Ijtimoiy-gumanitar fanlar

GENESIS AND EVOLUTIONARY DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPT "CRITICAL THINKING" IN PEDAGOGY

Critical thinking, pedagogy, genesis, reflective thinking, Bloom’s taxonomy, intellectual standards, cognitive competence, educational paradigm, metacognition, Socratic method

Authors

Critical thinking is among the most contested yet widely invoked concepts in contemporary pedagogy. This article investigates the
genesis and evolutionary development of the concept through a systematic historical-analytical review spanning from Socratic
dialectics to twenty-first-century metacognitive paradigms. Unlike previous surveys that treat the concept as a static construct, this
study maps five chronologically distinct developmental stages, identifying the internal logic connecting each transition. Drawing
on a structured analysis of fifteen primary and secondary sources selected through Google Scholar and Scopus databases, the author
demonstrates that critical thinking migrated from a philosophical virtue into a taxonomically measurable, teachable competence -
and argues that this migration was not linear but shaped by broader shifts in epistemology, democratic theory, and labour-market
demands. Original contribution: the article presents a synthesised periodisation table constructed from source analysis, and situates
the Uzbek pedagogical reception of critical thinking within this global trajectory for the first time in domestic scholarship. The
study identifies three underexplored tensions in existing definitions and proposes a working framework for contextualising critical
thinking instruction within the Uzbek secondary and higher education system