Critical Thinking: Taught nowhere, demanded everywhere

Every year, Rahim enters a new classroom carrying the same invisible luggage: memorised answers, rehearsed definitions, and the quiet certainty that questions are dangerous. In primary school, he learned early that speed mattered more than sense, and obedience more than curiosity. By university, teachers scold him for lacking "critical thinking", as if it were a switch he refused to turn on rather than a muscle never allowed to grow.

Rahim's story is repeated across Bangladesh. Yet policy debates treat this as an individual failure rather than a systemic design flaw. We diagnose the symptom loudly but ignore the architecture that produced it—an education system that rewards recall, penalises inquiry, and then expresses surprise when graduates struggle to reason. The situation outlined above raises questions that this article seeks to examine.

Almost every education seminar, policy dialogue, or newspaper column in Bangladesh eventually arrives at the same lament: our students lack critical thinking. The phrase has become so common that it risks turning into a cliché—invoked often, examined rarely, and acted upon least of all. What is missing from this conversation is not diagnosis, but precision. What exactly do we mean by critical thinking at different stages of education? How is it supposed to be taught? And, more importantly, how does the Bangladeshi education system structurally prevent its development?

If we are serious about cultivating critical thinkers rather than rehearsing rhetoric, we must examine critical thinking as a developmental skill, not a sudden ability expected to appear upon university graduation.

Critical thinking at the primary level

At the primary level, critical thinking is not about abstract theorisation or complex argumentation. It is about cognitive foundations. These include analytical ability (breaking a problem into parts), logical sequencing (understanding cause and effect), spatial reasoning (visualising relationships between objects), pattern recognition, comparison, classification, and basic decision-making.

Cognitive research shows that foundational skills—analysis, classification, causal reasoning, and metacognition—are formed in early schooling and strongly predict later academic and professional reasoning capacity. When primary education relies heavily on rote memorisation, students enter higher education without the cognitive scaffolding needed for abstraction or knowledge transfer. This aligns with OECD findings that systems neglecting early cognitive skill formation struggle to cultivate advanced problem-solving at later stages. Bangladesh's tertiary-level deficiencies, therefore, are structurally rooted in primary-level pedagogical design rather than isolated university failures.

For a primary school student, critical thinking may look like:

• Solving a maths problem using multiple methods

• Identifying why a story character made a specific choice

• Rearranging shapes to form new patterns

• Predicting outcomes if one variable changes

• Explaining why an answer is correct, not just what the answer is

In many education systems, these skills are developed through cognitive ability exercises embedded into the curriculum—puzzles, logic games, inquiry-based questions, project work, and classroom discussions that reward reasoning rather than memorisation.

In Bangladesh, however, primary education remains overwhelmingly rote-based. Textbooks prioritise recall over reasoning, and examinations reward accuracy of reproduction rather than clarity of thought. A student who memorises well succeeds; a student who questions often struggles. As a result, we expect secondary and tertiary institutions to develop skills that were never cognitively seeded in the first place.

Critical thinking at the tertiary level

At the tertiary level, critical thinking must evolve from general reasoning to discipline-specific application.

A business student's critical thinking should involve understanding markets, value chains, operational bottlenecks, and strategic trade-offs. An engineering student should be trained to diagnose system failures, optimise processes, and assess feasibility. A public policy or development studies student should be able to analyse institutional incentives, stakeholder interests, and policy consequences.

For example, an economics student should critically assess why Bangladesh's RMG sector remains competitive despite rising costs. A finance student should understand how liquidity risk actually manifests in Bangladeshi banks. A sociology student should analyse why urban informal settlements persist despite repeated policy interventions. An ICT student should evaluate why specific digital solutions fail in rural Bangladesh.

This level of critical thinking cannot be developed through lectures alone. It requires industry-aligned content, case-based learning, hands-on exposure, and sustained engagement with real-world problems.

