What’s Here
This section of Criticality contains a series of pages, mostly still under construction, on critical thinking, critical theory, critical pedagogy, and something I’m calling “critical culture,” which is a term I think I may have coined.
I see these categories as (1) closely related and (2) part of the central mission of Criticality, which is not quite formalized yet, but has something to do with promoting the idea of a postmodern humanism that is multicultural and planetary (to use terms from Gayatri Chakrovorti Spivak’s The Death of a Discipline).
These categories in brief
- Critical thinking is a set of cognitive processes through which human beings organize information and experience and formulate beliefs, opinions, and values.
- Critical theory is critical thinking organized around a particular category, such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, identity, and so on.
- Critical pedagogy is critical thinking and critical theory applied to education.
- Critical culture is both (1) cultural studies informed by critical theory, and (2) cultural practices of any and all kinds that enact social, cultural, and historical critique.
What’s ahead (?)
As of this writing, I do not know exactly what I will say on these pages about critical thinking, critical theory, critical pedagogy, and critical culture. In some way or other, I want to build bridges from the “Critical” section of Criticality to the “Humanities” section of Pedagogishness, and develop an argument in favor of a critical approach to the humanities as the essence of a postmodern humanism.