Our first course’s

questions
 What is the relationship
between Critical Thinking and
Ethics?

 Why start a Critical Thinking

course discussing Educational
Ethics?

 Moreover, what is the

relationship between Critical
thinking, Ethics, and
Education?

Edwaert Collier – Vanitas (1663)

How would I like to educate to my son?

Communicate my world vision and ensure that he develops

his own.

To be kind, gentle and yet confident towards any living being

in the world.

Express and support his building of knowledge and skills:

languages, logics, morality, feelings, techniques.

To be passionate to everything that surrounds him: nature,

people, past and future, but especially the present. To be
present.
Ethics
• Etymology: ethos (greek) as the character (disposition) or fundamental values of
a person, people, culture, or movement. The combination of moral, affective, behavioral
and intellectual dispositions of an individual. A way of living (of seeing and acting in the
world).
• General definitions (VAUGHN, 2019, p. 3):
• Philosophical study of morality and attitudes.
• Morality refers to beliefs concerning right and wrong, good and bad — beliefs that
can include judgments, values, rules, principles, and theories.
• These beliefs help guide our actions, define our values, and give us reasons for
being the persons we are.
• Ethics, then, addresses the powerful question that Socrates formulated twenty-four
hundred years ago: how ought we to live?
What Does “Doing Ethics” Mean?
• Deliberating about the rightness or wrongness of actions
• Judging the goodness of your character or intentions
• Examining the soundness of your moral outlook when it conflicts with that of others
• Examining your own and other people's moral outlook
• Questioning whether your moral decision making rests on coherent supporting considerations
• Ethical questions:
• What is the greatest good? What goals should I pursue in life? What virtues should I cultivate?
• What duties should I fulfill? What value should I put on human life? How important is it to pursue the
common good, do justice, and respect rights?
• Risk of not doing ethics: Loss of personal freedom; incomplete, confused, or mistaken responses;
stunted intellectual and moral growth; although perhaps embodying an uncritically embraced morality,
one will be incapable of defending one's beliefs by rational argument against criticisms
 Critical Thinking
• General definition:
• Reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do (ENNIS, 2013).
• Careful thinking directed to a goal (HITCHCOCK, 2018).

• It’s a general education outcome in the USA (an in most of the western countries), with abilities
and dispositions lists, schemes, and tests to assess the learning of these dispositions and abilities.
• Main moral values and political theories: autonomy and democracy.

• It's an interdisciplinary concept/practice: can be used as a scientifical tool to produce knowledge,

policies, actions, etc.
• Historical background: American philosopher John Dewey (1910), who more commonly called it
‘reflective thinking’.
• As active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the
grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends. (Dewey 1910: 6; 1933: 9)
Critical thinking historical background
Socrates’ philosophical examined life (4th century b.C.): The unexamined
life is not worth living.
Immanuel Kant Tribunal of Reason and the Enlightenment Ethics (18th
century):
• Our age is the age of criticism, to which everything must be
subjected. The sacredness of religion, and the authority of legislation,
are by many regarded as grounds of exemption from the examination
of this tribunal. But, if they on they are exempted, they become the
subjects of just suspicion, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect,
which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free
and public examination.
(Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Preface for the First Edition).
• Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) Have the courage to use your own
understanding, is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.
(Kant, Answer to the question: What is Enlightenment?)
Critical Theory (Frankfurt’s School) (20th century): in opposition to
traditional/colonized perspective, a theory is critical to the extent that it
seeks human “emancipation from slavery”, acts as a “liberating [and]
influence”, and works “to create a world which satisfies the needs and
powers of” human beings (Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays).
Critical Thinking as an Ethical
disposition
• French thinker Michel Foucault establish critique as an
attitude of the Modern times. It is
• Speech of permanent QUESTIONING
• Related to the TIME (present, past) and POWER
(political institutions).
• A form of LIVING (embodiment of values, an exercise of
transformation)
• Foucault’s quote on critical attitude:
[…] criticism is the movement by which the subject gives
himself the right to interrogate the truth about its power
effects and power over its truth discourses; criticism will be
the art of voluntary non-servitude, of reflected indolence.
(Foucault, What is critique?)
 Why start a Critical Thinking’s course discussing Educational
Ethics & Ethics?

