critical theory in philosophy of education

Critical Theories of Education: An Introduction

• First Online: 14 September 2022

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• Greg William Misiaszek 4 ,
• Janna M. Popoff 5 &
• Ali A. Abdi 6  

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This chapter gives an overall introduction to critical theories essential to education, as we lay out the histories, reasoning, needs, and overall structure of the Palgrave Handbook on Critical Theories of Education . We discuss the five groundings that are the conceptual and theoretical thematic constructions of the book as follows: praxis-oriented, fluidity, radical, utopic with countless possible future s , and using bottom-up approaches. We give our own brief summaries of the chapters within the following book’s parts: general critical theoretical perspectives and philosophies of education, critical race theories of education, critical international/global citizenship education, critical pedagogy/critical literacy studies in education, critical media/information studies and education, critical community-engaged learning/research, critical perspectives on science and mathematics education, critical gender/feminist studies in education, and critical Indigenous and Southern epistemologies of education.

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Misiaszek, G.W., Popoff, J.M., Abdi, A.A. (2022). Critical Theories of Education: An Introduction. In: Abdi, A.A., Misiaszek, G.W. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook on Critical Theories of Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86343-2_1

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Critical Theory by Claudio Corradetti LAST REVIEWED: 17 July 2023 LAST MODIFIED: 28 August 2018 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0374

Critical theory is a philosophical movement that developed from the Frankfurt School, initially hosted at the Institute of Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) and with a chair at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In 1923 Felix Weil, the son of an entrepreneur who made a fortune in Argentina, provided a conspicuous donation to establish the institute with the aim of developing Marxist studies in Germany. In 1933 the Nazis closed the institute, which temporally moved to Columbia University in New York. Starting from core Marxian concepts, such as the notions of fetishization, commodification, and reification, critical theorists developed a distinct method of analysis of society oriented toward emancipatory counterreactions to instances of power domination. Critical theorists expanded on a broad range of issues, including the critique of capitalism, pathologies of society, psychoanalysis of masses, and authoritarian power. Some of the most prominent figures of the first generation of critical theorists were Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin. Since the 1970s, the second generation, led by Jürgen Habermas, contributed greatly to the dialogue between the so-called Continental and analytical traditions, intersecting different disciplinary domains from political sociology to political theory, broadly construed. Later generations of critical-theory scholars coalesced among those who studied directly or associated their career with Habermas. A sample of some of the most representative scholars is included in the list of publications herein. All in all, the first generation of critical theorists was largely preoccupied with the functional and conceptual requalification of dialectics, starting from a revisitation of Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism by Georg Lukács. With Habermas, instead, a shift occurred in the analysis of the understanding of the conditions of action coordination and speech acts. Habermas’s reception of the “linguistic turn” posed a dilemma to his followers: either to be faithful to a context-neutral notion of universality, or to embrace a postmodern, context-dependent pluralization of standards of validity along the lines traced by Michel Foucault and others. The post-Habermasian generation of critical theorists has flourished along different directions. To mention only a few of these theorists, whereas Axel Honneth has engaged in a life-span program based on the Hegelian notion of recognition, Seyla Benhabib and Jean Cohen have recast some crucial modern notions such as those of citizenship, human rights, sovereignty, democracy, and cosmopolitanism. Finally, Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, respectively, have remained more sensible to classical social thinking by updating a critical research program on the criticism of capitalism, lifeforms, and social contestation, some among the original inspirations of critical social theory.

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Critical Theory and Pedagogy

Towards the Reconstruction of Education

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Table Of Contents

• About the author
• About the book
• This eBook can be cited
• Table of Contents
• Foreword (Steve Gennaro and Jeff Share)
• Chapter One: Toward a Critical Theory of Education
• Chapter Two: Marxian Perspectives on Educational Philosophy: From Classical Marxism to Critical Pedagogy
• Chapter Three: Exploring the Roots of Digital and Media Literacy through Personal Narrative
• Chapter Four: Critical Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and Radical Democracy: Reflections on the Work of Henry Giroux
• Chapter Five: Multimedia Pedagogy and Multicultural Education for the New Millennium (Rhonda Hammer and Douglas Kellner)
• Chapter Six: Reading Images Critically: Toward a Postmodern Pedagogy
• Chapter Seven: New Technologies/New Literacies: Reconstructing Education for Democracy and Social Justice
• Chapter Eight: Digital Culture, Media, and the Challenges of Contemporary Cyborg Youth (Steve Gennaro and Doug Kellner)
• Series Index

For more than half a century Douglas Kellner has helped shape the critical consciousness of academics, students, media critics, and activists. His writings have called for critical engagement with media, information, and technology, what he has termed “critical media literacy” (CML). He asserts the need to redesign public education to include CML with critical analysis and production, taught through dialogical Freirean pedagogy that engages students as co-constructors in the learning process. In the same way that Kellner himself once occupied John Dewey’s desk while a graduate student at Columbia University in New York in the 1960s, he has always believed in the Deweyian notion of the democratic potential of education and the responsibility of the education system to serve the people as centers for civic engagement and social justice, and not ideological indoctrination that perpetuates inequality, injustice, and oppression.

After earning his PhD at Columbia, Kellner spent several years studying in Europe with many of the academic giants of the time, from Ernest Bloch to Jacques Derrida. In 1969, he met Herbert Marcuse, a moment that changed his life, leading him to write numerous articles and books about Marcuse and upon his death, Kellner became the executor of Marcuse’s archives. In the early 1970s Kellner began teaching at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA) where he created one of the longest running public access TV shows called Alternative Views. With his co-host, Frank Morrow, they interviewed many of the leading ←vii | viii→ intellectuals and progressives who were ignored by the commercial media. The popularity of this community television show made Kellner a celebrity of the left, as he was often recognized, even on the streets of New York.

During this period while teaching at UTA, Kellner received grants to travel throughout Texas and the Mississippi Delta giving workshops on critical media literacy to high school teachers. It was not enough to teach and produce media, Kellner has also been a prolific author writing almost fifty books and hundreds of articles. After twenty-five years in Texas, Kellner moved to California where he held the George F. Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) until his retirement in 2019.

At the time of the publishing of this book, many of the same concerns from Kellner’s time as a graduate student in Philosophy at Columbia remain. Capitalism reigns and the divide between the world’s richest 2 % and the remaining 98 % widens as digital media mammoths like Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft have taken a stronghold on the digital commons and reap the massive economic benefits of globalization, digitization, and yes, even pandemics. According to separate reports by Oxfam and the Institute for Policy Studies, during the first year of COVID 19’s global pandemic, the number of people of living in poverty doubled to more than 500 million at the very same time as the world’s richest, a mere 2,365 billionaires, witnessed an increase of more than $4 trillion dollars to their wealth. Adding more than 50 % to their global monetary dominance. Of the ten wealthiest people in the world, more than half own media or technology empires: Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle and more. Kellner has always recognized the significant power of media and of technology and has spent a lifetime encouraging others to speak to the truth, to challenge the ideology of capitalism and the inequity it produces, and to recognize the liberatory potential of democratic pedagogy.

For more than half a century, Douglas Kellner has continued to write about the importance of political economy and remind us that as technology changes, the need to understand and question the means of production in media, and now digital media, remains of utmost importance. Kellner’s writings invite us to connect our understanding of current media and technology to a public pedagogy and civic engagement that at its core equals and underpins participatory democracy. Critical Media Literacy is social justice. It is pedagogy as lived out and experienced by many and not just by few. It is a necessity for understanding our past and a fundamental requirement to our democratic future. Critical Media Literacy and the reconstruction of Education are an important part of Douglas Kellner’s legacy, and this collection of essays stands as a reminder for us all—that our struggle is far ←viii | ix→ from over and we have the tools at our disposal to name the word and the world that surrounds us.

Steve Gennaro is a Lecturer in the Department of Humanities, York University, Toronto. He is the co-editor of Selling Youth (2010) and co-editor of Youth and Social Media (2021). He regularly publishes in areas relating to the philosophy of technology and critical media studies of youth, identity and politics.

Jeff Share teaches in the School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and co-authored with Douglas Kellner (2019), The Critical Media Literacy Guide: Engaging Media and Transforming Education.

Chapter One

Toward a critical theory of education.

It is surely not difficult to see that our time is a time of birth and transition to a new period. The spirit has broken with what was hitherto the world of its existence and imagination and is about to submerge all this in the past; it is at work giving itself a new form. To be sure, the spirit is never at rest but always engaged in ever progressing motion …. the spirit that educates itself matures slowly and quietly toward the new form, dissolving one particle of the edifice of its previous world after the other, …. This gradual crumbling … is interrupted by the break of day that, like lightning, all at once reveals the edifice of the new world. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit , (1965 [1807])

As the second decade of the second millennium unfolds, against the backdrop of COVID-19, the human species is undergoing one of the most dramatic technological revolutions in history, one that is changing everything from the ways that people work to the ways that they communicate with each other and spend their leisure time. The technological revolution centers on a removal of time and space as the precedents for education and bears witness to online, blended, hybrid, virtual, AI, and even gamified synchronous and asynchronous options for teaching and learning no longer occupying the periphery of education, but instead now holding steady as normalized educational options. This Great Transformation poses tremendous challenges to educators to rethink their basic tenets, to deploy the emergent technologies in creative and productive ways, and to restructure education to ←1 | 2→ respond constructively and progressively to the technological and social changes now encompassing the globe. 1

At the same time technological revolution is underway, important demographic and socio-political changes are taking place throughout the world. COVID-19 has left no corner of the world untouched and has altered all forms of daily living on a global scale. The global explosion of COVID-19 provides a reminder of how earlier conceptualizations and critiques of globalization may not have gone far enough to note the true interconnectedness of all peoples on this globe. Early colonization by imperial European nations brought pandemic and death to large segments of the colonized world, as Europeans imported deadly diseases throughout the colonized world. Ironically, this time the pandemic came from a former colonized part of the globe, so that the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as revenge of the colonized world, just as the pandemic can be seen as the revenge of nature for slaughtering animals in monstrous conditions of mass production and mechanized killing to feed hungry humans. 2

In this context, as Gennaro noted in 2010, our definition of globalization needs to be expanded to account for “the movement, interaction, sharing, co-option, and even imposition of economic goods and services, cultures, ideas, ideologies, people’s lives and lived experiences, food, plants, animals, labor, medicine, disease, learning, play, practices, and knowledge(s) across time and space(s) previously thought to be impossible or at the very least improbable.” 3 Furthermore, the Black Lives Matter and other liberation movements brought into perspective the very real challenge of providing equitable access to people from diverse races, classes, and backgrounds to the tools and competencies to succeed and participate in an ever more complex and changing digital world despite institutions that have institutionalized and normalized their very oppression. 4

In this chapter, I propose developing a critical theory of education for democratizing and reconstructing education to meet the challenges of a global and technological society. This involves articulating a metatheory for the philosophy of education and providing a historical genealogy and grounding of key themes of a democratic reconstruction of education which indicates what traditional aspects of education should be overcome and what alternative pedagogies and principles should reconstruct education in the present age. Education has always involved colonization of children, youth, the underclasses, immigrants, and members of the society at large into the values, behavior, labor skills, competitiveness, and submission to authority to serve the needs of white, patriarchal capitalism and to transmit the ideologies that Marx and Engels saw as the “ruling ideas of the ruling class” ( 1978 ), and which bell hooks (1994) reminds us also includes the ruling ideas of ←2 | 3→ white men and colonization of the subjects of education into White, Patriarchal Capitalism.

Biographical notes

Douglas Kellner (Author)

Douglas Kellner is Distinguished Research Professor of Education at UCLA and is author of many books on social theory, politics, history, philosophy, and culture, including Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism and six edited volumes of his collected papers. Kellner’s work in social theory and cultural studies includes Media Culture; Guys and Guns Amok; Media Spectacle; American Nightmare and the American Horror Show on the presidency of Donald Trump, followed by Technology and Democracy.

Key Subject Areas

• English Studies
• German Studies
• History & Political Science
• Law, Economics & Management
• Linguistics
• Media & Communication
• Romance Studies
• Science, Society and Culture
• Slavic Studies
• Theology & Philosophy
• Peter Lang Classics

3 Educational Philosophies

“Theories are more than academic words that folx with degrees throw around at coffee shops and poetry slams; they work to explain to us how the world works, who the world denies, and how the structures uphold oppression.”

Bettina L. Love, 2019

Learning Objectives

• Learn the four key Educational Philosophies
• Explore non-systemically dominant educational systems and their philosophical roots
• Compare how the privileging of educational thought and philosophy in the US  is based in social, political, and economic power
• Develop an initial personal philosophy of education through self-reflection and self examination taking into account narratives and counterstories

Activity – Educational Philosophy Assessment

In order to start reflecting on your own philosophy of education, complete the following:

• Educational Philosophies Self Assessment – https://evaeducation.weebly.com/uploads/1/9/6/9/19692577/self_assessment.pdf
• Scoring Guide for the Self Assessment: https://evaeducation.weebly.com/uploads/1/9/6/9/19692577/self_assessment_scoring_guide.pdf

What does this survey reveal about your underlying philosophy?

Do you agree or disagree with this assessment? Explain.

What might this survey reveal with your reasons in becoming a teacher?

Foundations of Educational Philosophy

Pause and Ponder – Education

You may have heard comments implying that education in the United States is not political, separate from religion, and accessible to everyone. The reality is that from its early existence in the western hemisphere in the 1600s, it was indeed political, religious, and accessible only to a select few. These traits continue to influence the evolution of education in the United States today.

The education system in the United States is a social institution. A social institution is a pattern of behaviors and social arrangements that have evolved to meet the needs of society. Quite often, how those needs are defined in official conversations is dependent on who has the social, economic, and legal power to do the defining.

Given this, and since the current system in the US was derived from a system that was explicitly designed to reproduce wealth and privilege for societal elites, it should be no surprise that the foundational theorists upon which the US education rests are representative of a narrow range of perspectives on education. Many educational approaches, perspectives, and philosophies have been neglected in the development of the US system. For instance, the educational system in the US is not rooted at all in the philosophies of Aztec or Mayan civilizations. Nor does it include understandings about teaching, learning, or intellectual growth from Muslim, Hindu, or Yoruba societies. It is accurate to say the US system of education and the philosophies on which it rests are decidedly Eurocentric.

Critical Lens – Eurocentrism

Eurocentrism (also Eurocentricity) is a worldview that is centered on or privileges European-based civilization or a biased view that favors it over nonEuropean-based civilizations.

In order to understand the educational system in the US in a way that supports educators in meeting the needs of all students, we offer the following orientation to the educational philosophies on which this system was founded.

