Logical reasoning is in short supply these days wherever you look. Politicians are throwing fallacies about as if they were confetti and most journalists lost sight of a sound logical train of thought long ago. In universities and public schools, children are taught principals that directly conflict one another, leading to a bog of logical despair impassable by the brightest minds.
Yesterday, my kids learned the rules to evaluate a classification:
- Is there a consistent principle, are the categories mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive?
- If so, do the categories represent an essential attribute of the items being classified?
This may seem easy and trivial, but the logic behind evaluating a set of categories can be very tricky if you forget the underlying principle of consistency.
Logical reasoning is the core of our lives, sadly uncommon in these days of a growing progressive educational swell that threatens to deaden the capabilities of our entire population.
I teach my children that all my years of graduate school in multiple fields, endured at great expense – both monetary and personal, taught me four important things:
- Approach everything you do with a clear mind and with an obsessive use of critical thinking and unerring logical reasoning.
- Do not be afraid to try something that no one else has ever done.
- Pouring liquids from large mouth containers to ones with smaller openings does not require a funnel after much careful practice.
- Avoiding cross contamination in your food stores (or in the biology lab) allows you to keep your materials longer without spoilage, thus reducing costs.
For the purposes of this discussion, really only the first lesson is important, although the rest of the list is really useful depending on the situation.
Spending the time with your kids to teach them the uncommon core of logic and critical thinking should be as fundamental as teaching them to tie their shoes. It was a skill possessed by the founders of our country when they were much younger than most of you reading this post. So it is definitely something your children can begin to learn.
And why shouldn’t the uncommon core become mainstream?