"The university is a lighthouse when it makes its students think, and this is an essential task of the professors".

"The university is a lighthouse when it makes its students think, and this is an essential task for professors," said Aurora Bernal, professor of Theory and History of the Education at the University of Navarra. The expert spoke at the VII workshop on identity, under the degree scroll "Critical thinking at the University: awakening interest in the truth", in which more than 100 people participated, including both in-person and online attendees.

Aurora Bernal pointed out that "societies in which a culture of the useful predominates, such as the present one, fail to cultivate the human. They have a lot of knowledge, but not enough deep knowledge".

Among the purposes of the Education Superior, according to the professor of the School of Education and Psychology, is "to make students wiser: to promote the skill to think in a concrete way, to think critically". Secondary school students and high school diploma are mostly trained to give their opinion and "they may not distinguish between thinking and thinking critically; they think about knowing more but not so much about thinking to reach the truth," said the expert, who pointed out that although not all students are like this, "they are impregnated with this cultural style.

"At the University, we are not satisfied with this and we encourage thinking with criteria, avoiding criticism without reasons. This requires sifting, analyzing, synthesizing, evaluating, discerning the true and the false, the good and the bad," he explained. In his opinion, "without critical thinking it is impossible to be free".

goal Professor Aurora Bernal, who gave a speech at lecture entitled "A University that surprises and encourages thinking", said that making people think should be the main goal of innovation professor. "Reading, writing and exposition are essential to develop critical thinking," she said. He also defended the master class: "The solution to the dispersion of students, which prevents them from attending a exhibition, is not to eliminate the master class, just as it is not to eliminate books and manuals".

The researcher proposed a procedure to boost critical thinking: surprise, since surprise "arouses emotion and admiration" and this in turn can awaken the desire to know. "A smart strategy is to start with the reality with which students connect. It is the beginning of a war in which you have to fight with themselves their passivity, and everything that prevents them from rising," he stressed.

The workshop of the University of Navarra, organized by the high school Core Curriculumalso hosted a roundtable with the participation of David Reyero, professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, and Francisco Esteban Bara, from the University of Barcelona. According to David Reyero, for current thinking, truth is the great enemy: "Having a different voice seems to be the main goal of the system educational. However, the core topic of critical thinking is not doubt, it is truth. Only the existence of truth gives meaning to questioning," he stressed.

"Thinking is a consequence of learning," he added. And the only valid recipe is to teach with full intensity: "The secret of good teaching is passion. Hence my skepticism by insistence on methodology."

On this topic, Francisco Esteban Bara added that in the face of the hype of methodologies, to cultivate critical thinking "perhaps there is nothing better than to contemplate the example". "In a single class absolutely marvelous things can happen. It is not necessary to program them excessively; it is enough to carry them in your head and in your heart".

In this regard, he made seven recommendations to teachers: be critical of oneself; be willing to doubt; go outside one's own subject; explain one's own experience as search engine of truths; recommend culture; sow concord; and have a sense of humor. "This can help us not to get lost in the forest of methodology and confuse the goal of the teaching. To educate is to bet. To be clear about the goal and put it at the expense of that methodology," he said.