A philosophy grounds or guides practice in the study of existence and knowledge while developing an ontology (the study of being) on what it means for something or someone to be—or exist. Educational philosophy, then, provides a foundation which constructs and guides the ways knowledge is generated and passed on to others. Therefore, when thinking and reflecting about your own philosophy of education, you need to acknowledge your values, beliefs and attitudes towards the educational system, as this will guide your practice. Therefore, it is of critical importance that teachers begin to develop a clear understanding of philosophical traditions and how the philosophical underpinnings inform their educational philosophies. Philosophies need to translate ideas into action. If you want to use certain techniques, then you need to understand how they are effective in the classroom to create that portion of your education philosophy.

Over the course of history, philosophy has experienced several paradigm shifts that influence teaching and learning. Philosophical traditions from the 19th century helped anchor the early foundations of educational philosophy and the development of public education in Europe and the United States.

Activity – Think and Reflect

Think and reflect on the following guiding questions:

• What does being a teacher mean to you?
• What are the skills that, from your perspective, effective teachers have?
• What should be taught?
• How should it be taught?
• What is knowledge?
• Why is it important to establish a trusting relationships between students, teachers and the community?

Whether you are aware or not, you have begun writing philosophical statements about education and being a teacher.

3.1 Philosophical Perspectives of Education

As students ourselves, we may have a particular notion of what schooling is and should be as well as what teachers do and should do. In his book entitled Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study, Dan Lortie (1975) called this the “apprenticeship of observation” (p. 62). Many people who pursue teaching think they already know what it entails because they have generally spent at least 13 years observing teachers as they work. The role of a teacher can seem simplistic because as a student, you only see one piece of what teachers actually do day in and day out. This one-dimensional perspective can contribute to a person’s idea of what the role of teachers in schools is, as well as what the purpose of schooling should be. The idea of the purpose of schooling can also be seen as an individual’s philosophy of schooling.

Philosophy can be defined as the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence. In the case of education, one’s philosophy is what one believes to be true about the essentials of education. When thinking about your philosophy of education, consider your beliefs about the roles of schools, teachers, learners, families, and communities. There are four philosophical perspectives currently used in educational settings: essentialism, perennialism, progressivism, and social reconstructionism/critical pedagogy. Unlike the more abstract philosophical perspectives of ontology and axiology, these four perspectives focus primarily on what should be taught and how it should be taught, i.e. the curriculum. These are explained below.

3.2 Four Key Educational Philosophies

Essentialism.

Essentialism adheres to a belief that a core set of essential skills must be taught to all students. Essentialists tend to privilege traditional academic disciplines that will develop prescribed skills and objectives in different content areas as well as develop a common culture. Typically, Essentialism argues for a back-to-basics approach on teaching intellectual and moral standards. Schools should prepare all students to be productive members of society. The Essentialist curriculum focuses on reading, writing, computing clearly and logically about objective facts concerning the real world. Schools should be sites of rigor where students learn to work hard and respect authority. Because of this stance, Essentialism tends to subscribe to tenets of Realism. Essentialist classrooms tend to be teacher-centered in instructional delivery with an emphasis on lecture and teacher demonstrations.

Perennialism:

Perennialism advocates for seeking, teaching, and learning universal truths that span across historical time periods. These truths, Perennialists argue, have everlasting importance in helping humans solve problems regardless of time and place. While Perennialism resembles essentialism at first glance, Perennialism focuses on the individual development of the student rather than emphasizing skills. Perennialism supports liberal arts curricula that helps produce well-rounded individuals with some knowledge across the arts and sciences. All students should take classes in English Language Arts, foreign languages, mathematics, natural sciences, fine arts, and philosophy. Like Essentialism, Perennialism may tend to favor teacher-centered instruction; however, Perennialists do utilize student-centered instructional activities like Socratic Seminar, which values and encourages students to think, rationalize, and develop their own ideas on topics.

Progressivism

Progressivism focuses its educational stance toward experiential learning with a focus on developing the whole child. Students learn by doing rather than being lectured to by teachers. Curriculum is usually integrated across contents instead of siloed into different disciplines. Progressivism’s stance is in stark contrast to both Essentialism and Perennialism in this manner. Progressivism follows a clear pragmatic ontology where the learner focuses on solving real-world problems through real experiences. Progressivist classrooms are student-centered where students will work in cooperative/collaborative groups to do project-based, expeditionary, problem-based, and/or service-learning activities. In progressivist classrooms, students have opportunities to follow their interests and have shared authority in planning and decision making with teachers.

3.3 A Response to Dominant Systems:

Social reconstructionism.

Social reconstructionism was founded as a response to the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust to assuage human cruelty. Social reform in response to helping prepare students to make a better world through instilling liberatory values. Critical pedagogy emerged from the foundation of the early social reconstructionist movement.

Critical Lens – Liberatory Thinking

“Liberatory thinking is the re- imagining of one’s assumptions and beliefs about others and their capabilities by interrupting internal beliefs that undermine productive relationships and actions. Liberatory thinking goes beyond simply changing mindsets to creating concrete opportunities for others to experience liberation. The opportunities provides cover for and centers underrepresented and marginalized people. It pushes people to interrogate their own multiple identities in relation to others and to think about the consequences of our actions, especially for students of critical need. It explores how mindsets can impede or ignite progress in the classroom, school, and district.”

Chicago Public Schools

For more information in Liberatory Thinking, please refer to the Equity Framework  from the Chicago Public Schools

Critical Pedagogy

Critical pedagogy is the application of critical theory to education. For critical pedagogues, teaching and learning is inherently a political act and they declare that knowledge and language are not neutral, nor can they be objective. Therefore, issues involving social, environmental, or economic justice cannot be separated from the curriculum. Critical pedagogy’s goal is to emancipate marginalized or oppressed groups by developing, according to Paulo Freire, conscientização, or critical consciousness in students.

Critical pedagogy de-centers the traditional classroom, which positions teachers at the center. The curriculum and classroom with a critical pedagogy stance is student-centered and focuses its content on social critique and political action.

3.4 Ways of Knowing

Pause and Ponder – Ways of Knowing

In addition to the historically neglected  thinkers and the theories presented above, it is important for educators to consider that there are many ways of knowing and acquiring knowledge

How do you know something is true?

In the US school system, for instance, students begin the day when a bell or signal goes off at the same predetermined time every day. This scheduling system shapes students’ awareness of how days in their lives will most likely be structured. Consider an alternative: What would happen if the school day started every day when the sun passes a certain point across the horizon. What would students learn about the world? How would students’ way of knowing about time and responsibility be changed?

Critical Lens – Cultural Practices

Here are two news stories with examples of cultural practices that are not taught in mainstream schools because they have been steered away from in this imperialistic, colonizing culture. Nevertheless, they have been sustained by thinkers and teachers and continue to be sustained today.

Culturally informed childbirth practices: Navajo woman starts nonprofit to improve maternal health

Traditional care of the land: For tribes, ‘good fire’ a key to restoring nature and people

3.5 Educational Thinkers

The thinkers and perspectives in the preceding section of this text are considered foundational thinkers in mainstream formal education in the US, other thinkers from the same time period and throughout history are considered foundational contributors to education throughout the world. Some of this has to do with the notion of US colonialism, imperialism, exceptionalism (the belief that the United States is either distinctive, unique, or exemplary compared to other nations), and the legacy of the enslavement of Black Americans in the United States. Because of these legacies, very few people of color were accepted into the cannon of formal educational thinkers. As a result, the US system has been shaped by a very narrow sample of foundational theorists, and many educators who trained in the 20th and 21st centuries in the US had their perspectives formed under this narrow umbrella.

The following individuals and theories are presented so that you can broaden your perspective and better serve all students during your career in education.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Du Bois completed his graduate work at the University of Berlin and Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate. He became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

In an effort to portray the genius and humanity of the Black race, Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a collection of 14 essays. The introduction of the book famously proclaimed that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” Each chapter begins with two epigraphs – one from a White poet, and one from a Black spiritualist – to demonstrate intellectual and cultural parity between Black and White cultures.

A major theme of The Souls of Black Folk is the double consciousness faced by African Americans: being both American and Black. This was a unique identity which, according to Du Bois, had been a handicap in the past, but could be a strength in the future: “Henceforth, the destiny of the race could be conceived as leading neither to assimilation nor separatism but to proud, enduring hyphenation.”

Double consciousness is the internal conflict experienced by subordinated or colonized groups in an oppressive society. Originally, double consciousness was specifically the psychological challenge African Americans experienced of “always looking at oneself through the eyes” of a racist white society and “measuring oneself by the means of a nation that looked back in contempt”. The term also referred to Du Bois’s experiences of reconciling his African heritage with an upbringing in a European-dominated society.

More recently, the concept of double consciousness has been expanded to other situations of social inequality, notably women living in patriarchal societies as well as LGBTQ2S+ people living in homophobic and transphobic societies.

The idea of double consciousness is important because it illuminates the experiences of Black people living in post-slavery America, and also because it sets a framework for understanding the position of oppressed people in an oppressive world. As a result, it became used to explain the dynamics of gender, colonialism, xenophobia and more alongside race. This theory laid a strong foundation for other critical theorists to expand upon.

Carter Godwin Woodson

Woodson was an American educator, historian, author, and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He achieved a graduate degree at the University of Chicago and in 1912 was the second African American, after W. E. B. Du Bois , to obtain a PhD from Harvard University . Woodson remains the only person whose parents were enslaved in the United States to obtain a PhD . He taught at two historically Black colleges: “ Howard University and West Virginia State University ”. Woodson believed that education and increasing social and professional contacts among Black and white people could reduce racism, and he promoted the organized study of African-American history partly for that purpose. He would later promote the first Negro History Week in Washington, D.C., in 1926, forerunner of Black History Month.

Woodson published The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861. Believing that history belonged to everybody, not just the historians, Woodson sought to engage Black civic leaders, high school teachers, clergy, women’s groups and fraternal associations in his project to improve the understanding of African-American history. He founded the Association for the Study of African American Life and History whose purpose he described as the “scientific study” of the “neglected aspects of Negro life and history” by training a new generation of Black people in historical research and methodology

hooks is a US based educational theorist and social activist. In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, she argues that a teacher’s use of control over students dulls the students’ enthusiasm and teaches obedience to authority, and keeps students from learning critical thinking. hook’s pedagogical practices exist as an interplay of anti-colonial, critical, and feminist pedagogies and are based on freedom. hooks also built a bridge between critical thinking and real-life situations, to enable educators to show students the everyday world instead of the stereotypical perspective of the world. hooks argues that teachers and students should engage in interrogations of cultural assumptions that are supported by oppression.

note: bell hooks intentionally does not capitalize her name, which follows her critical stance that language, even how we write one’s own name, is political and ideological.

Henry Giroux

Giroux is a foundational critical theorist in the US and Canada, best known for his pioneering work in critical pedagogy in K-12 and higher ed. His work advocates supporting students developing a consciousness of freedom and connecting knowledge to power, and the ability to take constructive action. His latest work examines the pitting of people against each other through the lens of class, race, and any other differences that don’t embrace white nationalism.

3.6 Latin American Thinkers

We will now analyze the impact of the pedagogical practice, as well as the educational thought, of different key educators in Latin America. These educators influenced a cultural change with ideas and concepts that modified the parameters of the educational system that was established in LatinAmerica.

Some of these educators have not been recognized in the educational system around the world. However, their work has been a catalyst in  giving way to cultural and educational transformations in Latin America. The following educators stand out for their innovative tendencies who fought for an educational system to which all people had access.

When studying these Latin American educators, it should be noted that they generated a change that had a great impact on socio-cultural problems and that their success, or failure, depended on the government policies carried out in the corresponding countries.

Deeper Dive – Latin American Thinkers

You can watch the history of each Latin American thinkers in Spanish in the following video:

Paulo Reglus Neves Freire

Freire is a Brazilian philosopher and educator, was one of the most influential thinkers behind social reconstructionism. He criticized the banking model of education in his best known writing, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is generally considered one of the fundamental texts of the critical pedagogy movement. Banking models of education view students as empty vessels to be filled by the teacher’s expertise, like a teacher putting “coins” of information into the students’ “piggy banks.” Instead, Freire supported problem-posing models of education that recognized the prior knowledge everyone has and can share with others. Conservative critics of social reconstructionists suggest that they have abandoned intellectual pursuits in education, whereas social reconstructionists believe that the analyzing of moral decisions leads to being good citizens in a democracy.

The installment dedicated to Paulo Freire covers the different stages of the life of the Brazilian pedagogue and politician. The documentary shows his Christian roots and his first steps related to literacy and adult education in Brazil, especially the one carried out in Angicos. Then, it continues with Freire’s years in exile, which included a diverse tour of Chile, the US, Nicaragua, etc. and the publication, in 1970, of two of his most important works: Education as a practice for freedom and Pedagogy of the oppressed. At the same time, it is argued that these works strengthened a political idea that became the organizer of the movement of the oppressed in Latin America.

Pause and Ponder – Dominant Narrative

The work of Freire, Giroux, and hooks are included as necessary responses to the exclusionary and marginalizing nature of the dominant narrative of educational systems. Even today, although educators may study their work, the systems they’re employed with tend to perpetuate the inequalities and dynamics Freire, Giroux, hooks, and others address.

Gabriela Mistral

Mistral, pseudonym of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, was a Chilean poet, diplomat and pedagogue. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945 for her poetic work, she was the first Ibero-American woman and the second Latin American person to receive a Nobel Prize.

Her political-ideological profile is represented as a hybrid between her Catholic, but not conservative, beliefs and her liberal traits, although she is not strictly defined as liberal. Her words and poetry, which frequently gave life to various newspaper articles, generated multiple conflicts with the most conservative sectors of society. Mistral, however, continued on her way and affirmed her work in the rural and indigenous sectors. During her trip to Mexico, at the invitation of Vasconcelos, she fulfilled her full potential as a teacher, promoting a pedagogy based on the child, with Christian roots and that took into account the singularities of the rural and indigenous areas in which she worked. In 1945 she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, something that made visible the impact of her teaching practice, intellectual and poetic practice.

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

Sarmiento was an Argentine politician, writer, teacher, journalist, serviceman and statesman; governor of the province of San Juan between 1862 and 1864, president of the Argentine Nation between 1868 and 1874, national senator for his province between 1874 and 1879 and minister of the interior in 1879.

