From Critical Thinking to Criticality

Ronald Barnett is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education, University College London, UK and Emeritus President of the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society.Martin Davies is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

EndorsementsCritical thinking is more needed as a public virtue than ever before. In this important book, Ronald Barnett and Martin Davies expand our ways of thinking about what critical thinking is and how to promote it. They develop the concept of “criticality” as a way of broadening our focus about what it means to be a critical thinker: beyond someone skilled at assessing knowledge claims to a way of being, thought, and action that characterize a kind of personhood. If we want to promote critical thinking, we need to understand what it means to promote critical thinkers.Nicholas C. BurbulesEdward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois, Urbana-ChampaignAlthough the 'ideal knower' in higher education is often identified as someone who is a critical independent thinker, very few people are able to define what ‘critical thinking’ is. This book provides novel insights into the concept of criticality and, even more importantly, illustrates how critical thinking can be developed by drawing on an understanding of the nature of the university itself.Emeritus Professor Chrissie Boughey, Rhodes University, South Africa.I have been waiting for a book such as this for years—a text that dismantles critical thinking across disciplinary fields and offers way to make sense of it—critically. The text points to the worrying concern of the loss of critical thinking in higher education and provides a model of criticality that transcends modes and theories of critical thinking. It culminates in seven planes of criticality which illustrate the central argument of the book that ‘criticality envelopes critical thinking’. This book is enlightened and enlightening, it offers a captivating stance on troublesome issues in a postdigital world.Professor Maggi Savin-Baden, Oxford, UK.Universities are in crisis. One of the main reasons for this is because the rationale of the universities is no longer clear. At the heart of universities nowadays sit financiers, who make decisions on behalf of the universities, and this promotes money making above everything else. Hence, critical thinking is diminished, if not marginalised to the periphery of the university mission and activity. Ronald Barnett and Martin Davies’ new book acts as a counterpoint to this slide into financial non-thought. This book is a well-needed counterinsurgency aimed at re-establishing critical thinking as the central goal and practice of universities for the present moment and beyond.Associate Professor David R. Cole, Western Sydney University.Barnett and Davies’ incisive and engaging book calls on universities, qua institutions, to exercise their considerable powers to become a critical conscience for the world. While recognising the value of extant critical thinking, epistemologically and pedagogically, it challenges higher education institutions to become agents of criticality, enabling students not only to think and reason critically, but to become critical beings exercising concern through action in the world. By providing a new way of thinking about university education; From Critical Thinking to Criticality brings hope into troubled worlds.Emeritus Professor Kathleen Lynch, University College Dublin

• 1 Introduction: A troubling setting Part one: The evaporation of critical thought2 Heresies of critical thought 3 An algorithmic world 4 Myths of the framework 5 A critical dialectic 6 Thinking critically about critical thinking 7 Recapitulation and development: The myopia of ‘critical thinking’ Part two: Criticality and its modes 8 The standard view of critical thinking 9 A model of criticality 10 Seven modes of criticality Part three: Advancing criticality11 Curriculum matters: For a critical experientiality 12 Pedagogical matters: Emergent learning and two forms of criticality Part four: The university—for a culture of criticality13 Disagreeing well: the university as space of criticality 14 The university: the world’s critical conscience Endnote: Pessimists and Optimists Unite! (At least in some ways) References Endorsements Index