Sense and sensibility: Stanley Cavell's philosophy of moral manners

Stefan Ramaekers and Joris Vlieghe’s ‘Infants, childhood and language in Agamben and Cavell: education as transformation’ is an insightful discussion of an important facet of educational experience. In the article, they consider a Fred Astaire dance sequence from the 1953 Vincente Minnelli film, The Band Wagon, in combination with a remarkable article about this same sequence by Stanley Cavell. On the strength of this, they develop an interesting line of thought regarding the experience of language, exploring connections between the ideas of Cavell and Agamben. Rich and thought-provoking though their discussion is, I find that it deflects attention from the most important aspects of the film sequence and the literature that has developed in response – specifically regarding questions of race and praise. The present discussion attempts to address these matters.

Objective To investigate the current status of critical thinking ability and commu-nication ability of nursing students, therefore providing reference for teaching reform. Methods The Critical Thinking Scale translated and revised by Pro. Peng MeiZi of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Supportive Communication Scale (SCS) edited by Whetten and his colleague were used to investi-gate nursing students' levels of critical thinking and communication ability among 176 selected nursing students in our college, with method of Random Cluster Sampling. Descriptive analysis, single sample t-test, and two independent sample t-test were applied to the collected data with SPSS l7.0. Results ①The average score of critical thinking for the investigated college nursing students was (264.54±29.94). 72.73% of them got 210~280 points, in which three items: cognitive maturity (t=4.695, P=0.000), open mind (t=4.016, P=0.000), and intellectual curiosity (t=2.973, P=0.003) were greater than 40 points. And the differences were statistically significant; compared to different individual character-istics, being a student cadre (t=3.494, P=0.001) or not is of statistical significance. ②The total average score of communication ability (t=3.219, P=0.002) for college nursing students, as well as the score of providing effective negative feedback (t=6.790, P=0.000) and supportive communication (t=4.267, P=0.000) were significantly higher than median 3.00. And the differences were statistically significant. Conclusion In order to improve the critical thinking ability and interpersonal communication ability of nursing students, and educate the nursing students to adapt to society and complicated clinical nursing environment, it is necessary to reform the curriculum setting, curriculum design and teaching method. Key words: Nursing students; Critical thinking ability; Communication ability; Investiga-tion and study

This article begins by clarifying the notion of what Stanley Cavell has called ‘Emersonian moral perfectionism.’ It goes on to explore this through close analysis of aspects of Emerson’s essay ‘Experience,’ in which ideas of trying or attempting or experimenting bring out the intimate relation between perfectionism and styles of writing. ‘Where do we find ourselves?’ Emerson asks, and the answer is to be found in part in what we write and what we say, injecting a new sense of possibility and responsibility into our relation to our words. But the language we speak and the lives that go with it are at the same time burdened with a past, and in the case of English, and in the American context especially, it is marked with a kind of repression relating to questions of slavery and race. These matters are implicated in questions of constitution, in both general and specifically political senses. Hence, inheritance and appropriation become causes of critical sensitivity, as do the forms of praise and acknowledgment that should meet them. The article explores ways of thinking through Emerson’s relation to these aspects of experience and seeks to find responses pertinent to today.

In this article I compare and contrast Hannah Arendt’s and Stanley Cavell’s understandings of critique, focusing in each case upon the role played in it by skepticism. Both writers are decisively influenced by the later Heidegger’s thought that thinking as such is, first, the necessary turn to a practice adequate to our situation and, second, something that we shun. They also share the desire to take up this Heideggerian thought in Kantian terms: what is at stake is critical thinking. It is here, however, that they part ways, with Arendt insisting that critique is as incompatible with skepticism as it is with dogmatism, and Cavell insisting that skepticism is the central moment within critique. Arendt’s attempt to ban skepticism from critique forces her into the contradictory position of at once denying and affirming the role of dogma in critical thinking. Cavell, in contrast, is able to shed light consistently upon the question of how citizens might best respond to the new – a task, ironically, that is as central to Arendt’s work as it is to Cavell’s. My argument thus functions as an immanent critique of Arendt, an attempt to demonstrate the need to read her in light of Cavell.

