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Martin Davies and Ronald Barnett
it is to reason carefully and soundly. Such legitimate concerns need to be rec-
onciled with another set of very legitimate concerns, namely what it is to be
educated in the modern world; and there, in this educational perspective, two
camps may be discerned, those who have been interested most in what it is to
be educated as an individual, and those who see in education a way of helping
to transform society. To our knowledge, a model of critical thinking in higher
education that reconciles all these different perspectives has not before been
attempted. We attempt to provide such a model in these pages and, in so
doing, we shall see points at which the various positions run into each other.
Three rival perspectives
The
philosophical
perspective (on which we have just touched) is principally
interested in clear and rigorous thinking. It has a particular interest in logi-
cal thinking, including informal and formal logic, in how critical thinking
relates to language use in ordinary contexts, how it forms part of metacog-
nitive processing in complex adaptive systems, and so on. The
educational
perspective is interested chiefly in the wider educational development of the
individual student and, to that end, is concerned with ways in which criti-
cal thinking can benefit the wider society outside the classroom through
the development and formation of a critico-social
attitude.
The
socially active
perspective—as we might term it—is itself a complex of positions but is
prompted by a concern to see society itself transformed and sees the incul-
cation of critical attitudes in students as a propadeutic to that end. It encom-
passes critical pedagogy (i.e., educating to dissolve habits of thought and to
promote political activism) and critical citizenship (i.e., cultivating a critical
citizenry).
As we shall see, these three perspectives are by no means entirely separable.
Their boundaries are permeable, with commentators, researchers, and scholars
taking up all manner of cross-boundary positions. For example, cutting across
the latter two perspectives—the educational and the socially active perspec-
tives—is a concern as to how to reconcile tensions that exist in the modern
corporate university, with its emphasis on developing technical and work-
ready skills in graduates, and the traditional role of the university that aims
to prepare thoughtful, well-read critical thinkers who are beneficial to society
at large (Daymon and Durkin 2013). There are, though, tensions between the
perspectives. For any book attempting to survey this field, the concerns of the
educators risk being seen (by philosophers) as tangential and remote while
the concerns of the philosophers risk being seen (by educators) as myopic and
obscure. Any book on the topic of critical thinking in higher education has to
try and address both perspectives without compromising the integrity of each.
This book is our attempt to do just that.
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