Abstract:

Critical thinking occupies a central place in contemporary educational discourse and public debate. The extensive literature devoted to the topic reflects both its recognized importance and the difficulty of adding new insights to a concept that has become widely used across different contexts. This repeated use has gradually diluted its meaning, while theoretical expansions have broadened the concept to the point that it sometimes accommodates divergent interpretations. For this reason, it becomes important to examine not only the value of critical thinking but also its limits in the formation of responsible and active citizens.

Although critical thinking is frequently presented as a key educational objective, contemporary societies increasingly display characteristics associated with a post-truth environment, in which beliefs and emotions often prevail over factual evidence. Political polarization, social inequalities, and collective decisions that ignore well-established knowledge demonstrate that the availability of information and the development of reasoning skills do not necessarily lead to rational or ethically grounded behaviour. The promotion of critical thinking alone therefore cannot guarantee the formation of citizens capable of acting coherently in complex social contexts.

The prominence of critical thinking is historically connected to the intellectual heritage of modernity. Enlightenment confidence in universal reason played a decisive role in the development of modern science, technology, and social institutions. At the same time, the twentieth century revealed that rationality could coexist with ideological projects that produced extreme violence. Later postmodern critiques challenged the idea of universal truth and emphasized the plurality of perspectives, contributing to a growing subjectivization of reality.

Educational research has approached critical thinking from different perspectives. Philosophical traditions emphasize intellectual dispositions such as open-mindedness and intellectual curiosity. Psychological approaches focus on cognitive skills including argument analysis, inference, evaluation, and decision-making. Pedagogical frameworks highlight higher-order intellectual operations like analysis and evaluation. Despite these differences, these approaches converge in defining critical thinking as a combination of cognitive abilities and dispositions that allow individuals to determine what to believe and how to act.

More recent perspectives connect critical thinking with ethical and civic concerns such as social justice and democratic participation. However, reasoning skills alone do not ensure ethical action. Human decisions depend not only on rational deliberation but also on emotional engagement and personal convictions formed within communities that transmit shared narratives and value systems.

For this reason, character education emerges as an important complement to the development of critical reasoning. While critical thinking remains essential for intellectual autonomy and democratic life, without the formation of moral convictions rooted in communal experience it risks remaining largely theoretical, expressing ideals that lack the motivational force necessary to guide meaningful action.

Keywords:

Critical Thinking, Creativity, Instrumental Thought.