Critical thinking is a rich, dynamic, complex concept that entails bringing the most appropriate and highest standards for thought to bear upon the intrinsic (and frequently flawed) reasoning that occurs in the human mind, in order to reason at the highest levels. Critical thinking, in its explicit form, requires disciplining one's own thinking, as well as understanding and evaluating others' thinking, by focusing deliberately on the components present in all human reasoning. It requires developing executive-level functioning, in which the mind examines and re-examines its own thought by reasoning about its thinking to improve its reasoning. An early 1980s quote, often repeated by Richard Paul, that captures this point in a catchy phrase is: 'thinking about your thinking while you're thinking to improve your thinking'. This entails identifying and examining any errors or problems in the components, or elements, of reasoning, and correcting flaws by employing criteria appropriate in a given context. This systematic process, daily and routinely applied, should increasingly improve one's reasoning abilities over time. This in turn should lead to progressively more insightful levels of self-awareness on the part of the reasoner and, were it to be taken seriously on a broad scale, on the species itself. Critical thinking should lead to a world in which the majority of people, through their thinking, are able to make meaningful contributions and find contentment, despite the many complexities we face. Critical thinking arises from the need to intervene in the mistaken, irrational, and self-deceptive reasoning pervasive in human societies, which requires cultivating traits of mind, as well as skills and abilities. Critical thinking entails getting underneath and examining social norms, conventions, and taboos to determine the extent to which they are logical and reasonable. It might be noted that not every critical thinking theoretician accepts or advances the importance of ethical reasoning in critical thinking. Yet critical thinking as a serious field of study would guide reasoners to embrace and develop within themselves intellectual as well as ethical virtues that gradually improve and enhance their character as fair-minded persons; this follows from the ethical obligations all people face in living a human life. Critical thought differs in logic from any other field in that it attempts to understand thought itself – what thought entails, and where it goes wrong; it attempts this, in part, by uncovering, examining, and appreciating the many ways in which skilled, committed, passionate human thought leads to a more reasonable world, as well as the many ways in which confusions, delusions, and deceptions in human thought lead to a less reasonable world. In its highest manifestations, critical thinking searches for understandings and practices that advance life on the planet. In short, critical thinking is separate from, but necessary to, every subject, discipline, profession, or arena of human life that entails reasoning; this includes virtually every domain of life, to some degree, since reasoning is naturally occurring in the mind. Critical thinking searches for patterns of intrinsic neurotic and pathological reasoning that impede our capacities for criticality, logical thought, and reasonability. Critical thinking seeks to understand human reasoning as a system of ideas intimately connected with other fundamental functions of the human mind, namely emotions and desires (the affective dimension). Because thinking coexists in relationship with feelings and the human will, critical thinking theoreticians attempt to understand the concomitant relationships among thinking, emotions, and desires, and to uncover the conceptual tools most useful in improving not only cognition, or thinking, but also emotions and desires. Critical thinking is meant to be pre-eminently practical; it seeks to establish and develop universal concepts and principles about human thought essential to advanced reasoning in any field of study. By improving reasoning, these universal principles are essential as well to improving human life. In sum, guiding conceptual principles for human reasoning, and hence human life, are explored, established, and cultivated through the field of critical thinking studies. Critical thinking advances freedom of thought, which presupposes freedom of speech. This follows precisely because freedom of speech is required if humans are to openly and unreservedly explore thought without fear of reprisal or punishment, and if they are to best explore the many various and frequently complex implications of thought. Critical thinking helps explore all domains important to living a fulfilling life, including the psychological, social, economic, ecological, zoological, historical, scientific, literary, sexual, artistic, civic, and political. And critical thinking is essential to the cultivation of the educated mind (see Education). Historically, a number of important theoreticians have contributed to a shared conception of critical thinking. These include theoreticians reaching back in time before the use of the term critical thinking, as well as those theoreticians who began articulating an explicit concept of critical thinking in the 1970s and 80s. For instance, some of the roots of contemporary critical thinking began in the early part of the twentieth century, from fields such as logical positivism, analytic philosophy, and semantics. Many of the latter theoreticians came from philosophy departments, primarily those interested in formal logic, informal logic, and argumentation. Beginning in the 1970s and moving through the 1980s and 90s, various fields of study began to contextualise and develop aspects of critical thinking at differing levels of quality. The most comprehensive and integrated approach to critical thinking was developed by Richard Paul (1937–2015) and continues with the writings and teaching of scholars working in the Paulian tradition. Paul's approach is distinguished from other critical thinking theories chiefly because it offers the most comprehensive, integrated approach to critical thinking, is it essential to reasoning through the questions and problems in academic and professional disciplines, and is based in ordinary languages. Paul argues for living the examined life, in connection with the thinking of Socrates. Paul's framework establishes first principles in critical thinking that may be derived from the theory he constructed, distilled, and developed. Notably, Paul emphasises ethical reasoning as essential to critical reasoning, the importance of deliberate self-cultivation in advancing one's own intellectual character, and the universals in reasoning applicable across all domains of thought, subjects, and disciplines.