How critical thinking is supposed to be taught

Globally, effective primary education systems incorporate structured cognitive exercises into the curriculum. These include graded logic tasks, problem-solving modules, interdisciplinary projects, and guided inquiry. China's primary education model, for instance, systematically incorporates mathematical reasoning, spatial intelligence, and problem decomposition from early grades—well before abstract theory is introduced.

Research by Facione (1990) and Willingham (2007) demonstrates that critical thinking is not a universally transferable skill; it must be contextualised within domains through applied problems, cases, and experiential learning.

At the tertiary level, critical thinking is cultivated through:

• Industry-specific case studies

• Simulation exercises

• Capstone projects linked to real organisations

• Internships integrated with academic evaluation

• Full value-chain analysis of industries, from raw input to final output

Where Bangladesh falls short systemically

Bangladesh's education system suffers from two deep structural gaps.

First, at the primary level, there is a stark absence of a formal curriculum for cognitive abilities. Logic, reasoning, and analytical exercises are treated as optional—or worse, as extracurricular luxuries. Teachers themselves are rarely trained to facilitate inquiry-based learning, operating instead within rigid syllabi and exam-centric performance metrics.

Second, at the tertiary level, there is a profound shortage of Bangladeshi industrial case studies and functional analyses. Students graduate with fragmented theoretical knowledge but little understanding of how any industry actually works—from start to finish.

Most university programmes do not teach the complete value chain of the RMG industry, the operational realities of logistics and supply chains, the internal functioning of banks, NGOs, telecom firms, or manufacturing enterprises, or how sustained operations evolve under regulatory, financial, and labour constraints.

Instead, curricula remain theory-heavy and compartmentalised. A student may study marketing, finance, and operations as separate subjects without ever seeing how they interact in a real Bangladeshi firm. The result is graduates who can define concepts but cannot apply them.

The resource gap: academic language vs learning language

Another critical issue lies in how knowledge is produced and disseminated. Much Bangladeshi research is written in dense academic language intended for journals rather than classrooms. While academically rigorous, this language often becomes a barrier to student understanding.

What Bangladesh urgently needs are student-oriented resource books—clearly written, industry-focused, operationally detailed, and designed for classroom use. High-level research papers cannot substitute for teaching materials that explain how industries actually function on the ground.

The way forward

Research shows that students learn complex reasoning more effectively when materials are contextually relevant, linguistically accessible, and grounded in concrete systems rather than abstract theory. Case-based and industry-specific resources help bridge the gap between conceptual knowledge and operational understanding, particularly in developing economies where imported textbooks often fail to align with local realities.

Bangladesh must urgently integrate cognitive ability exercises into primary education curricula, train teachers to facilitate reasoning rather than rote instruction, learn from models such as China's structured early cognitive development approach, invest in local, industry-specific case studies at the tertiary level, develop full-spectrum industrial teaching resources rather than relying solely on academic publications, and encourage faculty–industry collaboration that is formally recognised and rewarded.

From rhetoric to reality

Without these structural changes, critical thinking in Bangladesh will remain a talking point rather than a taught skill. The gap between higher education and job readiness will continue to widen, and employers will continue to lament graduates' lack of practical reasoning.

By the time Rahim graduates, the verdict is already written. Employers say he cannot analyse. Universities say schools did not prepare him. Schools say the curriculum leaves no time for it. Everyone is partly right—and collectively evasive.

Critical thinking did not fail Rahim; the system quietly ensured it never stood a chance. It asked a child to memorise before understanding, a teenager to perform before questioning, and a university student to apply knowledge that was never taught in context. Then it blamed him for the predictable outcome.

A nation cannot rely on individual resilience as policy. Until cognitive foundations are laid early and functional knowledge is taught deliberately later, "critical thinking" will remain a ceremonial phrase—invoked at conferences and ignored in classrooms.

Simon Mohsin is a policy analyst, researcher, and educator specialising in education reform, political economy, and international affairs. He has served for over a decade as a senior political and economic adviser in diplomatic missions in Dhaka and is currently affiliated as a researcher with North South University (NSU). He is the lead editor of Roots and Routes: Business Pathways in Bangladesh, a case-based academic resource bridging industry and education

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.