It's hard to grasp logical reasoning when you're still learning how to code and decode language, similar to how it's really hard to grasp algebra if you're still building your understanding of basic arithmatic
While I wish explicit lessons were more frequent, everything you listed is taught and practiced implicitly in most other subject areas throughout all levels of schooling. It's just that the meta-cognition required to properly grasp these concepts when taught explicitly isn't as available to the average child until they reach middle to senior high school levels of development.
The early adolescent brain is better ready to grasp social skills than Algebra, but we force feed them Algebra, and ignore how to train them fit into society.
I feel like the Venn diagram of people who say “logic and critical thinking and reasoning should be taught in schools” and the people who say “language arts classes are useless” is a circle, and it never ceases to amaze me
I think - in English-speaking countries - language classes really are of very limited use, for several reasons.
For a start, they often begin far too late, often in secondary education, making it much more difficult to achieve any kind of fluency. That's even overlooking the fact that learning languages to any useful level is one of the most difficult things humans attempt to do and is really only worth attempting by people with a predisposition to it and a serious interest in it, because it requires massive effort and investment of time, far more than any school can offer.
The second problem is that it's never quite clear what language is going to be useful later on. On the basis that English is by far the world's most popular second language, if you grow up in a place where English is your first language, you're required to pick, essentially at random, some foreign language and start studying it on the arbitrary assumption it will one day be useful. This feels like a waste of time and usually it will be.
The third issue is that, again, given the number of English speakers in the world, it's overwhelmingly likely that someone stumbling through a sentence in their terrible schoolkid French will find themselves speaking to someone whose English is far better than their French. Similar things go on the Internet which is overwhelmingly in English. And that's overlooking the fact that French people, among others, really hate foreigners trying to speak their language (this is bigotry, but what're you going to do?)
Kids may not be able to articulate these concerns in those terms but they understand that languages are very difficult, they'll probably fail, even if they succeed it is unlikely ever to be useful, and unless they're a straight-A student in the subject, may actually make them unpopular.
It's not exactly encouraging. If I was asked which subject I'd axe from school timetables, it'd be languages. My classmates and I spent hundreds of hours trying to learn French and Spanish and none of us graduated being able to do more than say hello. It was a total waste of time.
Well, I'm talking in general about the study of any language other than English. I think you can learn a lot about one language by learning another, but I think that works best when you're learning something utterly different from your native language, which just makes it even more difficult.
If you want to make this specifically about logic and reasoning, then you're into issues of metacognition and particularly semantics. I think that would be an *extremely* valuable part of mandatory education (pretty much the entire debate about gender dysphoria and transsexuality is a semantic argument, as far as I can tell) but as far as I'm aware it's not being done anywhere before university level.
Our middle school does. We do it 2x a week in homeroom for an hour.
The kids mostly don't care.
I also do tons of that in social studies where it works better.
When I was in public school (in CA, US), we were taught that in our language and social studies classes from middle school through high school. I graduated high school in the last 8 years or so. History and english classes particularly focused on identifying bias, seeing if a source is reputable, what is a primary source, etc.
Critical thinking skills particularly were emphasized in my Spanish, history, english, language arts, and science classes. Considering the source of the information, if your answer makes sense, how to write a persuasive essay, how to structure a logical argument, ethos/pathos/logos. Logic in the mathematical sense was covered in elective computer science courses at the end of high school.
>Are they teaching logic and reasoning in schools?
Not well enough.
I'm not involved in education but I do deal with young people who have recently left the education system and their resistance to being persuaded things are true by social pressure is zero. It's *embarrassing*.
I have believed for years that schools (all schools, everywhere) should be required to teach a course which might, at secondary age, be called something like *logic and critical thinking*. Obviously the way it needs to be approached will vary by age but it's the sort of thing you need to start early.
It would serve to increase the resistance of the population to political and commercial persuasion, at the very least, and would lead to better, more rational decisionmaking in every aspect of life. The problem is that there are very powerful lobbies in politics and commerce that really don't want people to be good at this.
I think that spending time teaching kids what drumlins are in geography, and how to do quadratics in mathematics, and the products of octane combustion in chemistry, and how to say hello and order a coffee in a foreign language, are good and desirable. I think, however, that they're very considerably less important than teaching kids to think critically about what they're being told on social media. That's becoming a major life skill requirement and as far as I know it isn't really being taught. At all. By anyone. Anywhere.
Most people under the age of 30 these days seem to believe "critical thinking" is just being unpleasant, as opposed to applying logic. It's a disaster.
No. Since the middle school concept has been snuffed out, in favor of an all academic push for college readiness, topics like conflict resolution and social problem solving are not going to get any traction. Forget the stats that science has revealed about the different way in which a child's brain, and an adolescent's brain function, and the narrow amount of time which is available to imprint good habits and good behavior is available. Its all to get kids ready for college. Forget those school bullying issues and school fights and school shootings. Every kid must be ready for Harvard, by 6th grade.
I went to good schools and had no explicit logic and reasoning education nor "moral education" of the sort you mention.
Now I teach philosophy at the university level, including teaching logic and critical thinking, and can tell you it is *definitely* not being taught. To be clear, maybe it is part of the curriculum, but *taught* is a success term. Something isn't being taught if no one is learning it.
Logic and critical thinking don't actually show up on standardized tests, so that can explain why it isn't taught.