Reviewed by: The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday by William H. Galperin Magdalena Ostas (bio) William H. Galperin. The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. Pp. 181. $55. The demand for a theoretical articulation of our relationship to “the everyday” has always been fraught with genuinely interesting difficulties. Insofar as the category captures a sense of what is pervasive in experience (Blanchot, as William Galperin notes in this study, describes the everyday as “what we are first of all, and most often”), we might ask what kinds of theoretical perspectives allow us to touch this idea of life as it is actually lived. Many of the philosophers, social theorists, and literary critics in the long history of interest in the everyday—the shapes of daily lives, the invisibility of mundane events, the look of objects of apparent insignificance, the feelings that attend repetition, the emergence of unreflective attitudes, the habits of ordinary speech—surrender the ambition to define the category, and they often turn, instead, to reflecting on our orientation or attitude toward this dimension of experience. Accordingly, it has been said that the everyday harbors real critical and creative potential as often as it has been asserted that it is the realm of deadening predictability and inauthenticity. In The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday, William Galperin registers the contemporary interest in the everyday with some skepticism. In contrast to the picture of the everyday as what is familiar, the everyday in Galperin’s study of Romanticism surfaces as a form of relation with the past and not with present-tense experience. In the sequence of wide-ranging and insightful readings he offers across Romantic-era visual arts (the panorama), lyric and narrative poetry (Wordsworth and Byron), novels (Austen), and epistolary correspondence (the Byron controversy), Galperin argues that the everyday is not open—paradoxically—to observation and that it becomes perceptible, instead, through forms of recollection or retrospection. Galperin derives his theoretical framework from a cluster of figures whose convergence is approximately familiar but whose collective relation to the idea of the everyday might be less apparent: Maurice Blanchot, Martin Heidegger, Henri Lefebvre, Stanley Cavell, and Paul de Man. In the opening chapter Galperin writes thus: [End Page 325] The everyday’s emergence and early conceptualization as a history of what was missed, as something appreciable in retrospect but not in real time, is more than just analogous to what a Marxist like Lefebvre also finds missing and lacking; it is at cross-purposes—and significantly so—with the very developments of which romantic-period discourse, in its subscriptions to interiority and individualism, remains a signal manifestation. (33) What we might think of as the everyday’s historiographic deep structure turns out over the course of Galperin’s readings to contend with the import of presentness in Romanticism’s understanding of selfhood. The important contribution of Galperin’s study thus lies in the way he conceptualizes the elusiveness of the everyday in temporal rather than perceptual terms: Romantic writers’ sense that the everyday often escapes or appears hidden stems from their recognition that it can only be encountered after it has passed and projected a “counter-actual history” (6) and not from the everyday’s permeating present-tense invisibility that renders it too ubiquitous to manifest or impress itself. The Romantic texts at the center of Galperin’s chapters exhibit a structure of retrospection whereby “the missed, the unappreciated, [and] the overlooked” come into consciousness with sudden and unexpected proximity (27). These recovered moments, what Galperin throughout calls “a history of missed opportunities,” are a revelation of things as they are re-seen and come into view through backward glances cast in the “prevailing afterwardness ” (18) or aftermath of experience. The chapter that engages the double-takes of Wordsworth’s poetry across moments in The Prelude, Lyrical Ballads, and the “Immortality Ode,” accordingly, concentrates on the conflict between the poet’s retrospective connection with nature and the Wordsworthian faith in the imagination as an agency working in the present. Wordsworth for Galperin instantiates an order...

