A Reflection on the Education of the ‘Critical Person’

This paper draws on Ronald Barnett's Higher Education: a critical business (1997) where he argues for the replacement of the notion of critical thinking in higher education by a holistic concept of ‘critical being’. He calls for an education of the ‘critical person’ that encompasses three domains: academic knowledge, the self and the world of action. This model is explored in relation to an undergraduate interdisciplinary, theme‐based ‘critical reading’ course, which, it is argued, offers, in a modest way, the possibility of an education for critical being through the conjunction of its topic. Death; its interdisciplinary structure; and the Death Journals that the students wrote.