From critical thinking to criticality and back again

This paper assesses the prospects of combining the distinctive strengths of the two major educational research programs of critical thinking and critical pedagogy—or, described more accurately, overcoming their shared limitations—in a new and superior educational objective called criticality. Several recent proposals explore the possibilities of engaging in bridgebuilding between these camps. The plan is that the distinctive strengths of these paradigms—the logical and epistemological precision of critical thinking together with the socio-political consciousness of critical pedagogy—could complement each other, while the associated adjustments to the overall picture could also help us to address their shared shortcomings. This gives us a new and more grounded educational goal of criticality, as suggested and developed independently by a growing number of thinkers (e.g. Burbules and Berk 1999; Davies 2014; Davies and Barnett 2015; Sibbett 2016; Shpeizer 2018). My article joins this on-going conversation but provides a more counter-reactionary tone by striving to vindicate the traditional mainstream conception of critical thinking. I maintain that despite their admirable ambitions, the various expressions of criticality do not succeed in combining the best parts of critical thinking and critical pedagogy, since on a deep meta-theoretical level these two paradigms have irreconcilable core principles. First, I argue that the depiction of the failures of critical thinking used to motivate criticality is to a large degree a strawman: in actuality, the existing conceptualization of critical thinking can already do the desired extra socio-political educational work, so there really is no pressing need for the suggested new augmentations. Second, the traditional worries of indoctrination, that have followed critical pedagogy since the inception of this educational movement, still remain unresolved within criticality. The only way to successfully address this concern is to lean on critical thinking as the core of our educational theory, bringing us right back to where started.