The Evens Prize for Education is dedicated to the promotion of critical thinking as a practice of freedom.
With the prize we aim to support critical thinking as a social practice that stimulates (young) people to think actively and deeply about an issue at hand in order to see and understand it from different perspectives before reaching a conclusion. Ideally critical thinking involves dialogical and shared learning experiences that are crucial for different reasons.
Not only does it foster better understanding of one’s own thoughts and openness to new ideas and other viewpoints, it also helps us to understand how interpretation and knowledge are socially constructed, gives voice to people or groups who have been silent or silenced, and allows us to discuss complex issues.
We believe that it is essential for pluralistic democratic societies that citizens are able to think and work together to build a common world while respecting each other’s differences.
The new prize will be awarded biennially and will support inspiring practices, (practice-oriented) research or both, depending on the specific definition of each call.
The focus on critical thinking also gathers some of the concerns we addressed in our previous Prizes for Media Education and Peace Education (see below). After several editions, we noticed that the strongest applicants for both prizes tended to emphasize education that stimulates critical thinking.