Journal Article Stanley Cavell in Conversation with Paul Standish Get access Stanley Cavell, Stanley Cavell Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Paul Standish Paul Standish Correspondence: Paul Standish, Centre for Philosophy, Institute of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H0AL, UK. Email: p.standish@ioe.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 46, Issue 2, May 2012, Pages 155–176, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.2012.00846.x Published: 13 April 2012

Why does Stanley Cavell’s philosophical thought matter for music? And how did Cavell’s musical practice and appreciation of music give shape to his most famous philosophical claims about cinema, human speech, opera, the expression of skepticism, and ordinary language philosophy? Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind provides a first-of-its-kind intervention by leading philosophers and scholars of music into an intellectual landscape in need of such charting. As a performer and a devoted student of music, the arc of Cavell’s wide-ranging investigation maps consistently with a proximate concern with features of human experience that involve music and sound, including the sound of prose, authorial voice (including its possession and its divestment), the presence/problem/potentiality of silence in human communication, and related features of sonic experience central to life lived at the scale of the everyday. Despite widespread scholarly fascination with the intersection of “Cavell” and “music”—that music is famously a core theme for him—no book like this has yet appeared. Moreover, our efforts here are addressed to the serious student (at all levels) and the general reader alike arriving from many precincts of thought and practice—musical performance, literary theory, cultural studies, musicology, and philosophy.

Stanley Cavell is a Harvard philosopher who, in writings spanning half a century has consistently returned to themes of education. Yet his writings are never programmatic, and he has never presumed to give advice to policy-makers or practitioners. He is interested in education as a critical dimension of human life. He shows how the autonomy of the individual is not to be separated from her role as a citizen. Understanding this requires attention to the criteria that sustain human practices and the development of judgement in relation to them. In philosophy and in ordinary life, this raises the question of scepticism, and Cavell’s distinctive response to this, which links its manifestation in philosophy with literature and tragedy, and with aspects of ordinary human existence, is especially original. Cavell never writes in a technical way or in jargon, but his language makes significant demands on the reader, encouraging them to read with a new attentiveness: this itself is of pedagogical importance. The present discussion takes up these themes and relates them to crucial questions regarding the education of teachers. Received: 02/09/2013 / Accepted: 04/10/2013 How to reference this article Standish, P. (2013). Rethinking democracy and education with Stanley Cavell. Foro de Educación , 11(15), pp. 49-64. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14516/fde.2013.011.015.002

This article analyzes Claude McKay’s essays on politics and society, especially those dealing with the racial question in the 1920s US. It reviews these texts, alongside other works (poems and autobiographical writings) that McKay produced on the same topics. The article aims at tracing a trajectory in McKay’s political thought: after criticizing the social and economic structures of capitalist and colonial societies, McKay envisages in post-revolutionary USSR a utopian society for oppressed people worldwide. However, his writings, rather than depicting the actual USSR society he knew in the early 1920s, evokes the multicultural myth of the ‘melting pot’ traditionally used to celebrate the US. McKay, maybe unwillingly, enthusiastically praises the myth of American exceptionalism, referring it to the USSR.

Objective To analyze the implementation effects of peer-assisted learning on critical thinking ability of undergraduate nursing students. Methods A total of 411 college nursing students were selected with 203 students of Class One, Class Three, and Class Five from Grade 2012 majoring in nursing were taken as the control group, 208 students of Class Two, Class Four, and Class Six as the experimental group. In the course of basic nursing practice, the control group was trained by the traditional practice, and the experimental group was trained by the way of peer mutual aid. Critical thinking disposition inventory Chinese version (CTDI-CV) was adopted to evaluate the level of critical thinking ability of the nursing students of both groups. SPSS 17.0 was used and the data of the two groups were compared by t test. Results The score of experimental group students' critical thinking ability and the score of 7 dimensions including their seeking truth, analysis ability, self-confidence, inquisitiveness, cognitive maturity, open mind and systematic ability were higher than those before the experiment (P<0.05). The total score of the experimental group students' critical thinking ability and the score of 5 dimensions including seeking truth, analysis ability, self-confidence, curiosity and cognitive maturity were higher than those of the control group (P<0.05). Conclusion Peer-assisted learning is beneficial to the improvement of critical thinking ability of nursing undergraduate students. Key words: Peer-assisted learning; Critical thinking disposition inventory

