As per the subject, why isn’t formal logic taught as a mandatory requirement in all high schools in the US? Anyone who is familiar with logic and the fallacies associated with it have obviously experienced frustration with the great wave of, well, BS arguments and suppositions that grip this country. Not only would teaching logic in schools help minimize the overwhelming number of fallacious assertions but would serve as an excellent precursor to higher mathematics and help make such courses as Geometry and Calculus less of a mystery to most students.
So what do you think? Is there a good reason for it’s lack of availability in the public school system or is it just another Illuminati conspiracy?
But cirriculum choices are made by Board of Education, a group not known for their logical prowess. (The same ones who try to rewrite history books to their political slant).
Actually the goverment would be better off if people did have a strong grasp of logic and rationality. Then you wouldn’t have anti-goverment zelots that speak against how the “goverment” is controling it’s citizens. You would have people that understand that the goverment is a bunch of small interedependent branches that cannot even work together well enough to have fluidicy of ideas that benifit themselves let alone able to organize in such a way as to control a population without having every Dick, Jane and Harry that work for them discovering it.
Having a strong grasp of logic still doesn’t stop people from falling for propaganda though. Even logical people act irrational most of the time. Especially if they want to believe something is true.
IMHO Logic cant really be taught… why not teach good sense while you are at it ? I understand the reasons you mention and I agree… problem is the political class having to deal with way more educated and logical constituents. They might have to offer them some real governance. So they will never allow that.
While I think the teaching logic would be a good idea, I doubt that this assertion is accurate. To reduce this phenomenon, we would need to teach critical thinking, in general, beginning at a much earlier age–and I am not sure that everyone is “wired” to handle it. I have vivid memories of the guys with whom I took Logic in college Acing the course (because they were able to apply specific rules to specific contextual questions on an exam) who could not maintain a logical argument in their out-of-classroom lives for any reward or to avoid any threat. (And, of course, there were also the guys who could not even get the concepts down in the class.)
Certainly, providing the tools of logic to a larger group would mean that more people would successfully avoid errors in their thinking, but it would hardly transform society.
Ah yes, I am one for the teaching of Logic and Critical Thinking at the HS level. Of course, opponents to the idea will state that it is required at the college level. That would be fine, if you were required to attend college before being able to vote.
Personally, I don’t think the politicians would really like the idea. After all, a logic look at the current administration shows a laughable, at best, group in power. Suckers are much easier to rule.
Darn tootin’! Kids should be forced to have a classic liberal arts education: astronomy, geometry, grammar, logic, math, music, and rhetoric…along with history, shop, and PE.
That would set us free!
I’m not sure suckers are easier to rule. In my management experience, people who are confident and have clear goals cause a lot less trouble than the insecure and stupid.
I just spent a great many posts explaining to someone why self-refuting claims are invalid, and that circular arguments don’t necessarily imply a false premise.
You’re darned right; the basics of logic should be taught in high school.
Unless the confident people’s goals conflict with each others’, as well as your own. Then you have a lot of trouble.
The best way to rule people is to brainwash them into believing that they have independently come up with their own goals / ideas / principles, which actually happen to be your own goals / ideas / principles that you brainwashed into them.
Right. Where are you going to fit it in? I took three years of math, four years of science (chem, physics, two years bio), four years of English, four years of music, three years of Spanish, three years of history, year of economics, and a year of psychology.
Frankly, I don’t think it will make a difference. Everyone in high school gets taught the basics of government and look how many people don’t understand even those basics.
If you have to explain to someone why a circular argument is illogical then that’s not something schooling is going to help.
I think so too. At least my D+ in logic and reason shows that it couldn’t be taught to me. I got the “word problems” like “if dogs are mammals, and some mammals are black, are all dogs black?” but the things with the symbols made no sense to me whatsoever. It was supposed to be an intro class, but it felt like I was missing some prior knowledge that would have made it comprehensible.
If it was going to be mandatory, it would have to be a well-taught one. Very well taught.
I wish critical thinking were taught in high schools, but I’m not sure that teaching formal logic is the best way to go about it. What I’d really like to see is a course on deconstructing advertisements and political propaganda. (Granted, that basically describes my freshman English course, but it’s at the college level, and not all students make it that far.)
In New York, symbolic logic is taught as part of the math requirement. At my university, it can also count as a math course for gen-ed purposes.
Teach the kids about fallacies and cogent arguments during English class. They spend days writing persuasive essays. It seems to me a quick lesson in reasoning would benefit them AND be appropriate.
Hokay. Third attempt at posting this. Hamsters must be on break.
I’m expanding the OP just a bit. The art of logical reasoning is IMHO connected to the arts of propaganda. Persuasion relies on appeals to emotion, and logical reasonong is the direct opposite of this.
I think a course in logic, propaganda, argument, and persuasion would be great. It could explain all the things that come up in fora like Great Debates, such as the “ad hominem attack”, and could dissect how we argue and persuade people. I would have loved to take such a course in high school, but the closest I got was History of Revolutions.
Of course, there is the PR Flack’s Doomsday Scenario to contend with:[ul][]Several generations of high-school students, and the adults they grow into, learn how to reason and debate, and how to counter others’ arguments.[]Political campaigns based on fear, emotion, and predjudice flop completely.[]Celebrity-driven hype and fads cease to attract the mobs.[]Major advertising campaigns gutter out as consumers start discussing the actual merits of the products involved.[]People buy less and less stuff on impulse.[]With less demand at the factories, millions of jobs are lost.[]Millions of jobless adults default on their mortgages and debts, causing the banking industry to collapse.[]With the banking industry dead, the remaining industries have no support, so they collapse too.[*]The Starving Remnants of America battle each other on the docks of the west coast dor their iron bowls of Ghinese food-aid rice.[/ul]We’re being led around by the nose for our own good, really!
Yeah, but you have to find people to teach it first. I mean, have you ever been in an average public HS science class? Most of the people teaching those couldn’t be made to understand Newton’s First Law if it were the only thing standing between them and eternal ordure. Do you really think you’re going to find enough people to teach all of America’s high schoolers what makes a valid or invalid syllogism in such a way that it won’t just be something they’re reciting while in class and forgetting as soon as they get out?
Frankly, most people don’t need logic. Sure, it’s nice and it helps and such, but you can get away with being a mindless drone quite well. The problem isn’t trying to force logical principles into the vast army of simpletons out there. The problem is finding a way to make sure they never have decision-making power in politics, business, or child rearing.
Frankly, I think the idea that logic courses are going to steer people to ‘right’ ideas is suspect. Take any contentious issue, and you can find highly educated people on both sides of it. People who have had plenty of logic courses.
People are led to their conclusions not by failures in logic, but by gaps in knowledge, personal bias, emotion, and personal circumstance.
Personally, I don’t care if they have the ‘right’ ideas or not, as long as they don’t get them by means of strawmen and ad hominem attacks. That’s where the mandatory coursework in reasoning would come in.
Honestly, you can’t just throw logic into the mix in high school. You need to start off with getting kids to understand the basics of the scientific method and just the basic principles of logical reasoning, then work your way up through the fallacies and so forth, getting into symbolic logic by late middle school or early high school.
As far as getting people to believe the “right” ideas, I also find that to be suspect, because I’m not so sure how many situations in life have cut and dried “right” answers. The important thing is how you get there.
