From Critical Thinking to Criticality: a Higher Education for Troubled World

From Critical Thinking to Criticality argues that universities must renew their commitment to critical thinking. Addressing challenges such as ecological crises, artificial intelligence, political populism, and the post-truth era, the book calls for universities to cultivate deeper critical engagement among students. The world is facing multiple crises and is in need of more critical thinking, but critical thinking is valued less. AI, populism, social media, ever-powerful states, a distrust of universities, the abandonment of the humanities, and a world that favours action and economic growth: all conspire to diminish critical thinking. Higher education falls in with this outlook: empirical evidence confirms a decline of interest in critical thinking even on the part of universities. From Critical Thinking to Criticality responds to this situation. It maps out the broad social and philosophical context that diminishes critical thinking; it compares and critiques the two major contemporary approaches—the standard view of critical thinking advanced by philosophers of education and the socio-political perspective of critical pedagogy; and it forges a new framing by developing the idea of criticality. Criticality is a total space of spaces for an infinite array of modes of criticality. It has several components—of thought, dialogue, action, being and intensity—and has implications for teaching and curricula, pointing them towards openness and transdisciplinarity. However, criticality can never be fully realised in study programmes. For that, a turn towards universities as institutions is required for they contain unrecognised resources, both to advance students’ criticality and to act as a critical conscience of society. In the matter of critical thinking, nothing less than the fate of society and the world is at stake. Against that horizon, critical thinking needs to be re-stated and re-instated—and this book does both.