His controversial, anti-racist and unitary side is reaffirmed, and the fact that he belongs to a generation that understood writing as a political practice. He questioned what was the best educational system for all of the students in Latina America. He starts investigating the opposite approaches of education in Massachusetts and Prussia. He believed that the students had a better option to succeed and learn independently in a society under the Prussian system, which was centralized and under the management of the state. The educational system in Massachusetts, on the contrary, was decentralized and the society was the principal entity to promote education. Therefore, the habits of each state were instilled in the students. For example, a republican state will have a republican approach to education and he did not agree with this approach. Therefore, after his investigations he laid the programmatic foundations of a national educational system, in where it was centralized and Popular Education was provided to all of the children in Argentina.

Later on, his side as a statesman is taken up again with the contributions he made in the elaboration of the Law of Common Education of Buenos Aires (1875) and the sanction under his presidency of the National Law of Common Education (1884).

Jesualdo Sosa

Sosa, better known as Jesualdo, was a Uruguayan teacher, writer, pedagogue and journalist. His teaching led him to dedicate himself with greater purpose  and knowledge on the activities, interests and needs of the child.

Starting from a critique of the traditional school and the capitalist system, Sosa combined there a proposal with Escolanovist overtones, which promoted the autonomy of children, their creativity, their expression, their work training, and was articulated with the activities of the community. That experience was collected in Vida de un maestro, a production that, despite the censorship attempts it suffered from dictatorial governments, was able to expand worldwide. After that publication, his life is described as a time of maturation, systematization and recognition, which gave him the chance to be called to collaborate in different parts of Latin America.

Simón Narciso de Jesús Carreño Rodríguez

de Jesús Carreño Rodríguez was a Venezuelan hero, educator, and politician. He was the tutor of Simón Bolívar and Andrés Bello. He contributed concepts and ideas including written works aimed at  the process of freedom and American integration.

In the seventh installment, Simón Rodríguez is recognized as a great precursor of our American pedagogical thought, as a fighter for the emancipation of Latin America and for public education for all as a form of social progress. His philosophy favored the equality in education as he believed this was a right for all citizens. He highlights his conception of equality, which was not restrictive as  he believed that equality started in educational practices. He sacrificed all his belongings and left everything for his ideals. In the miniseries,

José Vasconcelos Calderón

Vasconcelos Calderón was a Mexican lawyer, politician, writer, educator, public official and philosopher. He was part of the revolutionary movement led by Francisco Madero, which promoted the democratic transformation of a country that, at that time, was shaken by the dictatorships of Porfirio Díaz Mori. As a result of a political setup, Vasconcelos became Secretary of Education of the Federal Government (1921-1924). His management in this position is distinguished as short and intense, since there he carried out, with the support of Gabriela Mistral, his most recognized work, promoting high culture, rural literacy missions and muralism as ways of recovering Latin American roots. His work, The Cosmic Race, is considered a condensation of his position in favor of mestizaje, which is the biological and cultural encounter or its arrangement between different ethnic groups, in which they mix, giving birth to new species of families and new genotypes. This was a very controversial work as it was not aligned with the thinking of the people from this time.

José Carlos Mariátegui

Mariátegui, La Chira, was a Peruvian writer, journalist and political thinker, a prolific author despite his early death. He is also known in his country by the name of El Amauta. He was one of the main scholars of Socialism in Latin America.

“The revolution is not only the fight for bread, but also the conquest of beauty” is a representative phrase of José Carlos Mariátegui, which marks the beginning of the installment referring to the Peruvian writer, journalist and intellectual. At first, the documentary goes through what is considered his first school, recounting his initial steps in the writing of the newspaper La Razón, where he grew as a journalist and became involved in workers’ struggles and reformist ideals. Then it is analyzed how during his exile in Europe, Mariátegui was nurtured by Marxist ideas, the struggles of Italian workers and began to work on the notion of indigenism as a creative and revolutionary myth. During his return, it is stated that he strengthened his political proposal of autochthonous socialism, marked by a juxtaposition between Marxist theory, Latin Americanism and indigenism, with a strong emphasis also on gender equality and the depatriarchalizing of educational practices. These aspects are present in its most important editorial offering, Amauta. In 1928, he created the Peruvian Socialist Party and published Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, from which he criticized the liberal model of education (which placed the problem of indigenous people in education) and the lack of their recognition as subjects of law.

José Julián Martí Pérez

Martí Pérez was a writer and politician of Cuban origin. Democratic republican politician, thinker, journalist, philosopher and Cuban poet, creator of the Cuban Revolutionary Party and organizer of the War of 95 or Necessary War, named after the Cuban War of Independence. He suffered the vicissitudes of critical thought from a very young age, when he was imprisoned and exiled. Strongly involved in the struggles against Spanish colonization and US interference in the Caribbean, he claimed Bolivarian principles. His political and educational thought is described through four topics: the decolonization of Latin American knowledge, the formation of good people and the role of love in pedagogy, the special place given to creative work and the recovery of Latin American identity. In 1892, a time of exile, he founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party as a tool for the independence of the island and finally died on the battlefield years later.

Jorge J. E. Gracia

Gracia was born in Cuba in 1942 and was a Cuban refugee in the USA. He studied at both Universidad de La Habana and Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro in Havana before moving to the U.S., where he  earned a degree in philosophy from Wheaton College in 1965. He went on to receive a master’s degree in philosophy from University of Chicago in 1966, a licentiate in medieval studies from Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in 1970 and his doctorate in medieval philosophy from University of Toronto in 1971.

Gracia’s areas of research included metaphysics, ethnic and racial issues, philosophy of religion, and medieval and Latin American philosophy. These topics led him to author over 20 books and edit more than two dozen volumes of works by others. One of his most notable contributions was his 1984 edited anthology on Latin American philosophy, “Philosophical Analysis in Latin America,” which was the first work of its kind published in English by a philosopher.

Beyond his vast collection of writings, he was also a leader for many important organizations. He was the founding chair for the American Philosophical Association’s Committee for Hispanics in Philosophy and sat as president of the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, Society for Iberian and Latin American Thought, American Catholic Philosophical Association and the Metaphysical Society of America.

Gracia worked for the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1971 until he retired in January 2020 as SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Chair in the departments of philosophy and comparative literature.

Héctor-Neri Castañeda

Castañeda was a Guatemalan American philosopher who emigrated to the U.S. in 1948 as a refugee. He attended the University of Minnesota to earn his bachelor’s, master’s and PhD degrees.

After graduating with his PhD, Castañeda studied at Oxford University for a year before returning to the U.S. to work at Duke University for a short period of time. He went on to work at Wayne State University, where he founded the philosophical journal Noûs , which is still in production to this day.

Eventually, he moved to Indiana University in 1969 and became the Mahlon Powell Professor of philosophy as well as that university’s first dean of Latino affairs.

Castañeda is most notable for developing the guise theory , which applies to the analysis of thought, language and the structure of the world through abstract objects. He is also credited with the discovery of the concept of the quasi-indexical or quasi-indicator. This is a linguistic expression in which a person referencing another can shift from context to context, much like in the way ‘you’ can refer to a specific person in one context and another person in a different context.

In addition to his research, he was awarded a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation. He was also given the Presidential Medal of Honor by the government of Guatemala in 1991, among many other accomplishments.

Activities – Personal Philosophy of Education

In order to start building your own personal philosophy of education, it’s important to be able to articulate how you will incorporate diverse perspectives and ways of knowing into your teaching.

Instructions:

• Select a mainstream-culture based  single story about education and analyze it. Examine how an ideology or stereotype is perpetuated through  it
• Explore some or all of the story’s origins functions  impact on education
• Then examine the alternative stories: those told by the survivors of the single story
• Propose ways to change the story both in your teaching  and in the educational system in general

Like learning, teaching is always developing; it is never realized once and for all. Our public schools have always served as sites of moral, economic, political, religious and social conflict and assimilation into a narrowly defined standard image of what it means to be an American. According to Britzman (as quoted by Kelle, 1996), “the context of teaching is political, it is an ideological context that privileges the interests, values, and practices necessary to maintain the status quo.” Teaching is by no means “innocent of ideology,” she declares. Rather, the context of education tends to preserve “the institutional values of compliance to authority, social conformity, efficiency, standardization, competition, and the objectification of knowledge” (p. 66-67).

It should be no surprise then that contemporary debates over public education continue to reflect our deepest ideological differences. As Tyack and Cuban (1995) have noted in their historical study of school reform, the nation’s perception toward schooling often “shift[s]… from panacea to scapegoat” (p. 14). We would go a long way in solving academic achievement and closing educational gaps by addressing the broader structural issues that institutionalize and perpetuate poverty and inequality.

AFT – American Federation of Teachers – A Union of Professionals. (n.d.). American Federation of Teachers. https://www.aft.org/

April 14, 1947: Mendez v. Westminster Court Ruling – Zinn Education Project. (2023, May 25). Zinn Education Project. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/mendez-v-westminster/

ASU Local-Los Angeles welcomes its 3rd cohort of students. (2021, September 24). ASU News. https://news.asu.edu/20210924-latin-american-philosophers-you-should-know-about

BBC News. (2021, June 24). Canada: 751 unmarked graves found at residential school. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57592243

Bennett, Jr., Lerone (2005). “Carter G. Woodson, Father of Black History”. United States Department of State. Archived from the original on April 1, 2011. Retrieved May 30, 2011.

“Carter G. Woodson: Winona, WV – New River Gorge National Park and Preserve (U.S. National Park Service)”. www.nps.gov. Retrieved April 17, 2021.

Daryl Michael Scott, “The History of Black History Month” Archived July 23, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, on ASALH website.

Del Maestro Cmf, W. (2023). Maestros de América Latina, una serie que todo educador y estudiante de educación tiene que ver. Web Del Maestro CMF. https://webdelmaestrocmf.com/portal/maestros-de-america-latina-una-serie-que-todo-educador-y-estudiante-de-educacion-tiene-que-ver/

Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt (1997). The correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, Volume 3. University of Massachusetts Press. p. 282. ISBN 1-55849-105-8. Retrieved May 30, 2011.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York, Avenel, NJ: Gramercy Books; 1994

Evans, N. E. C. (2021, July 11). A Federal Probe Into Indian Boarding School Gravesites Seeks To Bring Healing. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2021/07/11/1013772743/indian-boarding-school-gravesites-federal-investigation

Hine, Darlene Clark (1986). “Carter G. Woodson, White Philanthropy and Negro Historiography”. The History Teacher. JSTOR. 19 (3): 407. doi : 10.2307/493381 . ISSN 0018-2745 . JSTOR 493381 .

Hooks, Bell (1994). Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415908078 . OCLC 30668295 .

Jan. 5, 1931: Lemon Grove incident – Zinn Education Project. (2023, January 6). Zinn Education Project. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/lemon-grove-incident/

Kahn, Jonathon S., Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois, Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-530789-4.

Lewis, David Levering (1993). W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race 1868–1919. New York City: Henry Holt and Co. p. 11. ISBN 9781466841512.

Liberatory thinking . (n.d.). https://www.cps.edu/sites/equity/equity-framework/equity-lens/liberatory-thinking/

Love, B. (2019).  We Want To Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom.  Beacon.

National Education Association | NEA. (n.d.). https://www.nea.org/

Paulo Freire | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (n.d.). https://iep.utm.edu/freire/

PBS Online: Only A Teacher: Schoolhouse Pioneers. (n.d.). https://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/john.html

Perez, D. (2022b, January 3). Social foundations of K-12 education. Pressbooks. https://kstatelibraries.pressbooks.pub/dellaperezproject/

Perez, D. (2022a, January 3). Chapter 4: Foundational Philosophies of Education. Pressbooks. https://kstatelibraries.pressbooks.pub/dellaperezproject/chapter/chapter-3-foundational-philosophies-of-education/

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (A. R. Luria, M. Lopez-Morillas & M. Cole [with J. V. Wertsch], Trans.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. (Original work [ca. 1930-1934)

Wamba, Philippe (1999). Kinship. New York, New York: Penguin Group. p. 82. ISBN 978-0-525-94387-7.

3.1 – “Two silhouette profile or a white vase.” by Wikimedia Commons is in the Public Domain, CC0

3.2 – “W.E.B. Du Bois” by James E. Purdy, Wikimedia Commons is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

3.3 – “Carter Godwin Woodson” by Flickr is licensed under CC BY 4.0

3.4 – “bell hooks” by Wikimedia Commons is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

3.5 – “Henry Giroux” by Flickr is licensed under CC BY 4.0

3.6 – “Paulo Freire” by Wikimedia Commons is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

3.7 – “Gabriela Mistral sonriendo” by Wikimedia Commons is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

3.8 – “Sarmiento” by Get Archive is in the Public Domain, CC0

3.9 – “Simón Rodriguez” by Wikipedia is licensed under CC BY 4.0

3.10 – “Jose Vasconsuelos” by Wikipedia is licensed under CC BY 4.0

3.11 – “Jose Carlos Mariategui” by Wikipedia is licensed under CC BY 4.0

3.12 – “Jose Marti” by Wikipedia is licensed under CC BY 4.0

3.1 – Essentialism in Education (Essentialist Philosophy of Education, Essentialist Theory of Education)s” by PHILO-notes, YouTube is licensed under CC BY 4.0

3.2 -“Perennialism: Overview & Practical Teaching Examples” by Shayla Czuchran, YouTube is licensed under CC BY 4.0

3.3 – “Progressivism: Overview & Practical Teaching Examples” by Teea Shook, YouTube is licensed under CC BY 4.0

3.4 – “Social Reconstruction” by Sarah Barlowe, YouTube is licensed under CC BY 4.0

3.5 – “Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy” by Dr. Yu-Ling Lee, YouTube is licensed under CC BY 4.0

3.6 – “The Earth Talks: Indigenous Ways of Knowing – with Pat McCabe” by Dartington Trust, YouTube is licensed under CC BY 4.0

3.7 – “Presentación de la serie Maestros de América Latina” by UNIPE Universidad Pedagógica Nacional , YouTube is licensed under CC BY 4.0

3.8 – “The danger of a single story “  by  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ,  YouTube  is licensed under  CC BY 4.0

Foundations of Education Copyright © 2023 by Lisa AbuAssaly George; Dr. Kanoe Bunney; Ceci De Valdenebro; and Tanya Mead is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Critical Pedagogy

Theories of critical pedagogy foreground the transformative power of education through consciousness-raising approaches to teaching. Among different approaches to critical pedagogy, there tends to be consistent attention to creating a horizontal student-teacher relationship, seeking new strategies for critical consciousness-raising of institutional structures and social realities, and suggesting methods for integrating social-historical reality into the pedagogical space. In focusing on the liberatory possibilities of education and centering the self-guided education of the oppressed, critical pedagogy is linked to the liberatory politics of Global South thought.

