What's the difference between "critical thinking" and ordinary "thinking"?

https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/11/the-case-against-the-cult-of-critical-thinking

An interesting attempt, but it's got some problems -- not insurmountable, I think.

I have long asked what I thought was an obvious question: What is the difference between "critical thinking" and ordinary "thinking"? What does the adjective "critical" add? According to the author here, in practice, "critical" adds a hermeneutic of doubt, at least, or a hermeneutic of suspicion. It sets up the thinking or the critical self as judge and jury over reality, or at least over that vast tract of reality that cannot be reduced to obvious physical and mathematical laws.

My skepticism regarding "critical thinking" is, I guess, an example of the very thing that I'm calling into question. I say, "To subject a thing to criticism, you have to know what the thing is about. But if you don't have a great fund of knowledge to draw upon, what will you reason with, and what will you reason about? And how do you come to that fund of knowledge?" I never told my students that I was teaching them Plato so that they would learn how to think critically. I figured that thought would (or would not) follow inevitably in our wake. I taught them Plato so that they would not be ignorant of Plato.

And there was a farther reason, one that is in accord with what the author struggles to call "charity" or "love," linking it to our need to be grounded in human relationships. I taught Plato because Plato is a legitimate object of wonder: and he enlarges our capacity for wonder. He tells us many things that are true, and he inspires a love of truth, and he whets the desire to pursue the truth. There's something odd and self-destructive about someone whose FIRST inclination is to look sourly or "critically" upon a human work. The FIRST inclination should be to take it as it is, and to see what goodness or beauty it has, so that you can say, "How good it is that you exist!" Keats calls it "negative capability," the humble act of the imagination whereby you become, provisionally, what you are beholding. It is related to wonder, gratitude, and, down the scale a bit, appreciation.

And as far as the hermeneutic of suspicion goes, I have never seen a practitioner who aims the weapon at himself. It's only Shakespeare, say, who has sinister political designs on us; never the in-the-know professor of Shakespeare who reduces him to a political agent.