Education for citizenship in Chile and critical thinking

Abstract

Given the relevance that the official curricular discourse gives to the ability of critical thinking, at a national and international level, as a ‘key competence’ in education for citizenship, this research article aims to know and understand how that skill is meant and the importance that Chilean teachers attribute to it in the formation of a citizen subject. The findings presented come from the application of 99 semi-structured interviews and two focus groups conducted with teachers from Valparaíso (Chile). The analysis of the speeches, assisted by the qualitative software NVivo 12, was coded through the survey of six matrix categories: citizenship, authoritarianism, curriculum, school, teaching role and neoliberal logic. From the curriculum matrix, a discursive line emerges as a subcategory on critical thinking that, on the one hand, supports the notionist and individualistic discourse of the government's educational policies, and, on the other, appeals to a transformation of society through the development of critical skills that oppose the dominant system, generating nebulae in its conceptualization and a semantic polyphony that operates as an “umbrella” concept due to the multiplicity of meanings it embraces.