Overview
Education, Culture and Critical Thinking relates current interest in critical thinking as an aim within education to wider issues concerning the social ends of education. It is portrayed as on ultimate ethical and political ideal and a criterion of the effectiveness of educational institutions to represent democratic and libertarian values.The philosophical argument begins with the contemporary 'thinking skills debate' in education, subsequently drawing on evidence from psychology, anthropology, education and political philosophy to characterize critical thinking in terms of powerful but rare and vulnerable cultural traditions of dialogue and inuititutionalized argumemt. These traditions, developments of universal human problem-solving abilities, have revolutionized human consciousness. They reveal an indefinite human potential in conditions of intellectual freedom, a freedom which is threatened by contemporary, servile views of education as a means to predetermined socioeconomic ends, defined increasingly by prespecified learning outcomes by centralized control and by standardized measures of attainment.