Critical pedagogy was popularized through the work of Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, most famously in his critical work Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), and also through his many other critical works on pedagogy as well as his field experience in adult education in Brazil. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed , Freire argues that through a consciousness-raising approach to pedagogy — an approach he calls conscientização —  “the oppressed unveil the world of oppression,” which creates the terms of education that then allows for a process of transformation (54). Critical pedagogy creates and maintains commitments to radical political projects of freedom and liberation for the oppressed peoples of the world.

Many researchers and educators have written about critical pedagogy since Freire. It remains an important field in philosophy of education with a high volume of ongoing research. [1] Given spatial constraints, this essay aims to offer an introduction to the concept by focusing on three key contributors — Paulo Freire, Enrique Dussel, and bell hooks. The essay starts with Freire then moves to Dussel and hooks to consider how their writings furthered the idea of critical pedagogy. To articulate the features and stakes of the project of critical pedagogy, I examine its key terms and arguments, focusing on conscientização , the student-teacher relationship, and the transformative possibility of education. The final section of this essay turns to debates on critical pedagogy in the twenty-first century, identifying the terms of the contemporary debate and positing the continued relevance of critical pedagogy in a changing social and political context.

Conscientização

Conscientização defines the process for critical pedagogy, reflecting its values as a method “from below,” in which the students’ role in their education is prioritized. Freire uses the term conscientização to describe the process of “learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (1968, 35). In this description, the act of consciousness-raising is rooted in the social-historical context of oppression. Consciousness-raising is what allows a group of people to “take action” toward liberation; it is a key element of revolutionary praxis.

In his earlier work Education for Critical Consciousness (1965), Freire describes the necessity of a pedagogy based in conscientização . Referring to Brazil as an “alienated society,” Freire suggests that people in an alienated society “seek to transplant from other cultures solutions to their problems” (1965, 10). Because these solutions are “neither generated by a critical analysis of the context itself, nor adequately adapted to the context, they prove inoperative and unfruitful” (10). The context-specific nature of conscientização takes on a primary role in developing a critical pedagogy. Conscientização is the pedagogic process by which oppressed peoples can be empowered to move away from external solutions for symptoms and structures of oppression and develop their own context-specific solutions instead. This reflects the “from below” nature of a pedagogy centered on conscientização . The description and critique of society comes from the oppressed group. Then, the transformation of society is based on that critique. The students’ thoughts are centered in this process.

In Freire’s thought, the pedagogical format that emerges from conscientização is described as a “‘problem-posing’ education, responding to the essence of consciousness” (1968, 79). This is opposed to what Freire calls the “banking method” of education, where students are seen as sites for depositing information. The banking method of education, thought to be the hegemonic form of education against which Freire forms the “problem-posing” style of education, furthers a top-down style of teaching and learning. In a problem-posing style of education, the students — through conscientização — define the terms of the problems of reality rooted in the socially and historically specific context of oppression. This is the “from below” nature of critical pedagogy.

In his critical work Pedagogics of Liberation: A Latin American Philosophy of Education (2019), Enrique Dussel writes about the extent of social transformation made necessary and possible by consciousness-raising. He considers the positioned nature of consciousness-raising as he offers the foregrounding of “Latin American being”: “Politically, Latin American pedagogics begins by welcoming the revelation of the ‘Latin American being,’ our voice ” (Dussel 2019, 121). By naming the importance of the “Latin American being” and “voice” in his theory, Dussel emphasizes the context-specific stakes of a new critical pedagogy. Dussel’s Pedagogics of Liberation offers an expansive view of critical pedagogy, taking the discussion from pedagogy to pedagogics to reflect a larger-scale theoretical commitment to the ways in which all social systems and institutions form a disciplinary education for the people. Dussel defines pedagogics as “the part of philosophy (along with ethics, politics, and economics) which considers face-to-face relationships… Pedagogics as we intend it here has a greater significance than pedagogy, covering all types of ‘discipline’ (what is received from another) existing in opposition to ‘invention’ (what is discovered on one’s own)” (47). Dussel’s intervention in a discourse of critical pedagogy via pedagogics prioritizes large-scale social transformations that change the terms of “face-to-face relationships.”

Written from the site of the U.S. academy, bell hooks’ essays in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994) consider the possible routes and obstacles to a consciousness-raising pedagogy. Citing inspiration from Freire’s work, hooks also critiques Freire and stages the importance of a model that integrates “anticolonial, critical, and feminist pedagogies” (1994, 10). Reflecting the specific context of U.S. higher education in the early 1990s, hooks analyzes the conditions that create inequities in the classroom context with a focus on gender, class, and race. In considering different sites of tension amidst a multiculturalist moment, hooks thinks about the limitations of both teachers and students to participate in a consciousness-raising process of education, suggesting the necessity of discomfort and growth in the process: “Often, professors and students have to learn to accept different ways of knowing, new epistemologies in the multicultural setting” (41). In Teaching to Transgress, hooks offers theories and stories from her classroom experience, reflecting the challenges of building a collective interest in such a pedagogy for both professors and students.

The Student-Teacher Relationship

As is suggested in hooks’ idea that “professors and students have to learn to accept different ways of knowing, new epistemologies,” a critical pedagogy rethinks the roles of teacher and student to arrive at a more horizontal construction. What is so illustrative about hooks’ articulation is the notion that in a critical pedagogy mode, teachers and students are doing the learning and accepting together. It is not a situation in which the teacher knows what is correct before the student. In a critical pedagogy, truth is explored and created in “solidarity” between teacher and student (Freire 1968, 77). The idea of solidarity between the teacher and student emphasizes the mutuality of the critical pedagogy approach.

To this effect, Freire develops a useful vocabulary around the teacher-student dynamic in critical pedagogy. In a few instances, he calls teachers and students “co-investigators,” reflecting the mutually-insightful process of a critical pedagogy (1968, 81). Similar to hooks’ formulation, the new ways of knowing are happening for the teacher and student at the same time. Another term Freire uses to describe the teacher-student dynamic is “co-intentional education,” naming the mutual subjectivity and mutual responsibility in the construction of a critical pedagogy (69).

In Freire’s articulation of critical pedagogy, dialogue and the centrality of students’ role in creating dialogue is central to the project. Stemming from the same logic of conscientização that grounds consciousness-raising in the students’ perception of social reality and oppression, Freire sees the “dialogical” construction of the problem-posing method as “constituted and organized by the students’ view of the world, where their own generative themes are found” (1968, 109). This reflects his larger motivation in rejecting a top-down model of education. In describing the role and responsibility of teachers, Freire writes, “It is not our role to speak to the people about our own view of the world, nor to attempt to impose that view on them, but rather to dialogue with the people about their view and ours” (96). In Freire’s theorization of critical pedagogy, the teacher’s responsibility is to create a learning environment in which a dialogue about the world, different ways of understanding it, and new ideas about what a transformed world could look like are able to emerge.

In Teaching to Transgress , hooks extends the critique of the teacher-student dynamic to look critically at the role of the broader classroom dynamic in education. In describing a successful classroom dynamic, hooks emphasizes collective participation and presence. To this effect, hooks writes that “as a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence” (1994, 8). The idea of “community” is another term that locates the priorities of critical pedagogy in its collective aspirations.

Dussel’s project to think about critical pedagogics brings the critique of the teacher-student dynamic to the level of the state. In Pedagogics of Liberation , Dussel argues for the importance of the teacher figure listening to the student figure whether that is in the school setting or in other sites of education in the systems and governing institutions. He discusses the roles of teacher and student on this larger scale, writing that “...the teacher that listens to the voice of the young person, the State that educates its young people and community, must know how to stay silent at times, must leave young people to perform their historical responsibility” (Dussel 2019, 119). This framing reflects the continuity of change and the importance of letting students lead in their education.

Transforming Systems, Transforming the World

The political project of critical pedagogy is toward freedom, liberation, and humanization for everyone. Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed suggests that the “struggle for humanization” can only be led by oppressed people (1968, 44). His idea of a critical pedagogy stakes radical belief in the transformative power of education. Freire argues that in the process of consciousness-raising and dialogical learning, students and teachers are able to critically analyze the contextual situation of oppression and participate in the act of creating a new reality together. As this pedagogy toward a “new reality” is realized, it “ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation” (54). This is not a single process, however. Freire emphasizes throughout his work that such a pedagogical approach is an ongoing process.

Reflecting the continuity of a transformative pedagogy, hooks writes about “education as the practice of freedom” (1994, 15). A practice signifies an ongoing process. A critical pedagogy is an ongoing process rather than a singular revolutionary event. Freedom is a keyword across works on critical pedagogy, inflected in Freire’s writing in its concreteness and situatedness: “Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion” (1968, 47). Freire’s critical pedagogy is interested in how the condition of freedom can be created and continued through the educational setting.

Dussel establishes the imperative of transforming all sites of pedagogy, calling for “a new school, a new medicine, and other new services for the oppressed” (2019, 140). The route to liberation is across sites of pedagogy and requires a transformation of all pedagogic institutions to prioritize the needs of the people and to be sites of continued and sustainable care.

Critical Pedagogy in the Twenty-First Century

This final section reflects on twenty-first century ambivalence and optimism around the political promises of critical pedagogy. As critical pedagogy continues to be a significant force in research and thought on the philosophy of education, scholars wrestle with education’s potential to conduct radical social transformation. Early theorists of critical pedagogy, such as Freire, Henry Giroux, and Ira Shor staked their thought in the possibility of social transformation. Skepticism of education’s ability to produce such revolutionary futures has become a core feature of critical pedagogy discourse with texts like Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy (2018) articulating an alternative source of hope in the liberatory present of education.

Many contemporary volumes organize their critique of the effectiveness of critical pedagogy around its ability to respond to the conditions of neoliberalism. In his chapter “Critical Pedagogy and Class Struggle in the Age of Neoliberal Terror” in Neoliberalism, Critical Pedagogy and Education (2019), Peter McLaren is reluctant to embrace the optimism of the revolutionary promise of critical pedagogy in the neoliberal context. Seehwa Cho’s critique of critical pedagogy in Critical Pedagogy and Social Change: Critical Analysis on the Language of Possibility (2012) takes issue with the lack of specificity in the articulation of possibility in earlier writings on critical pedagogy, suggesting an emptiness in its political promise in the neoliberal context.

On the other hand, contributors to Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times: Hope and Possibilities (2012) claim the continued importance of critical pedagogy, arguing that it is “needed to provide a framework for the identification and active responses to neoliberalism’s predatory schemes of crises, errant politics, and resultant policies” (Macrine 2012, 4). Tomas Boronski’s Critical Pedagogy: An Exploration of Contemporary Themes and Issues (2021) establishes a critique of neoliberalism from a British perspective and suggests that the advantage of critical pedagogy is how it creates alternative ways of interpreting “hegemonic views” of contemporary life through the eyes of oppressed people (4). The same social structures that render critical pedagogy ineffective for McLaren and Cho are the ones that make it necessary and hopeful for Boronski and the authors in Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times .

Critical pedagogy continues to be debated on its contemporary significance and political viability. By tracking core features of critical pedagogy such as consciousness-raising, horizontalizing the student-teacher relationship, and social transformation, this essay grounds the term in its practical features and stakes. The articulation of liberation that is central to critical pedagogy keeps the theory around it alive as researchers and practitioners continue asking how to most effectively implement it amidst rapidly changing circumstances. Critical pedagogy’s lasting focus on liberation, whether in search of liberatory futures or in arguing that education holds the makings of a liberated present, maintains its link to Global South politics and thought.

Bogdan, Sarah, Joseph Navarro, Gloria Park, and Madeleine Rosa. 2023. Critical Pedagogy in the Language and Writing Classroom: Strategies, Examples, Activities from Teacher Scholars . Routledge.

Boronski, Tomas. 2021. Critical Pedagogy: An Exploration of Contemporary Themes and Issues . Routledge.

Campbell, Andrew B., Ardavan Eizadirad and Steve Sider. 2023. Counternarratives of Pain and Suffering as Critical Pedagogy: Disrupting Oppression in Educational Contexts . Routledge.

Cho, Seehwa. 2012. Critical Pedagogy and Social Change: Critical Analysis on the Language of Possibility . Taylor & Francis Group.

Covino, Katharine and Cara Mulcahy, eds. 2024. The Intersections of Critical Pedagogy, Critical Literary, and Social Justice: Toward Empowerment, Equity, and Education for Liberation . Rowman & Littlefield.

Dussell, Enrique. 2019. Pedagogics of Liberation: A Latin American Philosophy of Education . Translated by David I. Backer and Cecilia Diego. punctum books.

Dyson, Sue. 2018 . Critical Pedagogy in Nursing: Transformational Approaches to Nurse Education in a Globalized World . Palgrave Macmillan.

Ellsworth, Elizabeth. 1989, “Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy”, Harvard Educational Review , vol. 59, no. 3, pp. 297–325.

Flynn, Susan and Melanie A. Marotta, eds. 2021. Critical Pedagogy, Race, and Media: Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education Teaching . Routledge.

Freire, Paulo. 1965. Education for Critical Consciousness . Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos, 2021. Bloomsbury Academic.

---. 1968. Pedagogy of the Oppressed . 2018. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. Bloomsbury Academic.

Freire, Paulo and Ira Shor. 1987. A Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues on Transforming Education . Bergin & Harvey Publishers.

Giroux, Henry. 2020. On Critical Pedagogy . Bloomsbury Academic.

---. 1984. Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling . Temple University Press.

Grande, Sandy. 2004, Red pedagogy: Native American social and political thought . Rowman & Littlefield.

Hodgson, Naomi, Joris Vlieghe and Piotr Zamojski. 2018. Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy . punctum books.

hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom . Routledge.

---. 2013. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope . Taylor and Francis.

Kirk, David. 2020. Precarity, Critical Pedagogy, and Physical Education . Routledge.

Leonardo, Zeus. 2005. Critical Pedagogy and Race. Wiley-Blackwell.

Macrine, Sheila L, ed. 2021. Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times: Hope and Possibilities . Palgrave MacMillan.

McLaren, Peter. 2016. Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education . Routledge.

---. 2019. Neoliberalism, Critical Pedagogy and Education . Routledge India.

McLaren, Peter and Petar Jandric. 2020. Postdigital Dialogues: On Critical Pedagogy, Liberation Theology and Information Technology . Bloomsbury Academic.

Mitchler, Sharon. 2023. Critical Rural Pedagogy: Connecting College Students with American Literature . National Council of Teachers of English.

Oztok, Murat. 2020. The Hidden Curriculum of Online Learning: Understanding Social Justice through Critical Pedagogy . Routledge.

Plen, Matt. 2022. Judaism, Education and Social Justice: Towards a Jewish Critical Pedagogy. Bloomsbury Academic .

