Ideology, class and rationality: a critique of Cambridge International Examinations’ Thinking Skills curriculum

an article by Leonel Lim (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA) published in Cambridge Journal of Education Volume 42 Issue 4 (December 2012)

Abstract

This article undertakes a critique of the aims and objectives of Thinking Skills, one of the most widely and internationally used curricula in the teaching of thinking, offered by the University of Cambridge International Examinations.

By engaging in a critical discourse analysis of how political and class biases are (re-)produced in the forms of thinking that are valued in the classroom, issues of power and ideology latent in curricular discourses of rationality are foregrounded.

Specifically, it will be demonstrated that the text engages in the ideological project of shaping our common sense understandings of what thinking and rationality is and should be, not only in instrumental forms that both connect to neoliberal commitments and privilege a particular fraction of the middle class, but also in ways that evacuate substantive notions of morality, social justice, and the common good from individuals’ deliberations.

The article concludes by pointing to alternative conceptualizations of thinking curricula.

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