In his postscript to The Eye of the Needle Rick Turner closes his analysis of South Africa and its prospects for social transformation with the comment that he is conscious of not having provided a plan or guideline for how change might happen:

This yardstick he proffers is, importantly, not an ideal in the Weberian sense. It is not a defined thing. It is centred largely on consciousness – ‘utopian thinking’. In defending it, he elaborates: ‘There are two reasons why it is important to think in long-range “utopian” terms … It constitutes a challenge to all accepted values, an invitation to continuous self-examination, to a continuous attempt at transcendence … [It makes possible] in the light of other possible societies [an understanding of how our society works] and why it works as it does’ (Turner 1980, 1–3). Foregrounded here and used orientationally throughout the text are the grounded competencies of consciousness – critical thinking, analysis, theorising and planning.

In this contribution, I work with Turner's insistence on the need to develop the capacity for critical thinking and consider its relevance for contemporary debates that are taking place around education and change. I ask how Turner's (1980, 1) thinking, produced at the apogee of the forty-year period of apartheid, when repression was at its most intense – ‘Other things being equal,’ he commented, ‘it is impossible for a black person to become prime minister of South Africa’ – might help us think about how we approach that great task of education and free it of its most limiting inclinations.