Objective To explore the relationship between the critical thinking disposition and the innovation behavior in nurses. Methods A total of 360 clinical nurses were questionnaired by the critical thinking disposition inventory and innovation behavior scale. Pearson correlation analysis and hierarchical regression analysis were used to explore the effect of critical thinking disposition on the innovation behavior in nurses. Results The total scores of critical thinking disposition and innovation behavior in nurses were respectively 290.68±33.46 and 4.12±0.96. There was significant difference of the score of innovation behavior in nurses with different professional titles and working years (F=6.257, 4.802, P <0.05). The score of innovation behavior was positively correlated with the scores of seek truth, open mind, analysis ability, systematic ability, self-confidence, learning desire and cognitive maturity (r=0.367-0.514, P <0.05). Hierarchical regression analysis showed that the seek truth, open mind, analysis ability, systematic ability, self-confidence, learning desire and cognitive maturity were the influencing factors of innovative behavior in nurses. Conclusions The critical thinking disposition and innovation behavior were in medium level in nurses, and the critical thinking disposition was the influencing factors of innovative behavior in nurses. Key words: Nurses; Critical thinking disposition; Innovative behavior

Reviewed by: Forms of Life: Aesthetics and Biopolitics in German Culture by Andreas Gailus Johannes Türk Forms of Life: Aesthetics and Biopolitics in German Culture. By Andreas Gailus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. Pp. xxiii + 383. Paper $29.95. ISBN 978-1501749810. During the last years of his life, Michel Foucault, the central figure to whom we are indebted in our approach to the question of life, moved away from the concept of biopolitics he had developed over the preceding decade and toward questions of the subject. Whereas his previous work had concerned the history of modernity, his lectures, devoted to the hermeneutics of the subject, to the care of the self, and finally to parrhesia, now focused on sources from Greek and Roman Antiquity. Andreas Gailus’s pathbreaking study of what the subtitle of his book calls “aesthetics and biopolitics in German culture” now offers the groundwork for an account of modernity that includes the dimension of the subject Foucault discovered at that point. The grids of biopolitical conceptualizations from Foucault to Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, Gailus claims in his preface and introduction, are not merely too abstract and deterministic but also too coarse. This comes at a considerable cost: through the marginalization of subjective life, the “violence of biopolitical determination” is elided, while “the intrinsic value and force” of life is precluded from coming into view (x). By contrast, the stake of Gailus’s book lies in the claim that the literary archive—and in its wake, other artistic “media that are perceptually and conceptually self-reflective” (11)—offers accounts of the intersection of the elements of biopolitical modernity—technology, knowledge, and power—with what the book emphatically calls an experiential or “existential” (xii) dimension of an irreducibly composite vitality. This dimension of inner experience is not an interiority preceding the social but a “network of dissonant forces . . . shaped by third-person narratives, impersonal scripts, practices, and technologies that regulate social life and structure the self’s relation to itself and to others” (9). Gailus’s argument follows Thomas Khurana’s and Christoph Menke’s exploration of concepts such as force and development. They define a form in which life is the subject and object of a process of formation that overcomes the separation of the cultural and the symbolic. In a last step, Gailus assimilates this constellation to what Wittgenstein in his Philosophic Investigations calls “form of life” (and alongside it “aspect seeing”). “Form of life” emphasizes how language games, a practice that cannot be clearly delimited and that accounts for the groundlessness and openness of meaning, is embedded in the pragmatic dimension of life. With Stanley Cavell, the book points to “the mutual absorption of the natural and the social” (52) as a constitutive part of the concept. Gailus’s book derives its main title, Forms of Life, from this concept, emphasizing the ineluctable plurality inherent in the mutual imbrication of life, form, and signification. In the epilogue, Gailus sketches a political philosophy merging from this plurality. [End Page 331] The book is divided into three parts. Each of them is devoted to two authors and focuses on a configuration of life. The first part describes “Life as Formation” (Kant, Goethe), the second “The Conflict of Forms” (Kleist, Nietzsche), and the third part “Life as Deformation” (Benn, Musil). The book begins in part one to develop the arc of its historical argument in a detailed reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. In the vitalist tradition from Herder to Blumenbach, in which Kant’s third critique is embedded, Gailus finds a theoretical lineage capable of laying the historical groundwork for his study. Recent scholarship has amply demonstrated the crucial role Kant’s theory of organism in the second half of the critique has played in the life sciences in general and for the emergence of the idea of self-organization in particular. Yet, at the heart of the book’s juxtaposition of the aesthetic judgment—the “life of cognition”—with the teleological judgment on organic form—the “cognition of life”—lies the “undercutting of the boundary between organic and biological life” (78). The vitality of life and the need for its aesthetic vitalization...

