ABSTRACT
Critical thinking can be defined as a mode of thinking characterised by specific and unique features in contrast to casuistry that imposes general rules on individual cases. Therefore, it resists any form of stereotyping – the mechanism through which tendentious thinking operates – and prejudice, arriving at conclusions that are not certain, but only probable. Critical thinking does not claim the universality of deduction but stimulates an awareness of the multiple expressions of deductive, inductive and analogical reasoning and creates a habitus of critical reflexivity towards the multiple forms of language. Starting from these fundamental considerations, the chapter explores what must be done, faced with a school that seems to embrace a technocratic/corporate productivism and which places a higher value on human capital than on human development, to re-centralise the vision of the school authentically – and not rhetorically – inspired by children’s rights and the values of the constitution, and which has in its DNA the promotion of an education in critical thinking.
