No, it really isn’t. It’s one method of exercising critical thinking, but someone can go through life never having written an essay and still develop and demonstrate their critical thinking skills.

It’s when we get the vehicle confused with or fused to the concept that we run into trouble in cases like handling LLM use in education.

Should students learn how to craft an essay? Definitely. It teaches all sorts of additional skills that are required to write in that format, assuming you have to generate the entire written work yourself.

Similarly, long division is a useful skill to learn, as are Riemann sums. But so is using a graphing calculator to do your dividing and differentiation for you. LLMs are a tool, not much different from a graphing calculator.