Educare al pensiero critico. Orientamenti curricolari per una scuola dello sviluppo umano

The study takes as its object of investigation the education of critical thinking, beginning with an analysis of certain features of twenty-first-century society and of the educational implications that may be derived from them. The postmodern era is characterized by the paradigm of complexity (Morin, 2017). In this sense, contemporary society is composed of a plurality of interacting levels that structure a reality which cannot be interpreted through univocal or homogeneous readings, but rather requires a sophisticated plurality of interwoven perspectives. Critical thinking education, therefore, emerges as one of the key means of addressing an era such as the present—an era marked by profound social, ideological, and cultural fragmentation, and traversed by deep and ongoing transformations, from climate change to the digital revolution, which are reflected in significant anthropological changes. It is argued that the contemporary condition calls for the valorization of the ideals invoked by the paradigm of human development in a democratic direction (Sen, 2001; Nussbaum, 2011), as principles that should inspire and guide educational and instructional processes. From a pedagogical standpoint, two dimensions emerge, which Bertin (1968/2021) already identified as constitutive of education—and of an education of reason—namely, the intellectual and the ethical-social. At their intersection lies the perspective of critical thinking as an essential educational need for citizens of the twenty-first century. In this regard, the study reflects on the conditions of possibility for critical thinking education within the school context. To this end, a theoretical investigation was conducted into the nature of critical thinking, alongside an exploratory inquiry aimed at examining the opinions and practices of upper secondary school teachers concerning the education of this form of thinking. In light of the findings, the study considers the opportunity to frame such education as a key curricular dimension, conceiving critical thinking as a transversal form of education to be implemented within the perspective of the integrated curriculum. In particular, it is argued that the development of critical thinking constitutes a process of deutero-learning and, as such, pertains to a curriculum of second-order logic. Consequently, it was deemed appropriate to formulate a curriculum hypothesis grounded in a model of curricular design based on principles of contextual and procedural structuring, which appears most suited to the logical typology of curriculum under consideration. Within this framework, a theoretical proposal of curricular orientations for critical thinking education in upper secondary school was elaborated. The proposed principles of contextual and procedural structuring were subsequently submitted for evaluation to an international panel of academic experts.