Critical thinking is the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking. It means making reasoned judgements that are logical and well thought – out. Critical thinking includes both cognitive skills and dispositions, in terms of attitudes or habits of mind. The ability to think critically is an essential life skill, though; this focal point is missed in many students’ education. Students are taught memorization with little or no time left for the development of critical thinking skills. Empirical research suggests that people begin developing critical thinking at very young age and all people can be taught to think critically. The present paper will explain the three main strategies i.e. cooperative learning, discussion and mind movies needed to promote critical thinking among learners that can improve their academic performance as well as helping them to develop the skills necessary to compete economically in a global environment. The finding of this research suggests that (1) critical thinking has a positive effect on student and teacher engagement within the classroom. (2) It has a positive impact on student achievement and students’ higher order thinking skills. (3) Critical thinking will also lead to self- directed learning and self- motivation for learners.

ABSTRACTWe live in a time of global crises: a deteriorating environment that is struggling to provide all the resources and services we demand of it, changing climate and its consequences for the biosphere, its habitats, inhabitants and biodiversity, conflicts‐divisive ideologies‐competition for resources, increasing societal inequalities and human deprivations, and a youth mental health pandemic, to name but just a few. Most of these crises are self‐made, the result of human decisions, and their acceptance/toleration by society. Policies and practices at all levels of society that created, exacerbate and launch new crises are, at worst, self‐serving and, at best, faulted through a lack of understanding. In democracies, citizens can hold decision‐makers to account but, to do this, they must understand the issues and be able to imagine better policies. We also live in a digital world in which a flood of mostly inconsequential information and misinformation pollutes our brains, enhancing pre‐existing biases and creating new ones, and numbing our mental ability to think clearly and reach sensible decisions. But sensible decisions are urgently needed at all levels to fix problems and reduce future self‐harm. Sensible decisions require sourcing the best available relevant information, and a process to convert information into understanding, understanding into clear decision options, and the choice of a decision option that leads to an action that represents best practice. Critical thinking is the enabling cognitive process of this decision pathway, because it selects the best available information through demanding evidence‐basing, seeks critical discourse between experts and stakeholders that agnostically explores solution space to find plausible options, and whittles down options inter alia through plausibility, due diligence, bottleneck analysis, cost‐benefit analysis, and benchmarking filtering. Crucially, it rejects biases, influencing factors, and other constraints on options, and is an effective barrier to the information flood. The problem is that critical thinking capacity is not widely available among either decision makers or stakeholders. There is an urgent need to rapidly roll out effective education programmes in which critical thinking teaching is solidly embedded. Since biases accumulate with age, the teaching of critical thinking must begin with the very young. However, the very young are not able to comprehend the complex abstract issues underpinning critical thinking. Embedding the teaching of critical thinking in a suitable educational context, and integrating it into curricula, is another challenge. To address these two challenges, the International Microbiology Literacy Initiative is developing a storytelling programme for children, called the Critical Thinking MicroChats Gallery, within the curriculum of societally relevant microbiology it is creating. MicroChats illustrate the principal practical elements of critical thinking, like bottlenecks, cost: benefit, benchmarking, the need for discussions and other points of view, employing readily relatable, relevant microbially centric scenarios. MicroChats suggest class discussion topics to encourage children to imagine the application of each element in other contexts to reinforce principles and hone critical thinking skills. Critical thinking, and especially the cultivation of the habit of asking ‘why’ and requiring plausible justification for policies/actions, is a shield against bias, prejudice, propaganda, misinformation and the incessant pressures of social media. It promotes a healthy mind and the attainment of the developmental potential of individuals. Increasing critical thinking in society will raise the quality of decision making at all levels and thereby improve sustainability/reduce the human footprint on our planet, and promote the individual sense of responsibility and global citizenship necessary for the improvement of the condition of humanity and its relationship with Planet Earth.