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Questions, context, and challenges
What is critical thinking, especially in the context of higher education?
How have research and scholarship on the matter developed over recent past
decades? What is the current state of the art here? How might the potential of
critical thinking be enhanced? What kinds of teaching are necessary in order
to realize that potential? And just why is this topic important now? These are
the key questions motivating this volume. We hesitate to use terms such as
“comprehensive” or “complete” or “definitive,” but we believe that, taken in
the round, the chapters in this volume together offer a fair insight into the
contemporary understandings of higher education worldwide. We also believe
that this volume is much needed, and we shall try to justify that claim in this
introduction.
The context here is complex, with strands running in different directions and
overlaying each other. Four paths open up. First, there is a sense—especially in
the Pacific Rim, notably China but also in other Asian countries—that critical
thinking has been given insufficient attention over decades and even centu-
ries. Pedagogies have been influenced by a complex of Confucian and cultural
attitudes to the teacher-as-authority and tacit rules of knowledge transmission,
buttressed by a sense of education assisting in the building of a national iden-
tity. Over recent decades, however, there has developed a sense that modernity
requires more questioning stances among students, if higher education is to ful-
fill its potential in the forming of a changing society. Second, there is a parallel
sense—especially in the newer countries of Africa and South America, and also
dimly becoming evident in more developed countries of the North—that criti-
cal thinking is a necessary part of the formation of critical citizens. Third, there
continues to be—especially in the United States—a concern that amid mass
higher education students are insufficiently developing their powers of critical
thought. Last, especially in the wake of the emergence of “the entrepreneurial
Introduction
Martin Davies and Ronald Barnett
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