Lecture - Critical Social and Political Thinking in Secondary Schools - Georgios Bikos - 3rd Better World Conference

Lecture - Critical Social and Political Thinking in Secondary Schools - Georgios Bikos - 3rd Better World Conference from Alfred Snider on Vimeo.

The critical social and political thinking and the methods of educating students in secondary level education, Georgios D Bikos, University of Athens, Greece

To begin with after pointing out the main characteristics of critical thinking, we then come to define the features of critical social and political thinking and the relation between general and social-political thinking and also between the social and political conception of the world.
The first part of this introduction is a brief presentation of the reasons that make it necessary to understand modern social and political life in a more critical way than before, as it is a very popular thesis about the end of ideology, together with the belief that politics has more to do with a public policy and a technocratic science mostly dealing with public affairs, rather than the “art of possible” which sets political courses and creates changes in the fields of polity, economy and society.

Then, we develop the teaching methods and ways through which this kind of thinking can grow into the minds of secondary education students. We present the teaching material, techniques and means which if included into the social and political subjects’ curricula, will provide teachers with the ability to develop their students’ critical minds towards the understanding and explanation of social and political status. One of the main methods we suggest is one that is based on the in-class conversations on controversial topics, on public affairs and on public policy issues, basically argumentative structured / debating like conversations.

3rd International Conference on Argumentation, Rhetoric, Debate and the Pedagogy of Empowerment, October 2010, Maribor, Slovenia.

Further details can be found at the conference websites:
Basic information at debate.uvm.edu/​debateblog/​better/​Welcome.html
News blog at betterworldconference.blogspot.com/

The conference was organized by the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor in Slovenia uni-mb.si/ , ZIP, Za in proti, zavod za kulturo dialoga/Pro et contra, institute for culture of dialogue zainproti.com/ , and the World Debate Institute of the University of Vermont debate.uvm.edu/​debateblog/​wdi/​Welcome.html .

The organizers are grateful for the support of our sponsor QatarDebate qatardebate.org/ .

Thanks to organizers Boris Vezjak, Alfred Snider and Bojana Skrt. Special thanks to Peter Mesarec, Monica Sobocan and Aljoša Polšak.