At least in the context of (higher) education pedagogy, critical and ideological thinking are regarded as irreconcilable opposites: one desideratum, the other anathema. In the aftermath of WWII, for example, the first official mention of critical thinking as a goal in Swedish education assigned it a crucial role in the making of independent democratic citizens capable of resisting propaganda (SOU 1948, p. 504). But the distinction between critical thinking and ideology is not so clear-cut. Opposing camps within critical thinking studies have accused each other of ideological blindness (Burbules & Berk 1999). Inasmuch as critical thinking as an educational goal has become a normative idea ritualistically iterated in educational policies and in curricular parlance, it can be said to perform the function of legitimizing and perpetuating a certain worldview in support of a larger and systematic body of normative ideas that we may call “ideology”. Finally, as Leo Berglund (following Luc Boltanski) argues in his recent PhD dissertation, the appropriation and operationalization of the potentially subversive critical dimension of critical thinking by the educational institution’s actors (researchers, educators) and within the educational institution for the purpose of strengthening its position and justifying its mission is fundamentally an ideological act (Berglund 2021, p. 50). Conversely, ideological thinking may not be so incompatible with democratic life if, following Clifford Geertz (1973), we conceive of ideologies as indispensable symbol-systems that provide blueprints for social and psychological processes and can therefore be considered prerequisites for our condition as political animals.
It matters how we define critical and ideological thinking. For the former, I will use the taxonomy I presented in a recent article on critical thinking in the course objectives of English literary studies in Sweden. In that article, I identified four major models of critical thinking in higher education: as cognitive-argumentative skills, as cognitive-argumentative skills and psychosocial dispositions (these first two comprising the Critical Thinking Movement), as resistance to oppression through critical pedagogy, and as a crucial step toward critical acting and being, a direction known as criticality (Cananau 20021). Out of the many theories of ideology, I rely on Paul Ricoeur and Clifford Geertz’s approaches, which are particularly appealing for literary historians.