Critical Thinking and the Education of Care

In this section I want to address three questions: what critical thinking is, how critical thinking education can be integrated with care education, and which teaching principles matter most in school settings.

Critical Thinking

In Chinese contexts, the standard translation of “critical thinking” is literal enough, but it also produces a predictable misunderstanding. Many people hear “critical” and assume it means simple negation, as though the point were merely to attack, reject, or refute. That misunderstanding does not belong only to casual readers. It appears even among students taking courses in the subject. For that reason, I sometimes prefer a more neutral phrase, something closer to “careful discernment,” especially when critical thinking is being brought into conversation with care education. In that setting, the aggressive, concept-first flavour of “critical” can easily become misleading.

Critical thinking has to be understood in two senses. First, it is a specialist course. It originated in the West, has now spread widely, and is currently flourishing in China as well. Conferences and workshops on teaching critical thinking appear every year. Yet the course itself has no single, standardized content or method. As Stephen Brookfield notes, critical thinking draws on at least five major sources: analytic philosophy and logic, natural science, pragmatism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory.[1] Teachers trained in different backgrounds will naturally emphasize different things. An ideally balanced course would make room for all five, but in practice that is difficult to achieve.

Second, critical thinking is also a more basic habit of mind. It runs through science, politics, and ordinary life. In principle, one aim of both school education and university education should be to strengthen this habit. Brookfield’s own definition is still a useful starting point: critical thinking involves identifying the assumptions that shape our thought and action, checking how accurate and reliable those assumptions are, viewing our beliefs and decisions from multiple perspectives, and then acting more wisely on that basis.[2]

This is why assumptions matter so much. Unlike approaches heavily shaped by formal logic, which often focus only on explicit premises, I want to include the wider background from which a judgment emerges. Brookfield distinguishes between normative, causal, and paradigmatic assumptions.[3] Normative assumptions tell us what should count as the right move in a given situation. Causal assumptions tell us what follows from what. Paradigmatic assumptions are the hardest to see, because they shape what the facts look like in the first place. Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit image remains a standard example.[4] Some people see a rabbit. Others see a duck. The visual data are the same, but the interpretive framework is not.

Something similar happens in social life. Consider Pope Francis’s reaction when a woman suddenly grabbed and pulled him toward her during a New Year’s greeting. One interpretation says that a moral leader briefly lost patience. Another says that an elderly man was nearly pulled over and reacted exactly as an ordinary person might. The crucial point is not to declare one reading finally victorious. It is to notice that different paradigmatic assumptions generate different moral interpretations of the same event. Francis’s later response was revealing for precisely this reason: he did not simply apologize to the woman in a personal sense; rather, he apologized for setting a poor moral example. In other words, he distinguished between himself as an elderly man in a concrete situation and himself as a global religious symbol. That capacity to move across frameworks is close to what care education needs.

Critical Thinking and Care Education

Although Brookfield’s framework is highly useful, care education is not simply a critical thinking course under another name. It borrows some of critical thinking’s methods and teaching ideals, but it often works through concrete material, such as environmental care, animal welfare, or life-care education more broadly. Its goals are also somewhat different. Critical thinking, by itself, is often very good at exposing assumptions, marking differences, and sharpening disagreement. Care education must do something more difficult. It has to make those differences visible without turning the classroom into a permanent scene of conflict.

That is why I sometimes say, only half-jokingly, that care education is a kind of “muddling through on the basis of precise analysis.” What I mean is not intellectual laziness. I mean that the educator must preserve enough conceptual clarity to see where the disagreement lies, while also leaving enough room for the other side’s standpoint to remain intelligible. In my view, that willingness to preserve space for the other person’s position, without sacrificing basic cognitive honesty, is itself a form of social good will.

At the same time, care education demands an even broader form of discernment than ordinary critical thinking courses usually do. Social psychology reminds us that behaviour is shaped not only by explicit attitudes but also by implicit attitudes and peripheral cues. Myers distinguishes between a central route of persuasion, which works through reasons and evidence, and a peripheral route, which works through cues that people accept without much reflection.[5] [6] In the present age, saturated by social media, algorithmic targeting, and AI-generated content, the peripheral route is everywhere. That means care education cannot stop at the level of argument analysis. It must also involve some training in the self-management of cognition. But that training must itself remain scientifically informed and critically supervised.

Teaching Principles

Several teaching principles follow from this.

1. Personal example matters. One important way to earn students’ trust is through lived credibility. This trust comes partly from competence, but also from relation. Brookfield openly discusses in class how critical thinking helped him work through depression. In the same spirit, the cases I use in this chapter are real cases from my own experience. When we ask students to manage their own cognition more consciously, we ought to experiment on ourselves first: how we regulate online input, how we review our information channels, how we build mechanisms of balance and correction.

2. Social learning matters. This point can hardly be overstated. Group work remains one of the most useful teaching forms because it helps students see that different assumptions can underlie the same issue. One method I often like is a modified chalk-talk exercise. I give a controversial question to two groups, assign each a position, write the question in the centre of the board, and ask each group to place short key terms on either side while responding to one another. The advantage is that students can see, very directly, how different assumptions and concepts cluster around the same question.

3. Teaching must proceed gradually and with attention to difference. Students differ by age, gender, cultural background, confidence, and prior training. Teachers need to adjust materials and grouping arrangements accordingly, so that discussion does not collapse into domination by the strongest voices. Tools such as Brookfield’s Critical Incident Questionnaire can help teachers test the accuracy of their own assumptions about what students are actually experiencing in the classroom.[7]

4. Reading and writing remain indispensable. Well-chosen texts provide some of the clearest examples of sustained argument, and asking students to produce a relatively systematic essay remains one of the best ways to test the depth, structure, and stability of their thinking.