ABSTRACT
Popular and official anxieties about educational standards, institutional pressures and inertia, and the demands of mass teaching have cashed themselves in the language of 'skills' and in obsession with predetermined educational targets. 'Critical thinking' has found its way into a proposed school-leaving examination syllabus as one of a number of 'core skills' to promote eventual workplace adaptability. The associated term, 'problem-solving' is already well established as one criterion of educational attainment despite an abundant literature displaying lack of consensus about its meaning. But such measures too neatly absolve educational institutions and governments of responsibilities for the 'thinking skills deficit'. Advocates of an alternative conception of critical thinking emphasise its subject- or domain-dependence. Critical thinking, in any educationally meaningful sense, must be understood in historical and philosophical terms as exfoliations of a universal potential of language in social conditions of heightened dialogue and controversy.
