Fostering Critical Thinking and Reasoned Discourse in the Post-Truth Era: Towards a Post-Managerial Organizational Epistemology

This paper argues that the continued reliance on managerialism as a foundational theory of action in education, with its focus on efficiency, uniformity and control, is antithetical to the goals of fostering critical thinking and reasoned discourse. This underexplored misalignment diminishes our collective capacity for reasoned discourse, essential for citizenship in a civil democracy. We trace the decline in civil discourse and anti-intellectualism to the epistemological foundations of the field. Specifically, we highlight that the dominant managerial paradigm is antithetical to the goals of learning. Here, managerialism frames learning as the transfer of knowledge from expert to novice, inviting compliance and the suspension of one’s own sense making capabilities, rather than active, reciprocal, and critical engagement. Using what we describe as a post-managerial theory building method, we propose a post-managerial organizational epistemology grounded in the science of learning, focusing on developing critical thinkers and problem solvers rather than producing standardized learning outcomes.