RESPONSIBLE TEACHING: THE DEVELOPMENT OF CRITICAL THINKING AND MEDIA LITERACY OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE AS A NECESSITY AND OBLIGATION

Responsible learning and teaching are in a correlation with the development of critical thinking, which starts with presenting the problem and ends with presenting arguments. Through the implementation of contemporary teaching strategies, critical thinking is being developed with the tendency of expanding the consciousness of a competent individual in a constantly changing environment of socially distributed knowledge and programmed truths. In a time when information is a powerful "weapon", and the corpus of public knowledge represents a means of controlling and monitoring, only an individual inclined to critical thinking is the answer to the manipulative challenges of media content. Therefore, educational tendencies for the development of critical thinking have ceased to be a mere means, but have rather become the necessity, purpose, and goal of education and teaching. An individual that has a developed critical (self)-consciousness is able to consume the media selectively and thus distinguish the mediated reality. The research paper is based on the assumption that critical thinking is the absolute goal of the educational process, a departure from factual and dogmatic knowledge that does not prepare an individual for living in the world of scattered and fragmented truth. Therefore, the research paper observes critical thinking primarily from the position of contemporary pedagogical theory and practice.