«Snitching Is Wrong Because it Is Not Right». Teaching and Learning Critical Thinking in Italian Technical and Professional Schools

In Italy, philosophy is a compulsory subject in the so-called Licei from the third to the fifth year of secondary education. At least since the Brocca Commission in 1992, the idea of introducing philosophy in technical and professional Italian schools has been discussed and endorsed in national documents. In this paper we describe a project that is aimed at introducing philosophy in the form of philosophical dialogue into technical and professional schools. In the scholastic year 2021-22, 35 classes, from 18 technical and professional Italian schools, took part in a pilot consisting of 10 hours of sessions of philosophical dialogue conducted according to the guidelines of the Community of Inquiry pedagogy that is adopted within the Philosophy for Children educational movement. One of the leading motivations for the adoption of philosophical dialogue in schools is that it is claimed to improve students’ critical thinking skills and dispositions. In order to test this hypothesis, we administered to students and control groups a test on some basic critical thinking skills (the capacity to distinguish reason from claims, and the capacity to produce reasons for claims). In this paper we present the pilot, the structure of the critical thinking test, the philosophical and pedagogical rationale behind the project, and we discuss the results of the test.