I’ve encountered this argument several times, and it rests on a false choice. The idea that explicit instruction is good for building knowledge but somehow bad for thinking fundamentally misunderstands what explicit instruction is trying to accomplish. The implication is often that students in explicit classrooms aren’t thinking. They are. In fact, they’re learning how to think. They compare, classify, explain, retrieve, connect, justify, solve problems, and refine their understanding. Thinking isn’t absent from explicit instruction. It’s deliberately guided and gradually strengthened. Yes, explicit instruction helps students acquire and retain knowledge. That’s not a weakness. That’s the point. Secure, domain-specific knowledge is what makes higher-order thinking possible. You can’t analyze, evaluate, create, or think critically about what you don’t know. This especially matters most for students who begin with less prior knowledge or fewer background experiences. Explicit instruction doesn’t lower the ceiling. It raises the floor by giving every student access to the expert knowledge required for sophisticated thinking. The criticism that explicit instruction is “just memorizing facts for a test” misses the entire mechanism. Knowledge isn’t the opposite of thinking. It’s what thinking is built from.