Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Criticality
CHAPTER 42
Reclaiming Critical Thinking
as Ideology Critique
STEPHEN BROOKFIELD
Critical thinking is a contested idea, one with a variety of meanings claimed by different groups—
including the subdisciplines of psychology—for very different purposes. Show up at a conference
session on critical thinking and you will find yourself in the company of people who locate
criticality within contradictory intellectual traditions. What count as examples of critical behaviors
can be defined in terms that represent almost completely opposed political and economic interests.
To a group of executives thinking critically could be the process by which they discover the
unchecked assumptions underlying a faulty marketing decision that has reduced corporate profits.
To union or community activists it may imply an unequivocal critique of capitalism and the fight
for worker cooperatives or factory councils. Thinking critically in this latter view involves action,
specifically that of galvanizing opposition to the relocation of U.S. factories to non-unionized
countries with no inconvenient pollution controls. Clearly, then, how the term critical is used
inevitably reflects the ideology and worldview of the user.
In American educational psychology it is the tradition of analytic philosophy that most strongly
frames how critical thinking is currently conceived and taught. From this perspective to be critical
is to be skilled at conceptual and argument analysis, to recognize false inferences and logical
fallacies, to be able to distinguish bias from fact, opinion from evidence, and so on. This kind
of relentless critique of unexamined and possible faulty assumptions is perhaps most famously
articulated in the scientific method’s principle of falsifiability where intellectual effort is devoted
to investigating erroneous aspects of scientific procedures. The analytic philosophy tradition
comprises a set of valuable, even essential, intellectual functions, but it focuses on critical
thinking solely as a cognitive process requiring a facility with language or mathematical games.
Criticality here neglects social and political critique. By way of contrast, critical psychologists
evaluate the theories and practices of educational psychology in terms of how they maintain an
unjust status quo.
This chapter takes as its starting point a provocative essay by Kincheloe (2000), “Making
Critical Thinking Critical.” Kincheloe argues that criticality is grounded in the critical theory
tradition but that its political and ethical dimensions have been forgotten. In Kincheloe’s view
critical thinking is really “the ability of individuals to disengage themselves from the tacit
assumptions of discursive practices and power relations in order to exert more conscious control