Ryan, Anne and Tony Walsh, eds. 2018. Reflexivity and Critical Pedagogy . Brill Sense.

Seal, Mike and Alan Smith. 2021. Enabling Critical Pedagogy in Higher Education . Critical Publishing.

Shor, Ira. 1992. Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change. University of Chicago Press.

---. 1996. When Students Have Power: Negotiating Authority in a Critical Pedagogy. University of Chicago Press.

Simpson, Ashley and Fred Dervin, eds. 2020. The Meaning of Criticality in Education Research: Reflecting on Critical Pedagogy . Palgrave Macmillan.

Stewart, Paul Alexander. 2021. Art, Critical Pedagogy and Capitalism . Routledge.

Toh, Glenn. 2022. Cross-border Shadow Education and Critical Pedagogy: Questioning Neoliberal and Parochial Orders in Singapore . Palgrave Macmillan.

Published: April 22, 2024

[1] Recent trends in critical pedagogy scholarship have involved applying the principles of critical pedagogy to specific educational formations, such as disciplinary fields, student communities and identities, and curriculum topics or teaching methods. Some scholars theorize critical pedagogy in the context of specific disciplines such as physical education (Kirk 2020), nursing (Dyson 2018), and language and writing (Bogdan, et al. 2023). Others take up critical pedagogy in the context of specific populations such as online learners (Oztok 2020), Japanese expatriates in Singapore (Toh 2022), and rural American students (Mitchler 2023). Another branch of critical pedagogy research focuses on re-theorizing its political outcomes. For example, a recent volume examines critical pedagogy alongside the ideas of critical literacy and social justice (Covino and Mulcahy 2024). A recent manifesto rejects the idea that critical pedagogy will lead to state transformation, instead emphasizing the liberatory present of education (Hodgson, et al. 2018).

Quinones, Elena. April 22, 2024. "Critical Pedagogy."  Global South Studies: A Collective Publication with The Global South . Accessed date.

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Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is a widely accepted educational goal. Its definition is contested, but the competing definitions can be understood as differing conceptions of the same basic concept: careful thinking directed to a goal. Conceptions differ with respect to the scope of such thinking, the type of goal, the criteria and norms for thinking carefully, and the thinking components on which they focus. Its adoption as an educational goal has been recommended on the basis of respect for students’ autonomy and preparing students for success in life and for democratic citizenship. “Critical thinkers” have the dispositions and abilities that lead them to think critically when appropriate. The abilities can be identified directly; the dispositions indirectly, by considering what factors contribute to or impede exercise of the abilities. Standardized tests have been developed to assess the degree to which a person possesses such dispositions and abilities. Educational intervention has been shown experimentally to improve them, particularly when it includes dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring. Controversies have arisen over the generalizability of critical thinking across domains, over alleged bias in critical thinking theories and instruction, and over the relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking.

2.1 Dewey’s Three Main Examples

2.2 dewey’s other examples, 2.3 further examples, 2.4 non-examples, 3. the definition of critical thinking, 4. its value, 5. the process of thinking critically, 6. components of the process, 7. contributory dispositions and abilities, 8.1 initiating dispositions, 8.2 internal dispositions, 9. critical thinking abilities, 10. required knowledge, 11. educational methods, 12.1 the generalizability of critical thinking, 12.2 bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, 12.3 relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking, other internet resources, related entries.

Use of the term ‘critical thinking’ to describe an educational goal goes back to the American philosopher John Dewey (1910), who more commonly called it ‘reflective thinking’. He defined it as

active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends. (Dewey 1910: 6; 1933: 9)

and identified a habit of such consideration with a scientific attitude of mind. His lengthy quotations of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill indicate that he was not the first person to propose development of a scientific attitude of mind as an educational goal.

In the 1930s, many of the schools that participated in the Eight-Year Study of the Progressive Education Association (Aikin 1942) adopted critical thinking as an educational goal, for whose achievement the study’s Evaluation Staff developed tests (Smith, Tyler, & Evaluation Staff 1942). Glaser (1941) showed experimentally that it was possible to improve the critical thinking of high school students. Bloom’s influential taxonomy of cognitive educational objectives (Bloom et al. 1956) incorporated critical thinking abilities. Ennis (1962) proposed 12 aspects of critical thinking as a basis for research on the teaching and evaluation of critical thinking ability.

Since 1980, an annual international conference in California on critical thinking and educational reform has attracted tens of thousands of educators from all levels of education and from many parts of the world. Also since 1980, the state university system in California has required all undergraduate students to take a critical thinking course. Since 1983, the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking has sponsored sessions in conjunction with the divisional meetings of the American Philosophical Association (APA). In 1987, the APA’s Committee on Pre-College Philosophy commissioned a consensus statement on critical thinking for purposes of educational assessment and instruction (Facione 1990a). Researchers have developed standardized tests of critical thinking abilities and dispositions; for details, see the Supplement on Assessment . Educational jurisdictions around the world now include critical thinking in guidelines for curriculum and assessment.

For details on this history, see the Supplement on History .

2. Examples and Non-Examples

Before considering the definition of critical thinking, it will be helpful to have in mind some examples of critical thinking, as well as some examples of kinds of thinking that would apparently not count as critical thinking.

Dewey (1910: 68–71; 1933: 91–94) takes as paradigms of reflective thinking three class papers of students in which they describe their thinking. The examples range from the everyday to the scientific.

Transit : “The other day, when I was down town on 16th Street, a clock caught my eye. I saw that the hands pointed to 12:20. This suggested that I had an engagement at 124th Street, at one o’clock. I reasoned that as it had taken me an hour to come down on a surface car, I should probably be twenty minutes late if I returned the same way. I might save twenty minutes by a subway express. But was there a station near? If not, I might lose more than twenty minutes in looking for one. Then I thought of the elevated, and I saw there was such a line within two blocks. But where was the station? If it were several blocks above or below the street I was on, I should lose time instead of gaining it. My mind went back to the subway express as quicker than the elevated; furthermore, I remembered that it went nearer than the elevated to the part of 124th Street I wished to reach, so that time would be saved at the end of the journey. I concluded in favor of the subway, and reached my destination by one o’clock.” (Dewey 1910: 68–69; 1933: 91–92)

Ferryboat : “Projecting nearly horizontally from the upper deck of the ferryboat on which I daily cross the river is a long white pole, having a gilded ball at its tip. It suggested a flagpole when I first saw it; its color, shape, and gilded ball agreed with this idea, and these reasons seemed to justify me in this belief. But soon difficulties presented themselves. The pole was nearly horizontal, an unusual position for a flagpole; in the next place, there was no pulley, ring, or cord by which to attach a flag; finally, there were elsewhere on the boat two vertical staffs from which flags were occasionally flown. It seemed probable that the pole was not there for flag-flying.

“I then tried to imagine all possible purposes of the pole, and to consider for which of these it was best suited: (a) Possibly it was an ornament. But as all the ferryboats and even the tugboats carried poles, this hypothesis was rejected. (b) Possibly it was the terminal of a wireless telegraph. But the same considerations made this improbable. Besides, the more natural place for such a terminal would be the highest part of the boat, on top of the pilot house. (c) Its purpose might be to point out the direction in which the boat is moving.

“In support of this conclusion, I discovered that the pole was lower than the pilot house, so that the steersman could easily see it. Moreover, the tip was enough higher than the base, so that, from the pilot’s position, it must appear to project far out in front of the boat. Moreover, the pilot being near the front of the boat, he would need some such guide as to its direction. Tugboats would also need poles for such a purpose. This hypothesis was so much more probable than the others that I accepted it. I formed the conclusion that the pole was set up for the purpose of showing the pilot the direction in which the boat pointed, to enable him to steer correctly.” (Dewey 1910: 69–70; 1933: 92–93)

Bubbles : “In washing tumblers in hot soapsuds and placing them mouth downward on a plate, bubbles appeared on the outside of the mouth of the tumblers and then went inside. Why? The presence of bubbles suggests air, which I note must come from inside the tumbler. I see that the soapy water on the plate prevents escape of the air save as it may be caught in bubbles. But why should air leave the tumbler? There was no substance entering to force it out. It must have expanded. It expands by increase of heat, or by decrease of pressure, or both. Could the air have become heated after the tumbler was taken from the hot suds? Clearly not the air that was already entangled in the water. If heated air was the cause, cold air must have entered in transferring the tumblers from the suds to the plate. I test to see if this supposition is true by taking several more tumblers out. Some I shake so as to make sure of entrapping cold air in them. Some I take out holding mouth downward in order to prevent cold air from entering. Bubbles appear on the outside of every one of the former and on none of the latter. I must be right in my inference. Air from the outside must have been expanded by the heat of the tumbler, which explains the appearance of the bubbles on the outside. But why do they then go inside? Cold contracts. The tumbler cooled and also the air inside it. Tension was removed, and hence bubbles appeared inside. To be sure of this, I test by placing a cup of ice on the tumbler while the bubbles are still forming outside. They soon reverse” (Dewey 1910: 70–71; 1933: 93–94).

Dewey (1910, 1933) sprinkles his book with other examples of critical thinking. We will refer to the following.

Weather : A man on a walk notices that it has suddenly become cool, thinks that it is probably going to rain, looks up and sees a dark cloud obscuring the sun, and quickens his steps (1910: 6–10; 1933: 9–13).

Disorder : A man finds his rooms on his return to them in disorder with his belongings thrown about, thinks at first of burglary as an explanation, then thinks of mischievous children as being an alternative explanation, then looks to see whether valuables are missing, and discovers that they are (1910: 82–83; 1933: 166–168).

Typhoid : A physician diagnosing a patient whose conspicuous symptoms suggest typhoid avoids drawing a conclusion until more data are gathered by questioning the patient and by making tests (1910: 85–86; 1933: 170).

Blur : A moving blur catches our eye in the distance, we ask ourselves whether it is a cloud of whirling dust or a tree moving its branches or a man signaling to us, we think of other traits that should be found on each of those possibilities, and we look and see if those traits are found (1910: 102, 108; 1933: 121, 133).

Suction pump : In thinking about the suction pump, the scientist first notes that it will draw water only to a maximum height of 33 feet at sea level and to a lesser maximum height at higher elevations, selects for attention the differing atmospheric pressure at these elevations, sets up experiments in which the air is removed from a vessel containing water (when suction no longer works) and in which the weight of air at various levels is calculated, compares the results of reasoning about the height to which a given weight of air will allow a suction pump to raise water with the observed maximum height at different elevations, and finally assimilates the suction pump to such apparently different phenomena as the siphon and the rising of a balloon (1910: 150–153; 1933: 195–198).

Diamond : A passenger in a car driving in a diamond lane reserved for vehicles with at least one passenger notices that the diamond marks on the pavement are far apart in some places and close together in others. Why? The driver suggests that the reason may be that the diamond marks are not needed where there is a solid double line separating the diamond lane from the adjoining lane, but are needed when there is a dotted single line permitting crossing into the diamond lane. Further observation confirms that the diamonds are close together when a dotted line separates the diamond lane from its neighbour, but otherwise far apart.

Rash : A woman suddenly develops a very itchy red rash on her throat and upper chest. She recently noticed a mark on the back of her right hand, but was not sure whether the mark was a rash or a scrape. She lies down in bed and thinks about what might be causing the rash and what to do about it. About two weeks before, she began taking blood pressure medication that contained a sulfa drug, and the pharmacist had warned her, in view of a previous allergic reaction to a medication containing a sulfa drug, to be on the alert for an allergic reaction; however, she had been taking the medication for two weeks with no such effect. The day before, she began using a new cream on her neck and upper chest; against the new cream as the cause was mark on the back of her hand, which had not been exposed to the cream. She began taking probiotics about a month before. She also recently started new eye drops, but she supposed that manufacturers of eye drops would be careful not to include allergy-causing components in the medication. The rash might be a heat rash, since she recently was sweating profusely from her upper body. Since she is about to go away on a short vacation, where she would not have access to her usual physician, she decides to keep taking the probiotics and using the new eye drops but to discontinue the blood pressure medication and to switch back to the old cream for her neck and upper chest. She forms a plan to consult her regular physician on her return about the blood pressure medication.

Candidate : Although Dewey included no examples of thinking directed at appraising the arguments of others, such thinking has come to be considered a kind of critical thinking. We find an example of such thinking in the performance task on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+), which its sponsoring organization describes as

a performance-based assessment that provides a measure of an institution’s contribution to the development of critical-thinking and written communication skills of its students. (Council for Aid to Education 2017)

A sample task posted on its website requires the test-taker to write a report for public distribution evaluating a fictional candidate’s policy proposals and their supporting arguments, using supplied background documents, with a recommendation on whether to endorse the candidate.

Immediate acceptance of an idea that suggests itself as a solution to a problem (e.g., a possible explanation of an event or phenomenon, an action that seems likely to produce a desired result) is “uncritical thinking, the minimum of reflection” (Dewey 1910: 13). On-going suspension of judgment in the light of doubt about a possible solution is not critical thinking (Dewey 1910: 108). Critique driven by a dogmatically held political or religious ideology is not critical thinking; thus Paulo Freire (1968 [1970]) is using the term (e.g., at 1970: 71, 81, 100, 146) in a more politically freighted sense that includes not only reflection but also revolutionary action against oppression. Derivation of a conclusion from given data using an algorithm is not critical thinking.

What is critical thinking? There are many definitions. Ennis (2016) lists 14 philosophically oriented scholarly definitions and three dictionary definitions. Following Rawls (1971), who distinguished his conception of justice from a utilitarian conception but regarded them as rival conceptions of the same concept, Ennis maintains that the 17 definitions are different conceptions of the same concept. Rawls articulated the shared concept of justice as

a characteristic set of principles for assigning basic rights and duties and for determining… the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. (Rawls 1971: 5)

Bailin et al. (1999b) claim that, if one considers what sorts of thinking an educator would take not to be critical thinking and what sorts to be critical thinking, one can conclude that educators typically understand critical thinking to have at least three features.

• It is done for the purpose of making up one’s mind about what to believe or do.
• The person engaging in the thinking is trying to fulfill standards of adequacy and accuracy appropriate to the thinking.
• The thinking fulfills the relevant standards to some threshold level.

One could sum up the core concept that involves these three features by saying that critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking. This core concept seems to apply to all the examples of critical thinking described in the previous section. As for the non-examples, their exclusion depends on construing careful thinking as excluding jumping immediately to conclusions, suspending judgment no matter how strong the evidence, reasoning from an unquestioned ideological or religious perspective, and routinely using an algorithm to answer a question.

