4Critical Thinking and Flexibility

Calliste SCHEIBLING-SÈVE1, Elena PASQUINELLI2 and Emmanuel SANDER1

1 IDEA, University of Geneva, Switzerland2 Fondation La main à la pâte, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, France

4.1. Introduction

Teaching and fostering critical thinking skills is now being recognized as a key objective within educational settings. Its perceived virtues range from strengthening students’ ability – as future citizens and workers – to apply their knowledge in new and changing circumstances (Howells 2018), to being able to select, interpret, evaluate, and apply relevant and reliable information (Halpern 2013). Critical thinking is seen as essential for dealing with individual and societal challenges, so much so that it has become a necessity for citizens of the 21st century (Halpern 2013).

Among the circumstances that now make critical thinking so relevant is overexposure to both news media and social media. In the age of “information-obesity”, the dangers of fake news and post-truth attitudes – combined with a lack of skills to correctly judge information – are widely reported (Whitworth 2009; Acerbi 2019).

Others emphasize the difficulty in protecting ourselves from our own biases (Pronin et al. 2002). Because of this lack of critical thinking skills – both externally tested by the constant influx of fake news and internally influenced by cognitive biases – we risk making inappropriate decisions, endorsing simplistic and insufficiently supported opinions, becoming ...

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