Abstract
According to specialists, critical thinking is necessary for everyone in all circumstances of life and more particularly for citizens in a democracy. As such, it should be the subject of real learning and education. The mission of the school is to bring forth and develop the critical thinking of the students so that they assimilate habits and modes of thought conducive to the exercise of a thoughtful judgment.Philosophy seems to be the most suitable subject for this project. But in Vocational High Schools it is never broached by students in their curriculum. Their academic profile, their difficulties, their busy schedules and the teaching of philosophy as practised in the other sections have resulted that, until then, philosophy has been absent from their training.In this thesis we question the possibility of introducing philosophy into the professional curriculum and try to verify the hypothesis according to which this subject would be beneficial for the students of these sections. For us, it seems essential the education of a youth be complete, taking into account all their potentialities and not be limited to a training only aimed at producing blue-collars, technicians. Thus, criticism education should also be part of their training. Faced with the difficulty of teaching general subjects in these classes, we turned to the New Philosophical Practices because they are innovative pedagogies, which seem to us necessary in vocational training. Among them, we choose to study Mr. Lipman’s Community of Philosophical Inquiry and Mr. Tozzi’s Democratic and Philosophical Purpose Discussion to see if they are conducive to the emergence and development of critical thinking in these students.In our research, we first present vocational training as it is taught in France and the students who attend these places of training that are Vocational High Schools. Then, we reflect on the meaning of a person’s education and discuss reasons for introducing philosophy into this curriculum. We then focus on defining critical thinking and its links to professional training and practice. This leads us to present the teaching of philosophy and to study whether it can be transposed into Vocational High Schools. This presentation leads us to study the two philosophical practices we have chosen and their link with criticism education. Finally, we present and analyze the extensive data that we have collected in our classes during philosophical discussions, using both methods, with tools that we describe. We examine the results of our analyses and verify the greater or lesser validity of our hypothesis. Based on the results of our research, we offer some pathes for further study.Through our research, we think we can make a useful contribution to the reflection needed to open up philosophy to the students of Vocational High Schools. At a time when the Ministry of National Education is considering teaching philosophy as an option in Vocational High Schools, we think that it may be appropriate for the didactics of the teaching of philosophy to get acquainted with our work. For us it is beneficial for the teams of Vocational High Schools to know what is possible to do and why, together with the practitioners of the Community of Philosophical Inquiry and of the Democratic and Philosophical Purpose Discussion. The contribution of these methods in vocational training has not yet been much documented towards these practioners.