If the core of critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking, conceptions of it can vary according to its presumed scope, its presumed goal, one’s criteria and threshold for being careful, and the thinking component on which one focuses. As to its scope, some conceptions (e.g., Dewey 1910, 1933) restrict it to constructive thinking on the basis of one’s own observations and experiments, others (e.g., Ennis 1962; Fisher & Scriven 1997; Johnson 1992) to appraisal of the products of such thinking. Ennis (1991) and Bailin et al. (1999b) take it to cover both construction and appraisal. As to its goal, some conceptions restrict it to forming a judgment (Dewey 1910, 1933; Lipman 1987; Facione 1990a). Others allow for actions as well as beliefs as the end point of a process of critical thinking (Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b). As to the criteria and threshold for being careful, definitions vary in the term used to indicate that critical thinking satisfies certain norms: “intellectually disciplined” (Scriven & Paul 1987), “reasonable” (Ennis 1991), “skillful” (Lipman 1987), “skilled” (Fisher & Scriven 1997), “careful” (Bailin & Battersby 2009). Some definitions specify these norms, referring variously to “consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends” (Dewey 1910, 1933); “the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning” (Glaser 1941); “conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication” (Scriven & Paul 1987); the requirement that “it is sensitive to context, relies on criteria, and is self-correcting” (Lipman 1987); “evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations” (Facione 1990a); and “plus-minus considerations of the product in terms of appropriate standards (or criteria)” (Johnson 1992). Stanovich and Stanovich (2010) propose to ground the concept of critical thinking in the concept of rationality, which they understand as combining epistemic rationality (fitting one’s beliefs to the world) and instrumental rationality (optimizing goal fulfillment); a critical thinker, in their view, is someone with “a propensity to override suboptimal responses from the autonomous mind” (2010: 227). These variant specifications of norms for critical thinking are not necessarily incompatible with one another, and in any case presuppose the core notion of thinking carefully. As to the thinking component singled out, some definitions focus on suspension of judgment during the thinking (Dewey 1910; McPeck 1981), others on inquiry while judgment is suspended (Bailin & Battersby 2009, 2021), others on the resulting judgment (Facione 1990a), and still others on responsiveness to reasons (Siegel 1988). Kuhn (2019) takes critical thinking to be more a dialogic practice of advancing and responding to arguments than an individual ability.

In educational contexts, a definition of critical thinking is a “programmatic definition” (Scheffler 1960: 19). It expresses a practical program for achieving an educational goal. For this purpose, a one-sentence formulaic definition is much less useful than articulation of a critical thinking process, with criteria and standards for the kinds of thinking that the process may involve. The real educational goal is recognition, adoption and implementation by students of those criteria and standards. That adoption and implementation in turn consists in acquiring the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker.

Conceptions of critical thinking generally do not include moral integrity as part of the concept. Dewey, for example, took critical thinking to be the ultimate intellectual goal of education, but distinguished it from the development of social cooperation among school children, which he took to be the central moral goal. Ennis (1996, 2011) added to his previous list of critical thinking dispositions a group of dispositions to care about the dignity and worth of every person, which he described as a “correlative” (1996) disposition without which critical thinking would be less valuable and perhaps harmful. An educational program that aimed at developing critical thinking but not the correlative disposition to care about the dignity and worth of every person, he asserted, “would be deficient and perhaps dangerous” (Ennis 1996: 172).

Dewey thought that education for reflective thinking would be of value to both the individual and society; recognition in educational practice of the kinship to the scientific attitude of children’s native curiosity, fertile imagination and love of experimental inquiry “would make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste” (Dewey 1910: iii). Schools participating in the Eight-Year Study took development of the habit of reflective thinking and skill in solving problems as a means to leading young people to understand, appreciate and live the democratic way of life characteristic of the United States (Aikin 1942: 17–18, 81). Harvey Siegel (1988: 55–61) has offered four considerations in support of adopting critical thinking as an educational ideal. (1) Respect for persons requires that schools and teachers honour students’ demands for reasons and explanations, deal with students honestly, and recognize the need to confront students’ independent judgment; these requirements concern the manner in which teachers treat students. (2) Education has the task of preparing children to be successful adults, a task that requires development of their self-sufficiency. (3) Education should initiate children into the rational traditions in such fields as history, science and mathematics. (4) Education should prepare children to become democratic citizens, which requires reasoned procedures and critical talents and attitudes. To supplement these considerations, Siegel (1988: 62–90) responds to two objections: the ideology objection that adoption of any educational ideal requires a prior ideological commitment and the indoctrination objection that cultivation of critical thinking cannot escape being a form of indoctrination.

Despite the diversity of our 11 examples, one can recognize a common pattern. Dewey analyzed it as consisting of five phases:

• suggestions , in which the mind leaps forward to a possible solution;
• an intellectualization of the difficulty or perplexity into a problem to be solved, a question for which the answer must be sought;
• the use of one suggestion after another as a leading idea, or hypothesis , to initiate and guide observation and other operations in collection of factual material;
• the mental elaboration of the idea or supposition as an idea or supposition ( reasoning , in the sense on which reasoning is a part, not the whole, of inference); and
• testing the hypothesis by overt or imaginative action. (Dewey 1933: 106–107; italics in original)

The process of reflective thinking consisting of these phases would be preceded by a perplexed, troubled or confused situation and followed by a cleared-up, unified, resolved situation (Dewey 1933: 106). The term ‘phases’ replaced the term ‘steps’ (Dewey 1910: 72), thus removing the earlier suggestion of an invariant sequence. Variants of the above analysis appeared in (Dewey 1916: 177) and (Dewey 1938: 101–119).

The variant formulations indicate the difficulty of giving a single logical analysis of such a varied process. The process of critical thinking may have a spiral pattern, with the problem being redefined in the light of obstacles to solving it as originally formulated. For example, the person in Transit might have concluded that getting to the appointment at the scheduled time was impossible and have reformulated the problem as that of rescheduling the appointment for a mutually convenient time. Further, defining a problem does not always follow after or lead immediately to an idea of a suggested solution. Nor should it do so, as Dewey himself recognized in describing the physician in Typhoid as avoiding any strong preference for this or that conclusion before getting further information (Dewey 1910: 85; 1933: 170). People with a hypothesis in mind, even one to which they have a very weak commitment, have a so-called “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998): they are likely to pay attention to evidence that confirms the hypothesis and to ignore evidence that counts against it or for some competing hypothesis. Detectives, intelligence agencies, and investigators of airplane accidents are well advised to gather relevant evidence systematically and to postpone even tentative adoption of an explanatory hypothesis until the collected evidence rules out with the appropriate degree of certainty all but one explanation. Dewey’s analysis of the critical thinking process can be faulted as well for requiring acceptance or rejection of a possible solution to a defined problem, with no allowance for deciding in the light of the available evidence to suspend judgment. Further, given the great variety of kinds of problems for which reflection is appropriate, there is likely to be variation in its component events. Perhaps the best way to conceptualize the critical thinking process is as a checklist whose component events can occur in a variety of orders, selectively, and more than once. These component events might include (1) noticing a difficulty, (2) defining the problem, (3) dividing the problem into manageable sub-problems, (4) formulating a variety of possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (5) determining what evidence is relevant to deciding among possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (6) devising a plan of systematic observation or experiment that will uncover the relevant evidence, (7) carrying out the plan of systematic observation or experimentation, (8) noting the results of the systematic observation or experiment, (9) gathering relevant testimony and information from others, (10) judging the credibility of testimony and information gathered from others, (11) drawing conclusions from gathered evidence and accepted testimony, and (12) accepting a solution that the evidence adequately supports (cf. Hitchcock 2017: 485).

Checklist conceptions of the process of critical thinking are open to the objection that they are too mechanical and procedural to fit the multi-dimensional and emotionally charged issues for which critical thinking is urgently needed (Paul 1984). For such issues, a more dialectical process is advocated, in which competing relevant world views are identified, their implications explored, and some sort of creative synthesis attempted.

If one considers the critical thinking process illustrated by the 11 examples, one can identify distinct kinds of mental acts and mental states that form part of it. To distinguish, label and briefly characterize these components is a useful preliminary to identifying abilities, skills, dispositions, attitudes, habits and the like that contribute causally to thinking critically. Identifying such abilities and habits is in turn a useful preliminary to setting educational goals. Setting the goals is in its turn a useful preliminary to designing strategies for helping learners to achieve the goals and to designing ways of measuring the extent to which learners have done so. Such measures provide both feedback to learners on their achievement and a basis for experimental research on the effectiveness of various strategies for educating people to think critically. Let us begin, then, by distinguishing the kinds of mental acts and mental events that can occur in a critical thinking process.

• Observing : One notices something in one’s immediate environment (sudden cooling of temperature in Weather , bubbles forming outside a glass and then going inside in Bubbles , a moving blur in the distance in Blur , a rash in Rash ). Or one notes the results of an experiment or systematic observation (valuables missing in Disorder , no suction without air pressure in Suction pump )
• Feeling : One feels puzzled or uncertain about something (how to get to an appointment on time in Transit , why the diamonds vary in spacing in Diamond ). One wants to resolve this perplexity. One feels satisfaction once one has worked out an answer (to take the subway express in Transit , diamonds closer when needed as a warning in Diamond ).
• Wondering : One formulates a question to be addressed (why bubbles form outside a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , how suction pumps work in Suction pump , what caused the rash in Rash ).
• Imagining : One thinks of possible answers (bus or subway or elevated in Transit , flagpole or ornament or wireless communication aid or direction indicator in Ferryboat , allergic reaction or heat rash in Rash ).
• Inferring : One works out what would be the case if a possible answer were assumed (valuables missing if there has been a burglary in Disorder , earlier start to the rash if it is an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug in Rash ). Or one draws a conclusion once sufficient relevant evidence is gathered (take the subway in Transit , burglary in Disorder , discontinue blood pressure medication and new cream in Rash ).
• Knowledge : One uses stored knowledge of the subject-matter to generate possible answers or to infer what would be expected on the assumption of a particular answer (knowledge of a city’s public transit system in Transit , of the requirements for a flagpole in Ferryboat , of Boyle’s law in Bubbles , of allergic reactions in Rash ).
• Experimenting : One designs and carries out an experiment or a systematic observation to find out whether the results deduced from a possible answer will occur (looking at the location of the flagpole in relation to the pilot’s position in Ferryboat , putting an ice cube on top of a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , measuring the height to which a suction pump will draw water at different elevations in Suction pump , noticing the spacing of diamonds when movement to or from a diamond lane is allowed in Diamond ).
• Consulting : One finds a source of information, gets the information from the source, and makes a judgment on whether to accept it. None of our 11 examples include searching for sources of information. In this respect they are unrepresentative, since most people nowadays have almost instant access to information relevant to answering any question, including many of those illustrated by the examples. However, Candidate includes the activities of extracting information from sources and evaluating its credibility.
• Identifying and analyzing arguments : One notices an argument and works out its structure and content as a preliminary to evaluating its strength. This activity is central to Candidate . It is an important part of a critical thinking process in which one surveys arguments for various positions on an issue.
• Judging : One makes a judgment on the basis of accumulated evidence and reasoning, such as the judgment in Ferryboat that the purpose of the pole is to provide direction to the pilot.
• Deciding : One makes a decision on what to do or on what policy to adopt, as in the decision in Transit to take the subway.

By definition, a person who does something voluntarily is both willing and able to do that thing at that time. Both the willingness and the ability contribute causally to the person’s action, in the sense that the voluntary action would not occur if either (or both) of these were lacking. For example, suppose that one is standing with one’s arms at one’s sides and one voluntarily lifts one’s right arm to an extended horizontal position. One would not do so if one were unable to lift one’s arm, if for example one’s right side was paralyzed as the result of a stroke. Nor would one do so if one were unwilling to lift one’s arm, if for example one were participating in a street demonstration at which a white supremacist was urging the crowd to lift their right arm in a Nazi salute and one were unwilling to express support in this way for the racist Nazi ideology. The same analysis applies to a voluntary mental process of thinking critically. It requires both willingness and ability to think critically, including willingness and ability to perform each of the mental acts that compose the process and to coordinate those acts in a sequence that is directed at resolving the initiating perplexity.

Consider willingness first. We can identify causal contributors to willingness to think critically by considering factors that would cause a person who was able to think critically about an issue nevertheless not to do so (Hamby 2014). For each factor, the opposite condition thus contributes causally to willingness to think critically on a particular occasion. For example, people who habitually jump to conclusions without considering alternatives will not think critically about issues that arise, even if they have the required abilities. The contrary condition of willingness to suspend judgment is thus a causal contributor to thinking critically.

Now consider ability. In contrast to the ability to move one’s arm, which can be completely absent because a stroke has left the arm paralyzed, the ability to think critically is a developed ability, whose absence is not a complete absence of ability to think but absence of ability to think well. We can identify the ability to think well directly, in terms of the norms and standards for good thinking. In general, to be able do well the thinking activities that can be components of a critical thinking process, one needs to know the concepts and principles that characterize their good performance, to recognize in particular cases that the concepts and principles apply, and to apply them. The knowledge, recognition and application may be procedural rather than declarative. It may be domain-specific rather than widely applicable, and in either case may need subject-matter knowledge, sometimes of a deep kind.

Reflections of the sort illustrated by the previous two paragraphs have led scholars to identify the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a “critical thinker”, i.e., someone who thinks critically whenever it is appropriate to do so. We turn now to these three types of causal contributors to thinking critically. We start with dispositions, since arguably these are the most powerful contributors to being a critical thinker, can be fostered at an early stage of a child’s development, and are susceptible to general improvement (Glaser 1941: 175)

8. Critical Thinking Dispositions

Educational researchers use the term ‘dispositions’ broadly for the habits of mind and attitudes that contribute causally to being a critical thinker. Some writers (e.g., Paul & Elder 2006; Hamby 2014; Bailin & Battersby 2016a) propose to use the term ‘virtues’ for this dimension of a critical thinker. The virtues in question, although they are virtues of character, concern the person’s ways of thinking rather than the person’s ways of behaving towards others. They are not moral virtues but intellectual virtues, of the sort articulated by Zagzebski (1996) and discussed by Turri, Alfano, and Greco (2017).

On a realistic conception, thinking dispositions or intellectual virtues are real properties of thinkers. They are general tendencies, propensities, or inclinations to think in particular ways in particular circumstances, and can be genuinely explanatory (Siegel 1999). Sceptics argue that there is no evidence for a specific mental basis for the habits of mind that contribute to thinking critically, and that it is pedagogically misleading to posit such a basis (Bailin et al. 1999a). Whatever their status, critical thinking dispositions need motivation for their initial formation in a child—motivation that may be external or internal. As children develop, the force of habit will gradually become important in sustaining the disposition (Nieto & Valenzuela 2012). Mere force of habit, however, is unlikely to sustain critical thinking dispositions. Critical thinkers must value and enjoy using their knowledge and abilities to think things through for themselves. They must be committed to, and lovers of, inquiry.

