ethics while leveraging AI’s potential to complement these skills.
Teaching students how to interact with AI critically and responsibly isn’t dumbing down education—it’s future-proofing it.
The heart of critical thinking hasn’t changed, even in a world with AI. It’s still about asking good questions, analyzing information, and forming reasoned conclusions. What’s changed is the tools available to help us get there.
So, let’s not reduce this conversation to fear. AI isn’t the enemy here; it’s an opportunity to broaden our methods and approaches.
The real boogieman isn’t AI—it’s the fear of change.
Let’s embrace the challenge of teaching students how to use AI thoughtfully and creatively while keeping critical thinking at the center of their learning.
For more thoughts on AI and critical thinking, check out my post: Critical Thinking in a World of AI.
The image was created by Midjourney using the following prompt: imagine AI as a scary boogieman lurking in the dark as a threat to students’ critical thinking.
