American Education Sphere as a Space of Rational Critical Thinking

One of the priority directions of the modern education process is developing of secondary and higher schools students’ critical thinking. Modern society tendencies such as constantly expanding informational space, skyrocketing role of the communicative processes and increasing amount of information form challenge of developing students’ critical thinking for the linguistic and communicative practices. Purpose. The purpose of this article is to analyze the role of critical thinking, to consider philosophical tradition of the critical thinking development, to find out what kinds of critical thinking development techniques providing special educational activities are used at universities. Methods. The methodology of this research is the comparative analysis of different kinds of critical thinking and philosophical systematization of its functions according to the specific value of critical thinking. The functional approaches to realize interdependence of critical thinking and communicative competence, the significance of the philosophical tradition of developing of the critical thinking for the linguistic and communicative practices of critical thinking are implemented in this article. The American tradition of differentiating content presentation, possible interpretations and self-assessment in the analysis of texts is systematized. The analytical method is used to find out the significance of different kinds of critical thinking development methodical techniques, provided special educational communicative activities at universities, such as: reasoning, argumentation, dialogues, debates and others. Results. Considering the importance of argumentation, its skills are taught as in high schools as well as in the US universities. Today teachers require from their students to generate and defend their views, to learn the ability of thinking independently, to formulate their own opinions with responsibility and to defend their position argumentatively. Not least in these requirements occupy argumentative communicative abilities as a way to explain and defend their arguments and critical thinking, which is one of the tools to analyze perceived information. Means of argumentation and critical thinking are improving while the whole students’ training period with the help of such means as dialogue and discussion methods in classes.