John Dewey's notion of reflective thinking and the modern educational goal of critical thinking

Authors

• Veli-Mikko Kauppi Oulun yliopisto
• Henri Pettersson Oulun yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33350/ka.119405

Keywords:

John Dewey, educational aims, critical thinking, reflective thinking

Abstract

Critical thinking has been one of the most debated educational goals during the past decades. Scholars have defined critical thinking as a collection of all the mental skills and attitudes whose constituents enable an individual to actively and successfully engage in reasoned belief formation and decision making. Reflective thinking, in turn, is a close relative of critical thinking, both in its origins and in its meaning. In terms of the amount of attention received, reflective thinking has subsequently been overshadowed by critical thinking. The notion of reflective thinking was first introduced by the famed American philosopher of education John Dewey at the beginning of the twentieth century, and he is also routinely mentioned as a key early influence on the modern theory of critical thinking. Our article argues that, while on the surface Deweyan reflective thinking bears many similarities to contemporary critical thinking, on closer comparison the differences between these phenomena become significant. The thinking of an ideal critical thinker is characteristically described in the literature through the realization of epistemological criteria and logical rules, which abstracts this activity as a theoretical phenomenon away from our everyday life, turning it into a so-called ideal theory. Reflective thinking, on the other hand, is described in Dewey’s work in a positive light as something we should normatively try to attain, but without the problems associated with ideal theories. In our article, we juxtapose critical and reflective thinking, which may help to identify and overcome the problems that occur with the educational goal of critical thinking.