Education Moreover, what is the relationship between Critical thinking,

Ethics, and Education?
Education as a
social practice

• Etymology: breeding, a
bringing up, a rearing; a
raise up; a takeout; to
lead and conduct.
• Education as conservative
and productive processes.
• What happen when
educational relationships
take place? Teachers,
students, schools,
knowledge.
• The two sides of
discipline.
Educational
practices
Paideia
• Training
• Transmission
• Accumulation
Bildung
• (auto)(trans)Formation
• Culture/nature
• Journey/displacement
Didacta Magna:
the art of educating
everything to everyone
• John Amos Comenius (1592-1670) published the book
1657.
• Reshape the role of education in political governance.
• From disciplinary violence to the disciplinary teaching
of how to conduct.
• Childhood as a special age to teach how one should
behave toward the world.
• “Discipline is nothing but an unfailing method by
which we may make our scholars”.
• To turn bodies docile: moral and knowledge as
ornaments of soul.
Discipline and the invention of the school
• Discipline for Foucault is a type of power, a modality for its exercise. It comprises a whole set of instruments,
techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets. It is a “physics” of power, an “anatomy” of power, or a
technology of power.
• Disciplinary Power is “not the brute fact of the domination of the one over the many, or of one group over
another, but the multiple forms of domination that can be exercised in society; so not the king in his central
position, but subjects in their reciprocal relations; not sovereignty in its one edifice, but the multiple
subjugations that take place and function within the social body.” (FOUCAULT, Society Must Be Defended, p.
27).
• Discipline objectifies the people on whom it is applied. This type of power forms a body of knowledge about the
individuals it disciplines, rather than the deployment of visible signs of sovereignty.
• Population increase and growth of capitalism are interrelated. Disciplining techniques would not have been possible
without the latter, or useful, without the former.
• There is a parallel between the emergence of a formally egalitarian juridical framework and a parliamentary,
representative political regime in Western Europe, and the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms.
• Representative regime promises sovereignty by the people, but at the same time, panopticism and the disciplines
guarantee submission of the people.
• “The ‘Enlightenment,’ which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.”
• Self-governance
• Transparency
• Accountability
• Efficiency

Modern Education: the Panopticon system by Jeremy Bentham

Banking Education: social mass reproduction
Paulo Freire’s criticism of
banking education
Teacher/curriculum as a dispositive
within a wider moral, political, and
economical program:
• the teacher teaches and the
students are taught;
• the teacher knows everything,
and the students know nothing;
• the teacher thinks and the
students are thought about;
• the teacher talks and the
students listen—meekly;
• the teacher disciplines and the
students are disciplined;
• the teacher chooses and enforces
his choice, and the students
comply; pupils are mere objects.
• the teacher acts and the students
have the illusion of acting through
the action of the teacher;
• the teacher chooses the program
content, and the students (who
were not consulted) adapt to it;
• the teacher confuses the authority
of knowledge with his or her own
professional authority, which she
and he sets in opposition to the
freedom of the students;
Paulo Freire’s liberating education
Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of
information.
It is a learning situation in which the cognizable object (far from being
the end of the cognitive act) intermediates the cognitive actors—
teacher on the one hand and students on the other.
Accordingly, the practice of problem-posing education entails at the
outset that the teacher-student contradiction to be resolved. Dialogical
relations—indispensable to the capacity of cognitive actors to
cooperate in perceiving the same cognizable object—are otherwise
impossible.
When the education is not liberating, the
goal of the oppressed is to become oppressor
Freire warns the oppressed against becoming oppressors on two counts:
(1) whether the oppressed gain power and use this power to oppress their
previous oppressor; or
(2) in the case of the oppressed gaining power over other oppressed people
and becoming their oppressors, as they seek their own individual
liberation. The danger of a previously oppressed person becoming an
oppressor is due to their ambiguous duality. Freire points out that the
oppressed are at one and the same time both themselves (the oppressed)
and the oppressor, whose consciousness they have internalized.
Due to this ambiguous duality and the internalization of their oppressors, the
oppressed seek to become like the oppressors and share in their way of life.
bell hooks’ Critical Thinking and Engaged
Pedagogy
Students do not become critical thinkers overnight. First, they must learn to
embrace the joy and power of thinking itself. Engaged pedagogy is a
teaching strategy that aims to restore students’ will to think, and their will
to be fully self-actualized. The central focus of engaged pedagogy is to
enable students to think critically. […] In simpler terms, critical thinking
involves first discovering the who, what, when, where, and how of things
—finding the answers to those eternal questions of the inquisitive child—
and then utilizing that knowledge in a manner that enables you to
determine what matters most. (hooks, 2010, pp.7-8)
Teachers and students' radical openness
Keeping an open mind is an essential requirement of critical thinking. I
often talk about radical openness because it became clear to me, after
years in academic settings, that it was far too easy to become attached to
and protective of one’s viewpoint, and to rule out other perspectives. So
much academic training encourages teachers to assume that they must
be “right” at all times. Instead, I propose that teachers must be open at
all times, and we must be willing to acknowledge what we do not know.
A radical commitment to openness maintains the integrity of the
critical thinking process and its central role in education. (hooks,
2010, pp. 10)
Integrity, critical thinking, engagement
The root meaning of the word “integrity” is wholeness. Hence,
engaged pedagogy makes the classroom a place where wholeness is
welcomed, and students can be honest, even radically open. They can
name their fears, voice their resistance to thinking, speak out, and they
can also fully celebrate the moments where everything clicks and
collective learning is taking place. Whenever genuine learning is
happening the conditions for self-actualization are in place, even
when that is not a goal of our teaching process. Because engaged
pedagogy highlights the importance of independent thinking and
each student finding his or her unique voice, this recognition is usually
empowering for students. (hooks, 2010, pp.21)
Decolonizing education: free to think
“Liberation” was a term constantly evoked. And it was incredibly liberating to
learn a more complex political language with which to name and understand
the politics of our nation. It was incredibly liberating to move past notions of
personal prejudices and hatreds to look at systems of domination and how
they operated interdependently. The most essential lesson for everyone,
irrespective of our race, class, or gender, was learning the role education
played as a tool of colonization here in the United States. […] In Pedagogy in
Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau, Paulo Freire contends:
The culture of the colonized was a reflection of their barbaric way of seeing the world. Culture belonged
only to the colonizers. The alienating experience of colonial education was only counteracted for the
colonized at those moments when, in an urge for independence, they rejected some of its aspects. (hooks,
2010, pp. 25)
Liberation is an ongoing process
We would all have fared better in our struggles to end racism, sexism, and
class exploitation if we had learned that liberation is an ongoing process. We
are bombarded daily by a colonizing mentality (few of us manage to escape
the received messages coming from every area of our lives), one that not only
shapes consciousness and actions but also provides material rewards for
submission and acquiescence that far exceed any material gains for resistance,
so we must be constantly engaging new ways of thinking and being. We
must be critically vigilant. This is no easy task when most people spend most
of their days working within dominator culture. (hooks, 2010, pp.26)
The classroom
I teach myself in outline haunting my own
childhood in classrooms of dirty
children that smelled of snot and tears and wet
feet in winter catching spitballs and
chalk
and a storm of childhood diseases while a
lifeless bag of asafetida hung around
my neck
kept to keep me free from all contagion and
while I stank with safety
and loneliness.
We are
Enclosed by the walls between us by the
chemistry of the dead spaces we share
smelling naïve and plastic safe and unspeakable
and true
they will not speak.
 