A person may have a critical thinking disposition with respect to only some kinds of issues. For example, one could be open-minded about scientific issues but not about religious issues. Similarly, one could be confident in one’s ability to reason about the theological implications of the existence of evil in the world but not in one’s ability to reason about the best design for a guided ballistic missile.

Facione (1990a: 25) divides “affective dispositions” of critical thinking into approaches to life and living in general and approaches to specific issues, questions or problems. Adapting this distinction, one can usefully divide critical thinking dispositions into initiating dispositions (those that contribute causally to starting to think critically about an issue) and internal dispositions (those that contribute causally to doing a good job of thinking critically once one has started). The two categories are not mutually exclusive. For example, open-mindedness, in the sense of willingness to consider alternative points of view to one’s own, is both an initiating and an internal disposition.

Using the strategy of considering factors that would block people with the ability to think critically from doing so, we can identify as initiating dispositions for thinking critically attentiveness, a habit of inquiry, self-confidence, courage, open-mindedness, willingness to suspend judgment, trust in reason, wanting evidence for one’s beliefs, and seeking the truth. We consider briefly what each of these dispositions amounts to, in each case citing sources that acknowledge them.

• Attentiveness : One will not think critically if one fails to recognize an issue that needs to be thought through. For example, the pedestrian in Weather would not have looked up if he had not noticed that the air was suddenly cooler. To be a critical thinker, then, one needs to be habitually attentive to one’s surroundings, noticing not only what one senses but also sources of perplexity in messages received and in one’s own beliefs and attitudes (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
• Habit of inquiry : Inquiry is effortful, and one needs an internal push to engage in it. For example, the student in Bubbles could easily have stopped at idle wondering about the cause of the bubbles rather than reasoning to a hypothesis, then designing and executing an experiment to test it. Thus willingness to think critically needs mental energy and initiative. What can supply that energy? Love of inquiry, or perhaps just a habit of inquiry. Hamby (2015) has argued that willingness to inquire is the central critical thinking virtue, one that encompasses all the others. It is recognized as a critical thinking disposition by Dewey (1910: 29; 1933: 35), Glaser (1941: 5), Ennis (1987: 12; 1991: 8), Facione (1990a: 25), Bailin et al. (1999b: 294), Halpern (1998: 452), and Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo (2001).
• Self-confidence : Lack of confidence in one’s abilities can block critical thinking. For example, if the woman in Rash lacked confidence in her ability to figure things out for herself, she might just have assumed that the rash on her chest was the allergic reaction to her medication against which the pharmacist had warned her. Thus willingness to think critically requires confidence in one’s ability to inquire (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
• Courage : Fear of thinking for oneself can stop one from doing it. Thus willingness to think critically requires intellectual courage (Paul & Elder 2006: 16).
• Open-mindedness : A dogmatic attitude will impede thinking critically. For example, a person who adheres rigidly to a “pro-choice” position on the issue of the legal status of induced abortion is likely to be unwilling to consider seriously the issue of when in its development an unborn child acquires a moral right to life. Thus willingness to think critically requires open-mindedness, in the sense of a willingness to examine questions to which one already accepts an answer but which further evidence or reasoning might cause one to answer differently (Dewey 1933; Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b; Halpern 1998, Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). Paul (1981) emphasizes open-mindedness about alternative world-views, and recommends a dialectical approach to integrating such views as central to what he calls “strong sense” critical thinking. In three studies, Haran, Ritov, & Mellers (2013) found that actively open-minded thinking, including “the tendency to weigh new evidence against a favored belief, to spend sufficient time on a problem before giving up, and to consider carefully the opinions of others in forming one’s own”, led study participants to acquire information and thus to make accurate estimations.
• Willingness to suspend judgment : Premature closure on an initial solution will block critical thinking. Thus willingness to think critically requires a willingness to suspend judgment while alternatives are explored (Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Halpern 1998).
• Trust in reason : Since distrust in the processes of reasoned inquiry will dissuade one from engaging in it, trust in them is an initiating critical thinking disposition (Facione 1990a, 25; Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001; Paul & Elder 2006). In reaction to an allegedly exclusive emphasis on reason in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, Thayer-Bacon (2000) argues that intuition, imagination, and emotion have important roles to play in an adequate conception of critical thinking that she calls “constructive thinking”. From her point of view, critical thinking requires trust not only in reason but also in intuition, imagination, and emotion.
• Seeking the truth : If one does not care about the truth but is content to stick with one’s initial bias on an issue, then one will not think critically about it. Seeking the truth is thus an initiating critical thinking disposition (Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). A disposition to seek the truth is implicit in more specific critical thinking dispositions, such as trying to be well-informed, considering seriously points of view other than one’s own, looking for alternatives, suspending judgment when the evidence is insufficient, and adopting a position when the evidence supporting it is sufficient.

Some of the initiating dispositions, such as open-mindedness and willingness to suspend judgment, are also internal critical thinking dispositions, in the sense of mental habits or attitudes that contribute causally to doing a good job of critical thinking once one starts the process. But there are many other internal critical thinking dispositions. Some of them are parasitic on one’s conception of good thinking. For example, it is constitutive of good thinking about an issue to formulate the issue clearly and to maintain focus on it. For this purpose, one needs not only the corresponding ability but also the corresponding disposition. Ennis (1991: 8) describes it as the disposition “to determine and maintain focus on the conclusion or question”, Facione (1990a: 25) as “clarity in stating the question or concern”. Other internal dispositions are motivators to continue or adjust the critical thinking process, such as willingness to persist in a complex task and willingness to abandon nonproductive strategies in an attempt to self-correct (Halpern 1998: 452). For a list of identified internal critical thinking dispositions, see the Supplement on Internal Critical Thinking Dispositions .

Some theorists postulate skills, i.e., acquired abilities, as operative in critical thinking. It is not obvious, however, that a good mental act is the exercise of a generic acquired skill. Inferring an expected time of arrival, as in Transit , has some generic components but also uses non-generic subject-matter knowledge. Bailin et al. (1999a) argue against viewing critical thinking skills as generic and discrete, on the ground that skilled performance at a critical thinking task cannot be separated from knowledge of concepts and from domain-specific principles of good thinking. Talk of skills, they concede, is unproblematic if it means merely that a person with critical thinking skills is capable of intelligent performance.

Despite such scepticism, theorists of critical thinking have listed as general contributors to critical thinking what they variously call abilities (Glaser 1941; Ennis 1962, 1991), skills (Facione 1990a; Halpern 1998) or competencies (Fisher & Scriven 1997). Amalgamating these lists would produce a confusing and chaotic cornucopia of more than 50 possible educational objectives, with only partial overlap among them. It makes sense instead to try to understand the reasons for the multiplicity and diversity, and to make a selection according to one’s own reasons for singling out abilities to be developed in a critical thinking curriculum. Two reasons for diversity among lists of critical thinking abilities are the underlying conception of critical thinking and the envisaged educational level. Appraisal-only conceptions, for example, involve a different suite of abilities than constructive-only conceptions. Some lists, such as those in (Glaser 1941), are put forward as educational objectives for secondary school students, whereas others are proposed as objectives for college students (e.g., Facione 1990a).

The abilities described in the remaining paragraphs of this section emerge from reflection on the general abilities needed to do well the thinking activities identified in section 6 as components of the critical thinking process described in section 5 . The derivation of each collection of abilities is accompanied by citation of sources that list such abilities and of standardized tests that claim to test them.

Observational abilities : Careful and accurate observation sometimes requires specialist expertise and practice, as in the case of observing birds and observing accident scenes. However, there are general abilities of noticing what one’s senses are picking up from one’s environment and of being able to articulate clearly and accurately to oneself and others what one has observed. It helps in exercising them to be able to recognize and take into account factors that make one’s observation less trustworthy, such as prior framing of the situation, inadequate time, deficient senses, poor observation conditions, and the like. It helps as well to be skilled at taking steps to make one’s observation more trustworthy, such as moving closer to get a better look, measuring something three times and taking the average, and checking what one thinks one is observing with someone else who is in a good position to observe it. It also helps to be skilled at recognizing respects in which one’s report of one’s observation involves inference rather than direct observation, so that one can then consider whether the inference is justified. These abilities come into play as well when one thinks about whether and with what degree of confidence to accept an observation report, for example in the study of history or in a criminal investigation or in assessing news reports. Observational abilities show up in some lists of critical thinking abilities (Ennis 1962: 90; Facione 1990a: 16; Ennis 1991: 9). There are items testing a person’s ability to judge the credibility of observation reports in the Cornell Critical Thinking Tests, Levels X and Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). Norris and King (1983, 1985, 1990a, 1990b) is a test of ability to appraise observation reports.

Emotional abilities : The emotions that drive a critical thinking process are perplexity or puzzlement, a wish to resolve it, and satisfaction at achieving the desired resolution. Children experience these emotions at an early age, without being trained to do so. Education that takes critical thinking as a goal needs only to channel these emotions and to make sure not to stifle them. Collaborative critical thinking benefits from ability to recognize one’s own and others’ emotional commitments and reactions.

Questioning abilities : A critical thinking process needs transformation of an inchoate sense of perplexity into a clear question. Formulating a question well requires not building in questionable assumptions, not prejudging the issue, and using language that in context is unambiguous and precise enough (Ennis 1962: 97; 1991: 9).

Imaginative abilities : Thinking directed at finding the correct causal explanation of a general phenomenon or particular event requires an ability to imagine possible explanations. Thinking about what policy or plan of action to adopt requires generation of options and consideration of possible consequences of each option. Domain knowledge is required for such creative activity, but a general ability to imagine alternatives is helpful and can be nurtured so as to become easier, quicker, more extensive, and deeper (Dewey 1910: 34–39; 1933: 40–47). Facione (1990a) and Halpern (1998) include the ability to imagine alternatives as a critical thinking ability.

Inferential abilities : The ability to draw conclusions from given information, and to recognize with what degree of certainty one’s own or others’ conclusions follow, is universally recognized as a general critical thinking ability. All 11 examples in section 2 of this article include inferences, some from hypotheses or options (as in Transit , Ferryboat and Disorder ), others from something observed (as in Weather and Rash ). None of these inferences is formally valid. Rather, they are licensed by general, sometimes qualified substantive rules of inference (Toulmin 1958) that rest on domain knowledge—that a bus trip takes about the same time in each direction, that the terminal of a wireless telegraph would be located on the highest possible place, that sudden cooling is often followed by rain, that an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug generally shows up soon after one starts taking it. It is a matter of controversy to what extent the specialized ability to deduce conclusions from premisses using formal rules of inference is needed for critical thinking. Dewey (1933) locates logical forms in setting out the products of reflection rather than in the process of reflection. Ennis (1981a), on the other hand, maintains that a liberally-educated person should have the following abilities: to translate natural-language statements into statements using the standard logical operators, to use appropriately the language of necessary and sufficient conditions, to deal with argument forms and arguments containing symbols, to determine whether in virtue of an argument’s form its conclusion follows necessarily from its premisses, to reason with logically complex propositions, and to apply the rules and procedures of deductive logic. Inferential abilities are recognized as critical thinking abilities by Glaser (1941: 6), Facione (1990a: 9), Ennis (1991: 9), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 99, 111), and Halpern (1998: 452). Items testing inferential abilities constitute two of the five subtests of the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (Watson & Glaser 1980a, 1980b, 1994), two of the four sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), three of the seven sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), 11 of the 34 items on Forms A and B of the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992), and a high but variable proportion of the 25 selected-response questions in the Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017).

Experimenting abilities : Knowing how to design and execute an experiment is important not just in scientific research but also in everyday life, as in Rash . Dewey devoted a whole chapter of his How We Think (1910: 145–156; 1933: 190–202) to the superiority of experimentation over observation in advancing knowledge. Experimenting abilities come into play at one remove in appraising reports of scientific studies. Skill in designing and executing experiments includes the acknowledged abilities to appraise evidence (Glaser 1941: 6), to carry out experiments and to apply appropriate statistical inference techniques (Facione 1990a: 9), to judge inductions to an explanatory hypothesis (Ennis 1991: 9), and to recognize the need for an adequately large sample size (Halpern 1998). The Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) includes four items (out of 52) on experimental design. The Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) makes room for appraisal of study design in both its performance task and its selected-response questions.

Consulting abilities : Skill at consulting sources of information comes into play when one seeks information to help resolve a problem, as in Candidate . Ability to find and appraise information includes ability to gather and marshal pertinent information (Glaser 1941: 6), to judge whether a statement made by an alleged authority is acceptable (Ennis 1962: 84), to plan a search for desired information (Facione 1990a: 9), and to judge the credibility of a source (Ennis 1991: 9). Ability to judge the credibility of statements is tested by 24 items (out of 76) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) and by four items (out of 52) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). The College Learning Assessment’s performance task requires evaluation of whether information in documents is credible or unreliable (Council for Aid to Education 2017).

Argument analysis abilities : The ability to identify and analyze arguments contributes to the process of surveying arguments on an issue in order to form one’s own reasoned judgment, as in Candidate . The ability to detect and analyze arguments is recognized as a critical thinking skill by Facione (1990a: 7–8), Ennis (1991: 9) and Halpern (1998). Five items (out of 34) on the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992) test skill at argument analysis. The College Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) incorporates argument analysis in its selected-response tests of critical reading and evaluation and of critiquing an argument.

Judging skills and deciding skills : Skill at judging and deciding is skill at recognizing what judgment or decision the available evidence and argument supports, and with what degree of confidence. It is thus a component of the inferential skills already discussed.

Lists and tests of critical thinking abilities often include two more abilities: identifying assumptions and constructing and evaluating definitions.

In addition to dispositions and abilities, critical thinking needs knowledge: of critical thinking concepts, of critical thinking principles, and of the subject-matter of the thinking.

We can derive a short list of concepts whose understanding contributes to critical thinking from the critical thinking abilities described in the preceding section. Observational abilities require an understanding of the difference between observation and inference. Questioning abilities require an understanding of the concepts of ambiguity and vagueness. Inferential abilities require an understanding of the difference between conclusive and defeasible inference (traditionally, between deduction and induction), as well as of the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. Experimenting abilities require an understanding of the concepts of hypothesis, null hypothesis, assumption and prediction, as well as of the concept of statistical significance and of its difference from importance. They also require an understanding of the difference between an experiment and an observational study, and in particular of the difference between a randomized controlled trial, a prospective correlational study and a retrospective (case-control) study. Argument analysis abilities require an understanding of the concepts of argument, premiss, assumption, conclusion and counter-consideration. Additional critical thinking concepts are proposed by Bailin et al. (1999b: 293), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 105–106), Black (2012), and Blair (2021).

