John Black. 

        "WHAT IS CRITICAL THINKING?"

        In a number of workshops I've done recently on critical thinking 
        across the curriculum, I've been confronted by this question and a 
        lot of confusion about its answer.  This is primarily because the 
        territory of CTAC is the subject of various landgrabs by disparate 
        groups.  Those of us who share a philosophical approach to CT are 
        competing with proponents of Creative Thinking (de Bono etc.), 
        problem-solving, thinking skills development and so on.  Because 
        "critical thinking" is the current buzzword in educational PR, 
        these various players are trying to appropriate the term for their 
        own brands of enlightenment.  It is vital therefore that ACTIR 
        come to and propagate its own understanding of what CT is in a 
        cross-curriculum context. 

        I don't want to deny that other approaches to thinking have merit, 
        nor that they are less than relevant to CT.  However, I believe 
        there are essential elements in CT which can become lost in the 
        process-orientated alternatives.  

        When I talk to educators outside philosophy about CT, I emphasise 
        the central role played in it by the goal of Rational Evaluation.  
        The skills, habits, attitudes of CT are those of the rational 
        evaluator of factual claims, hypotheses, value judgments, actions, 
        attitudes, beliefs, opinions.  The presumption is that the best 
        way to develop these, and so become a Critical Thinker, is by 
        practising them and by learning about them in a self-conscious 
        way.  The notion that CT instruction involves practice links with 
        the educational concept of Active Learning, and the self-conscious 
        aspect with that of Metacognition.  Putting the initial letters of 
        the important ideas together we get the REALM of CT instruction.  
        
        As I conceive the goal of CT instruction, it is to enable the 
        student to become an autonomous thinker within a community of 
        thinkers.  Independence of thought is essential both to deep 
        understanding and novel discovery, but the correctness of one's 
        thought is constrained by the intersubjective nature of inquiry.  
        There is a danger that in encouraging autonomy, we allow 
        idiosyncrasy and produce idiocy.  I see Reason, embodied in the 
        canons of rationality, as the mediator between Autonomy and 
        Community.  This is the ARC of CT instruction.