(LORDE, Audre. The classroom. In: “I Teach Myself In Outline,” Notes, Journals, Syllabi
& An Excerpt From Deotha, edited by Iemanjá Brown and Miriam Atkin, a CUNY’s
Manifold Project, The City University of New York.)
Theodor Adorno on Education after
Auschwitz
The premier demand upon all education is that
Auschwitz not happen again. Its priority before
any other requirement is such that I believe I
need not and should not justify it. I cannot
understand why it has been given so little concern
until now. To justify it would be monstrous in the
face of the monstrosity that took place. Yet the
fact that one is so barely conscious of this
demand and the questions it raises shows that
the monstrosity has not penetrated people’s
minds deeply, itself a symptom of the continuing
potential for its recurrence as far as peoples’
conscious and unconscious is concerned. Every
debate about the ideals of education is trivial and
inconsequential compared to this single ideal:
never again Auschwitz.
Education, memory,
sociopolitical transformation
In conclusion, permit me to say a few words about some possibilities for making conscious the general subjective
mechanisms without which Auschwitz would hardly have been possible. Knowledge of these mechanisms is
necessary, as is knowledge of the stereotypical defense mechanisms that block such a consciousness. Whoever still
says today that it did not happen or was not all that bad already defends what took place and unquestionably
would be prepared to look on or join in if it happens again. Even if rational enlightenment, as psychology well
knows, does not straightaway eliminate the unconscious mechanisms, then it reinforces, at least in the
preconscious, certain counter-impulses and helps prepare a climate that does not favor the uttermost extreme. If
the entire cultural consciousness really became permeated with the idea of the pathogenic character of the
tendencies that came into their own at Auschwitz, then perhaps people would better control those tendencies.
[…]
All political instruction finally should be centered upon the idea that Auschwitz should never happen again. This
would be possible only when it devotes itself openly, without fear of offending any authorities, to this most
important of problems. To do this education must transform itself into sociology, that is, it must teach about the
societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms. One must submit to critical treatment
—to provide just one model—such a respectable concept as that of “reason of state”; in placing the right of the
state over that of its members, the horror is potentially already posited.
ADORNO, Education after Auschwitz, 1966 (Radio Program published as title).
Ethical challenges to education
• We need to face the challenge of talking and practicing an education
after modern Slavery and Colonization (of flesh and souls). The same
modernity that invented our modern conception of education.
• To change the perception that there is only one form of experience,
thought, knowledge and culture. Stop ignoring the perspectivism in
analyzing, studying and understanding the world and human living.
• A challenge for our generation who though that History has come to
and end – meaning that we don’t struggle anymore with any
antagonist, that we reached a fair state of things without the Cold
War polarization.
On self-discipline: Rudyard Kipling’s poem If
(1918)
If you can keep your head when all about you    If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,        And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    But make allowance for their doubting too;        And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,     To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:     Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
   
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;    If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;        Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    And treat those two impostors just the same;        If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,     With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:     And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!