Abstract
The topic of critical thinking has engaged philosophers, psychologists and educators for well over one hundred years. Amid polarized political attacks on the teaching of controversial issues, however, education in critical thinking appears to be nearing a new low, not only in the United States, but also in other countries being torn by partisan politics. This article reviews the ebb and flow of critical thinking efforts, suggests explanations for their discouraging results, and proposes a way forward that treats critical thinking as an integrative process advanced by Mary Parker Follet, and more recently espoused by Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway. In the exploratory spirit of John Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead, I am introducing this essay, not with analysis or theory, but with a narrative of educational events in all their richness of context. These events describe how middle school students addressed the question of whether wolves should be removed from the endangered species list in the Northern Rocky Mountains of the United States. In the course of this discussion, I wish to demonstrate that thinking critically requires moving beyond winning, losing, or compromising to resolution of conflict, and furthermore, understanding that even stable resolutions must be revisited as events change.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorials
- Why Whitehead? A Personal Confession
- Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue on the relevance of the philosophy of A.N. Whitehead to Human Affairs
- Special Issue
- A.N. Whitehead and Process Thought
- The Theory of Projection
- Between Event and Object. Rhythms of Experience in Whitehead
- Critical Thinking as an Integrative Process: Debating Wolves in Yellowstone
- Whitehead and Victorian Philosophy of Science: A Historical Investigation of the Concept of Hypothesis
- Research Articles
- The Natural Right to Property as an Instrumental Right
- Self-creation Without Natural Limits? On a Certain Blindness in Richard Rorty’s Anti-authoritarian Pragmatism
- Lévinas’s Philosophy of the Face: Anxiety, Responsibility, and Ethical Moments that Arise in Encounters with the Other
- Book Review
- Arran Stibbe: Econarrative: Ethics, Ecology, and the Search for New Narratives to Live By
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorials
- Why Whitehead? A Personal Confession
- Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue on the relevance of the philosophy of A.N. Whitehead to Human Affairs
- Special Issue
- A.N. Whitehead and Process Thought
- The Theory of Projection
- Between Event and Object. Rhythms of Experience in Whitehead
- Critical Thinking as an Integrative Process: Debating Wolves in Yellowstone
- Whitehead and Victorian Philosophy of Science: A Historical Investigation of the Concept of Hypothesis
- Research Articles
- The Natural Right to Property as an Instrumental Right
- Self-creation Without Natural Limits? On a Certain Blindness in Richard Rorty’s Anti-authoritarian Pragmatism
- Lévinas’s Philosophy of the Face: Anxiety, Responsibility, and Ethical Moments that Arise in Encounters with the Other
- Book Review
- Arran Stibbe: Econarrative: Ethics, Ecology, and the Search for New Narratives to Live By