Developing Student Criticality in Higher Education

Abstract

The unprecedented expansion of higher education in recent decades and its resulting incorporation into mainstream society (as distinct from being an elite preserve), have focused attention sharply on the processes and out-comes of higher education, including criticality. By criticality we mean critical thinking, critical self-reflection and critical action, but much more on this later in Chapters 2, 3 and 4. In this context of expansion, discussion about criticality exists within a wider debate over the purposes of higher education and its future direction. Policy makers focus differentially on higher education as a promoter of economic effectiveness, as an agent of social justice, or as a means through which responsible citizens can be created.