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 ([1]) 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 ([2]), 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, selfdisciplined, 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 ([3]), 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