Home – Home – Jornals – Professional Education in the Modern World 2018 number 2

The author analyzes most important characteristics and conditions of critical thinking formation on the basis of historic and contemporary data. The creation, formation and further development of critical thinking is formed by social-historic context, beginning with the Ancient Greece and until the modern society. The author claims for necessity of forming and developing critical thinking as the determining factor of personality development in modern conditions. The process of critical thinking formation becomes especially important during the transition to individual education paradigm. The paper highlights that development of critical thinking as the necessary tool of selection, analysis, systematization and interpretation of information is the condition for transition to individual training. The methodical problems of defining the critical thinking caused by "inflation" of critical thinking on one end and its "shrinking" on the other are shown and partially solved. The most important characteristics of critical thinking are seen as follows: openness, plasticity, goal-orientation, self-reflection and self-skepticism. The author shows the necessity of critical thinking's elements, hypothesizing and questioning.