The Role of Critical and Civic Thinking in Citizenship Education

“Citizenship education” aims to promote the active participation of citizens in democratic society and to develop knowledge, skills and attitudes that enable individuals to understand the workings of democratic institutions, to participate in decision-making processes and to take responsibility in community life. Citizenship requires a critical education that underpins the different forms of democracy, which today form the foundation of basic and higher education. Orlowski (2011) hopes that education can become a place of "resistance and hope" through the assumption of critical thinking, understood as a set of cognitive skills that can be transferred to different contexts and areas of life (Davies & Barnett, 2015, p. 89), which can be decisive for the development and promotion of evaluation, investigation and judgment skills. Critical thinking can be said to be an essential exploratory and investigative tool, conveying a type of self-directed, self-disciplined and self-corrective thinking, which requires an effort to examine any beliefs or purported forms of knowledge. It presupposes effective communication and an ability to recognize problems, to find viable means of dealing with them, and to collect and organize relevant information. With reference to citizenship, it involves at least three dimensions (Glaser, 1941), which concern the willingness to consider in a thoughtful way the problems and themes that fall within the range of experiences, the knowledge of logical methods of investigation and reasoning and the ability to apply them. If "civic thinking" refers to the ability to consciously understand and participate in civic and political life, "critical" thinking refers to a process of analysis and rational evaluation of information, situations or ideas, which involves the ability to think critically about what one reads, hears, or observes, rigorously examining arguments and evidence. Therefore, it can be said to be a fundamental tool for making citizens aware and capable of participating constructively in society. The contribution focuses on the conceptualization of the integration of these concepts in the field of citizenship education, which can be a key to equipping individuals in education processes with the necessary tools to understand the complexity of society, participate in an informed way in collective decisions and contribute to progress and common well-being. These aspects are often included in educational programs to develop a responsible and aware citizenship, but the ability to nurture the relationship between the two forms of thought, interconnected by critical reflection, has as its objective the development of a "democratic civic identity", which can be conceived as a dimension of citizenship education that lives within a democratic school and its results.