This is a lovely example of Newspeak, with the addition of some confusion on the part of some of the fundies as to what the script is supposed to be this week. "Critical thinking" is good when the Discovery Institute uses it to mean teaching discredited biological or meteorological bullshit as an "alternative viewpoint" to science. But "critical thinking" is doubleplus ungood if it means teaching kids to, y'know,
think critically about things like religion, democracy, what would constitute a just society........anything that might challenge the authoritarian mindset that the Fundipublicans (among others) hold so dear.
And our dear Texas legislature is dominated by these shitheads that have never even read Orwell, along with a couple that could and did read
1984, but thought it was an instruction manual.