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Martin Davies and Ronald Barnett
university” and the development of market principles in higher education, a
concern with critical thinking is apparently being displaced by a determination
to raise the levels of skills more obviously suited to the requirements of a global
economy. Notably in the United Kingdom and Australia, for example, “critical
thinking” has faded from the public debate about higher education, as “employ-
ability” has risen.
These currents prompt a number of observations, namely that critical think-
ing is of worldwide concern, that its presence—for a variety of reasons—may
be fragile, and that its interpretation is connected with a range of purposes that
are themselves changing. Once, critical thinking was once understood to be
the mark of a person who had been in receipt of a higher education. Indeed,
there was considerable overlap between the liberal conception of the idea of
the university and the idea of critical thinking. The university precisely made
available a space in which the mind could be so educated that it was able to
form its own authentic judgments. Now, as higher education has both become
a mass enterprise and its value to the economy has multiplied, it is an open
matter as to whether and in which ways critical thinking might be of economic
value. Consequently, it sometimes appears that if the idea of critical thinking
is to find broad support across society, then it needs to be reframed so that its
social and civic value might become more apparent.
What this book does
This book does more than investigate critical thinking as either a concept or
as a set of skills in itself. There are plenty of books that do this already (for a
recent example, see Moon 2008). Specialist edited collections have also been
created, for example, looking at critical thinking and generalizability (Norris
1992). Rather, this book examines the nature of critical thinking within, and
its application and relevance to, higher education. As we shall see, the very
idea of critical thinking in higher education has generated profoundly differ-
ent, and even antagonistic, views among scholars and researchers who have
thought deeply about the matter.
The aims of this volume are fourfold:
1. to bring together key papers, or excerpts of key texts, that have already been
published in this area;
2. to explicitly focus on the work being done on critical thinking in the
particular context of higher education;
3. to provide (in this introduction) an overview of the literature; and
4. to stimulate further interest and debate on the topic.
In selecting contributors, we have been mindful that critical thinking in
higher education is a global concern with a potential worldwide audience of
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