Logic – How do we teach it?
Logic tells us that there will always be someone out there trying to tell us what we need to teach our kids. If the opportunity exists for a new fad and a pile of curriculum behind it, then someone will put together a program and soon there will be a tidal wave of options for you to purchase. These new fads usually come with buzzwords, and there are a whole new set of buzzwords floating out there lately. One of them is filtering down into the homeschooling world and it has me worried. Have you heard people talk about “critical thinking” and how important it is to teach your children this skill?
I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time with the idea that you need to sit down and teach your child to think.
When you teach, you show your child how to use tools to do something. You teach your child how to use the tools we call addition and subtraction and multiplication and division that will allow them to live in a world that measures things and uses money. We call that teaching math. You don’t skip the math part and jump right into trying to teach your child to figure out how much interest she will have to pay if she buys a home with a 30 year mortgage. She would be lost and confused. She wouldn’t have the basic math tools to understand and the interest calculation would remain a mystery.
When you try to teach your child “critical thinking” skills, you are skipping the subject you actually need to teach. That is logic. Logic is perhaps the most important tool your child can learn, except perhaps reading. Logic defines math and any of the sciences, and even the structure of most language. With out understanding logic, your child cannot make a solid argument or evaluate a persuasive speech or understand the basics of science.
In a lot of ways, logic is not a skill you learn but a tool to understand. Skills are things you learn using the fundamental tools you have mastered. Remember those wooden sewing cards we let our children play with when they were toddlers? Our little ones used shoelaces to thread through the holes in the cards. Were they sewing at that time? No, of course not. They were gaining the essential tools of eye-hand coordination necessary to learn to actually sew when they get older.
Logic is the essential tool for almost everything else. How do you teach logic? Start with what you already know and then go back to the ancients. They worked out the principles of logic long, long ago and those ideas are still the same today. The basic ideas of logic are also embedded into stories and fairy tales. This makes a lot of sense, since stories are a great way to teach children. Think about what happens in any of the fairy tales you grew up with. Aren’t logical choices a big part of the dilemmas facing any of the heroes and villains?
Fairy tales, children’s stories, and the Bible are a perfect way to start teaching logic. When your children are older, you can work through Plato and Socrates with them. That is really all you need.
So grab a book and read together with your child. Don’t worry about the buzzwords and the fads. You know best what your child needs and you know best how to teach her. You are her mother and that gives you all the qualification you will ever need.
