On Deep, Critical and Independent Thinking and Why It Is So Challenging for Higher Education to Teach These Things

Abstract

This chapter starts with some despondency about the complications inherent to critical thinking , critical thinking skills and dispositions, and how all these things may fit within higher education. Nevertheless, the chapter does suggest a possible route to higher education for sustainability, styled as a road map, and goes on to consider how teaching the skills to think critically and teaching dispositions to think critically may be achieved. Two examples of dispositions likely relevant to deep, critical and independent thinking , in the context of sustainability, are considered in some detail; having a disposition to open-mindedness and a disposition to fairness . The chapter ends by considering what might happen if a critical mass of university graduates who have the skills and dispositions to think deeply, critically and independently somehow get together with sustainability on their minds.