These days there’s a growing temptation to skip the learning part. After all, if Google or AI can retrieve, summarize, and even explain anything on demand, why bother? Research says otherwise.
A 2019 study in the Journal of Educational Psychology found that students with stronger factual recall (meaning the ones who know stuff) consistently outperformed their peers in critical thinking. So? It means reasoning doesn’t float in a vacuum. It stands on a foundation of prior knowledge.
If we don’t know what we don’t know, we become easy targets for plausible-sounding nonsense. AI can only reason with the inputs it’s given. And if those inputs come from shallow exposure or biased data, it will reflect that back—with confidence.
Critical thinking still starts with knowing. Why we do what we do!