The dark side of critical thinking and the need to restore learning relationships

Abstract

In the 20th century, critical thinking emerged as an important ideal in and aim of education. Hardly anyone opposes critical thinking, its weight is re-enforced in debates on education and its positive value is largely taken for granted because of the manifold promises it carries. However, in this paper I will challenge critical thinking as an aim of and unanimous positive value in education. The climate for critical thinking has changed in the course of modernization, since modern society no longer carries an open inviting view of the future; rather, it has been overloaded with dystopian energy and meaning as a result of negative and affirmative critical thinking to the extent that is it becoming self-crippling and existentially alienating. In the paper, I discuss different and significant views of critical thinking in education and higher education in order to highlight why and in what ways it is cherished and extolled in education. I argue that processes of reflexive modernization in society have altered the conditions for critical thinking to the extent that the imaginaries, institutions and practices we used to trust and still rely on in social life and in education are paradoxically dead and alive. In this context, I explicate a dark side of critical thinking that we can no longer neglect. I argue that quite common ways of doing critical thinking may have self-crippling, existentially alienating and dystopian dynamics and effects in times when we need confidence and trust the most. Consequently, no matter how much we cherish critical thinking we are no longer in a position to think of it as an unanimous good or as an ultimate aim of education. Critical thinking is, like many practices obstructed by reflexive modernization, full of self-serving fictions, nurturing its status as an all-but-only-good-purpose skill. There is a need to rethink critical thinking, its role and status in education and restore its learning relationships without falling prey to its darker dynamics, or so I argue.