According to Glaser (1941: 25), ability to think critically requires knowledge of the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning. If we review the list of abilities in the preceding section, however, we can see that some of them can be acquired and exercised merely through practice, possibly guided in an educational setting, followed by feedback. Searching intelligently for a causal explanation of some phenomenon or event requires that one consider a full range of possible causal contributors, but it seems more important that one implements this principle in one’s practice than that one is able to articulate it. What is important is “operational knowledge” of the standards and principles of good thinking (Bailin et al. 1999b: 291–293). But the development of such critical thinking abilities as designing an experiment or constructing an operational definition can benefit from learning their underlying theory. Further, explicit knowledge of quirks of human thinking seems useful as a cautionary guide. Human memory is not just fallible about details, as people learn from their own experiences of misremembering, but is so malleable that a detailed, clear and vivid recollection of an event can be a total fabrication (Loftus 2017). People seek or interpret evidence in ways that are partial to their existing beliefs and expectations, often unconscious of their “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998). Not only are people subject to this and other cognitive biases (Kahneman 2011), of which they are typically unaware, but it may be counter-productive for one to make oneself aware of them and try consciously to counteract them or to counteract social biases such as racial or sexual stereotypes (Kenyon & Beaulac 2014). It is helpful to be aware of these facts and of the superior effectiveness of blocking the operation of biases—for example, by making an immediate record of one’s observations, refraining from forming a preliminary explanatory hypothesis, blind refereeing, double-blind randomized trials, and blind grading of students’ work. It is also helpful to be aware of the prevalence of “noise” (unwanted unsystematic variability of judgments), of how to detect noise (through a noise audit), and of how to reduce noise: make accuracy the goal, think statistically, break a process of arriving at a judgment into independent tasks, resist premature intuitions, in a group get independent judgments first, favour comparative judgments and scales (Kahneman, Sibony, & Sunstein 2021). It is helpful as well to be aware of the concept of “bounded rationality” in decision-making and of the related distinction between “satisficing” and optimizing (Simon 1956; Gigerenzer 2001).

Critical thinking about an issue requires substantive knowledge of the domain to which the issue belongs. Critical thinking abilities are not a magic elixir that can be applied to any issue whatever by somebody who has no knowledge of the facts relevant to exploring that issue. For example, the student in Bubbles needed to know that gases do not penetrate solid objects like a glass, that air expands when heated, that the volume of an enclosed gas varies directly with its temperature and inversely with its pressure, and that hot objects will spontaneously cool down to the ambient temperature of their surroundings unless kept hot by insulation or a source of heat. Critical thinkers thus need a rich fund of subject-matter knowledge relevant to the variety of situations they encounter. This fact is recognized in the inclusion among critical thinking dispositions of a concern to become and remain generally well informed.

Experimental educational interventions, with control groups, have shown that education can improve critical thinking skills and dispositions, as measured by standardized tests. For information about these tests, see the Supplement on Assessment .

What educational methods are most effective at developing the dispositions, abilities and knowledge of a critical thinker? In a comprehensive meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental studies of strategies for teaching students to think critically, Abrami et al. (2015) found that dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring each increased the effectiveness of the educational intervention, and that they were most effective when combined. They also found that in these studies a combination of separate instruction in critical thinking with subject-matter instruction in which students are encouraged to think critically was more effective than either by itself. However, the difference was not statistically significant; that is, it might have arisen by chance.

Most of these studies lack the longitudinal follow-up required to determine whether the observed differential improvements in critical thinking abilities or dispositions continue over time, for example until high school or college graduation. For details on studies of methods of developing critical thinking skills and dispositions, see the Supplement on Educational Methods .

12. Controversies

Scholars have denied the generalizability of critical thinking abilities across subject domains, have alleged bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, and have investigated the relationship of critical thinking to other kinds of thinking.

McPeck (1981) attacked the thinking skills movement of the 1970s, including the critical thinking movement. He argued that there are no general thinking skills, since thinking is always thinking about some subject-matter. It is futile, he claimed, for schools and colleges to teach thinking as if it were a separate subject. Rather, teachers should lead their pupils to become autonomous thinkers by teaching school subjects in a way that brings out their cognitive structure and that encourages and rewards discussion and argument. As some of his critics (e.g., Paul 1985; Siegel 1985) pointed out, McPeck’s central argument needs elaboration, since it has obvious counter-examples in writing and speaking, for which (up to a certain level of complexity) there are teachable general abilities even though they are always about some subject-matter. To make his argument convincing, McPeck needs to explain how thinking differs from writing and speaking in a way that does not permit useful abstraction of its components from the subject-matters with which it deals. He has not done so. Nevertheless, his position that the dispositions and abilities of a critical thinker are best developed in the context of subject-matter instruction is shared by many theorists of critical thinking, including Dewey (1910, 1933), Glaser (1941), Passmore (1980), Weinstein (1990), Bailin et al. (1999b), and Willingham (2019).

McPeck’s challenge prompted reflection on the extent to which critical thinking is subject-specific. McPeck argued for a strong subject-specificity thesis, according to which it is a conceptual truth that all critical thinking abilities are specific to a subject. (He did not however extend his subject-specificity thesis to critical thinking dispositions. In particular, he took the disposition to suspend judgment in situations of cognitive dissonance to be a general disposition.) Conceptual subject-specificity is subject to obvious counter-examples, such as the general ability to recognize confusion of necessary and sufficient conditions. A more modest thesis, also endorsed by McPeck, is epistemological subject-specificity, according to which the norms of good thinking vary from one field to another. Epistemological subject-specificity clearly holds to a certain extent; for example, the principles in accordance with which one solves a differential equation are quite different from the principles in accordance with which one determines whether a painting is a genuine Picasso. But the thesis suffers, as Ennis (1989) points out, from vagueness of the concept of a field or subject and from the obvious existence of inter-field principles, however broadly the concept of a field is construed. For example, the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning hold for all the varied fields in which such reasoning occurs. A third kind of subject-specificity is empirical subject-specificity, according to which as a matter of empirically observable fact a person with the abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker in one area of investigation will not necessarily have them in another area of investigation.

The thesis of empirical subject-specificity raises the general problem of transfer. If critical thinking abilities and dispositions have to be developed independently in each school subject, how are they of any use in dealing with the problems of everyday life and the political and social issues of contemporary society, most of which do not fit into the framework of a traditional school subject? Proponents of empirical subject-specificity tend to argue that transfer is more likely to occur if there is critical thinking instruction in a variety of domains, with explicit attention to dispositions and abilities that cut across domains. But evidence for this claim is scanty. There is a need for well-designed empirical studies that investigate the conditions that make transfer more likely.

It is common ground in debates about the generality or subject-specificity of critical thinking dispositions and abilities that critical thinking about any topic requires background knowledge about the topic. For example, the most sophisticated understanding of the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning is of no help unless accompanied by some knowledge of what might be plausible explanations of some phenomenon under investigation.

Critics have objected to bias in the theory, pedagogy and practice of critical thinking. Commentators (e.g., Alston 1995; Ennis 1998) have noted that anyone who takes a position has a bias in the neutral sense of being inclined in one direction rather than others. The critics, however, are objecting to bias in the pejorative sense of an unjustified favoring of certain ways of knowing over others, frequently alleging that the unjustly favoured ways are those of a dominant sex or culture (Bailin 1995). These ways favour:

• reinforcement of egocentric and sociocentric biases over dialectical engagement with opposing world-views (Paul 1981, 1984; Warren 1998)
• distancing from the object of inquiry over closeness to it (Martin 1992; Thayer-Bacon 1992)
• indifference to the situation of others over care for them (Martin 1992)
• orientation to thought over orientation to action (Martin 1992)
• being reasonable over caring to understand people’s ideas (Thayer-Bacon 1993)
• being neutral and objective over being embodied and situated (Thayer-Bacon 1995a)
• doubting over believing (Thayer-Bacon 1995b)
• reason over emotion, imagination and intuition (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
• solitary thinking over collaborative thinking (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
• written and spoken assignments over other forms of expression (Alston 2001)
• attention to written and spoken communications over attention to human problems (Alston 2001)
• winning debates in the public sphere over making and understanding meaning (Alston 2001)

A common thread in this smorgasbord of accusations is dissatisfaction with focusing on the logical analysis and evaluation of reasoning and arguments. While these authors acknowledge that such analysis and evaluation is part of critical thinking and should be part of its conceptualization and pedagogy, they insist that it is only a part. Paul (1981), for example, bemoans the tendency of atomistic teaching of methods of analyzing and evaluating arguments to turn students into more able sophists, adept at finding fault with positions and arguments with which they disagree but even more entrenched in the egocentric and sociocentric biases with which they began. Martin (1992) and Thayer-Bacon (1992) cite with approval the self-reported intimacy with their subject-matter of leading researchers in biology and medicine, an intimacy that conflicts with the distancing allegedly recommended in standard conceptions and pedagogy of critical thinking. Thayer-Bacon (2000) contrasts the embodied and socially embedded learning of her elementary school students in a Montessori school, who used their imagination, intuition and emotions as well as their reason, with conceptions of critical thinking as

thinking that is used to critique arguments, offer justifications, and make judgments about what are the good reasons, or the right answers. (Thayer-Bacon 2000: 127–128)

Alston (2001) reports that her students in a women’s studies class were able to see the flaws in the Cinderella myth that pervades much romantic fiction but in their own romantic relationships still acted as if all failures were the woman’s fault and still accepted the notions of love at first sight and living happily ever after. Students, she writes, should

be able to connect their intellectual critique to a more affective, somatic, and ethical account of making risky choices that have sexist, racist, classist, familial, sexual, or other consequences for themselves and those both near and far… critical thinking that reads arguments, texts, or practices merely on the surface without connections to feeling/desiring/doing or action lacks an ethical depth that should infuse the difference between mere cognitive activity and something we want to call critical thinking. (Alston 2001: 34)

Some critics portray such biases as unfair to women. Thayer-Bacon (1992), for example, has charged modern critical thinking theory with being sexist, on the ground that it separates the self from the object and causes one to lose touch with one’s inner voice, and thus stigmatizes women, who (she asserts) link self to object and listen to their inner voice. Her charge does not imply that women as a group are on average less able than men to analyze and evaluate arguments. Facione (1990c) found no difference by sex in performance on his California Critical Thinking Skills Test. Kuhn (1991: 280–281) found no difference by sex in either the disposition or the competence to engage in argumentative thinking.

The critics propose a variety of remedies for the biases that they allege. In general, they do not propose to eliminate or downplay critical thinking as an educational goal. Rather, they propose to conceptualize critical thinking differently and to change its pedagogy accordingly. Their pedagogical proposals arise logically from their objections. They can be summarized as follows:

• Focus on argument networks with dialectical exchanges reflecting contesting points of view rather than on atomic arguments, so as to develop “strong sense” critical thinking that transcends egocentric and sociocentric biases (Paul 1981, 1984).
• Foster closeness to the subject-matter and feeling connected to others in order to inform a humane democracy (Martin 1992).
• Develop “constructive thinking” as a social activity in a community of physically embodied and socially embedded inquirers with personal voices who value not only reason but also imagination, intuition and emotion (Thayer-Bacon 2000).
• In developing critical thinking in school subjects, treat as important neither skills nor dispositions but opening worlds of meaning (Alston 2001).
• Attend to the development of critical thinking dispositions as well as skills, and adopt the “critical pedagogy” practised and advocated by Freire (1968 [1970]) and hooks (1994) (Dalgleish, Girard, & Davies 2017).

A common thread in these proposals is treatment of critical thinking as a social, interactive, personally engaged activity like that of a quilting bee or a barn-raising (Thayer-Bacon 2000) rather than as an individual, solitary, distanced activity symbolized by Rodin’s The Thinker . One can get a vivid description of education with the former type of goal from the writings of bell hooks (1994, 2010). Critical thinking for her is open-minded dialectical exchange across opposing standpoints and from multiple perspectives, a conception similar to Paul’s “strong sense” critical thinking (Paul 1981). She abandons the structure of domination in the traditional classroom. In an introductory course on black women writers, for example, she assigns students to write an autobiographical paragraph about an early racial memory, then to read it aloud as the others listen, thus affirming the uniqueness and value of each voice and creating a communal awareness of the diversity of the group’s experiences (hooks 1994: 84). Her “engaged pedagogy” is thus similar to the “freedom under guidance” implemented in John Dewey’s Laboratory School of Chicago in the late 1890s and early 1900s. It incorporates the dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring that Abrami (2015) found to be most effective in improving critical thinking skills and dispositions.

What is the relationship of critical thinking to problem solving, decision-making, higher-order thinking, creative thinking, and other recognized types of thinking? One’s answer to this question obviously depends on how one defines the terms used in the question. If critical thinking is conceived broadly to cover any careful thinking about any topic for any purpose, then problem solving and decision making will be kinds of critical thinking, if they are done carefully. Historically, ‘critical thinking’ and ‘problem solving’ were two names for the same thing. If critical thinking is conceived more narrowly as consisting solely of appraisal of intellectual products, then it will be disjoint with problem solving and decision making, which are constructive.

Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives used the phrase “intellectual abilities and skills” for what had been labeled “critical thinking” by some, “reflective thinking” by Dewey and others, and “problem solving” by still others (Bloom et al. 1956: 38). Thus, the so-called “higher-order thinking skills” at the taxonomy’s top levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation are just critical thinking skills, although they do not come with general criteria for their assessment (Ennis 1981b). The revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson et al. 2001) likewise treats critical thinking as cutting across those types of cognitive process that involve more than remembering (Anderson et al. 2001: 269–270). For details, see the Supplement on History .

As to creative thinking, it overlaps with critical thinking (Bailin 1987, 1988). Thinking about the explanation of some phenomenon or event, as in Ferryboat , requires creative imagination in constructing plausible explanatory hypotheses. Likewise, thinking about a policy question, as in Candidate , requires creativity in coming up with options. Conversely, creativity in any field needs to be balanced by critical appraisal of the draft painting or novel or mathematical theory.

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• Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking (AILACT)
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• Critical Thinking Definition, Instruction, and Assessment: A Rigorous Approach
• Critical Thinking Research (RAIL)
• Foundation for Critical Thinking
• Insight Assessment
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• The Critical Thinking Consortium
• The Nature of Critical Thinking: An Outline of Critical Thinking Dispositions and Abilities , by Robert H. Ennis

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