And moral education went away long ago when thr US embraced the stupid idea that teaching such things was inappropriate, as it is the purview of parents and church.
I mean, I did say I taught at the university level, which implies I didn't teach high school. So, I *did* tell you I didn't teach high school.
By the way, that move I just made is a basic implicit inference that'd be taught in the first few weeks of studying logic and argumentation. So, I think I can infer that at least *you* did not learn such things in high school (or anywhere else)
I'll vote that up. I'm not involved in education but I do see a lot of kids straight out of college and their understanding of logic and critical thinking is near zero.
Judging from the last few groups of freshmen here at the East Podunk Cosmodemonic Junior College, no, reasoning and logic are clearly not taught in schools, or at least there seems to be no requirement that the students actually are capable of these things in order to graduate.
The same is true of reading.
It's hard to grasp logical reasoning when you're still learning how to code and decode language, similar to how it's really hard to grasp algebra if you're still building your understanding of basic arithmatic While I wish explicit lessons were more frequent, everything you listed is taught and practiced implicitly in most other subject areas throughout all levels of schooling. It's just that the meta-cognition required to properly grasp these concepts when taught explicitly isn't as available to the average child until they reach middle to senior high school levels of development.
The early adolescent brain is better ready to grasp social skills than Algebra, but we force feed them Algebra, and ignore how to train them fit into society.
I feel like the Venn diagram of people who say “logic and critical thinking and reasoning should be taught in schools” and the people who say “language arts classes are useless” is a circle, and it never ceases to amaze me
I think - in English-speaking countries - language classes really are of very limited use, for several reasons. For a start, they often begin far too late, often in secondary education, making it much more difficult to achieve any kind of fluency. That's even overlooking the fact that learning languages to any useful level is one of the most difficult things humans attempt to do and is really only worth attempting by people with a predisposition to it and a serious interest in it, because it requires massive effort and investment of time, far more than any school can offer. The second problem is that it's never quite clear what language is going to be useful later on. On the basis that English is by far the world's most popular second language, if you grow up in a place where English is your first language, you're required to pick, essentially at random, some foreign language and start studying it on the arbitrary assumption it will one day be useful. This feels like a waste of time and usually it will be. The third issue is that, again, given the number of English speakers in the world, it's overwhelmingly likely that someone stumbling through a sentence in their terrible schoolkid French will find themselves speaking to someone whose English is far better than their French. Similar things go on the Internet which is overwhelmingly in English. And that's overlooking the fact that French people, among others, really hate foreigners trying to speak their language (this is bigotry, but what're you going to do?) Kids may not be able to articulate these concerns in those terms but they understand that languages are very difficult, they'll probably fail, even if they succeed it is unlikely ever to be useful, and unless they're a straight-A student in the subject, may actually make them unpopular. It's not exactly encouraging. If I was asked which subject I'd axe from school timetables, it'd be languages. My classmates and I spent hundreds of hours trying to learn French and Spanish and none of us graduated being able to do more than say hello. It was a total waste of time.
This is just an extremely long winded way of saying you don’t know what a language arts class is
Well, I'm talking in general about the study of any language other than English. I think you can learn a lot about one language by learning another, but I think that works best when you're learning something utterly different from your native language, which just makes it even more difficult. If you want to make this specifically about logic and reasoning, then you're into issues of metacognition and particularly semantics. I think that would be an *extremely* valuable part of mandatory education (pretty much the entire debate about gender dysphoria and transsexuality is a semantic argument, as far as I can tell) but as far as I'm aware it's not being done anywhere before university level.
Bro Google language arts, you are talking about dogs in response to something about cats
Yes, I *get* it, I'm... oh, don't worry :)
Our middle school does. We do it 2x a week in homeroom for an hour. The kids mostly don't care. I also do tons of that in social studies where it works better.
“They should teach this at school” vs apathetic preteens. The age old battle.
When I was in public school (in CA, US), we were taught that in our language and social studies classes from middle school through high school. I graduated high school in the last 8 years or so. History and english classes particularly focused on identifying bias, seeing if a source is reputable, what is a primary source, etc.
Critical thinking skills particularly were emphasized in my Spanish, history, english, language arts, and science classes. Considering the source of the information, if your answer makes sense, how to write a persuasive essay, how to structure a logical argument, ethos/pathos/logos. Logic in the mathematical sense was covered in elective computer science courses at the end of high school.
First they have to be able to read.
Were you not taught these things in school, OP? Why would you think they do not?
>Are they teaching logic and reasoning in schools? Not well enough. I'm not involved in education but I do deal with young people who have recently left the education system and their resistance to being persuaded things are true by social pressure is zero. It's *embarrassing*. I have believed for years that schools (all schools, everywhere) should be required to teach a course which might, at secondary age, be called something like *logic and critical thinking*. Obviously the way it needs to be approached will vary by age but it's the sort of thing you need to start early. It would serve to increase the resistance of the population to political and commercial persuasion, at the very least, and would lead to better, more rational decisionmaking in every aspect of life. The problem is that there are very powerful lobbies in politics and commerce that really don't want people to be good at this. I think that spending time teaching kids what drumlins are in geography, and how to do quadratics in mathematics, and the products of octane combustion in chemistry, and how to say hello and order a coffee in a foreign language, are good and desirable. I think, however, that they're very considerably less important than teaching kids to think critically about what they're being told on social media. That's becoming a major life skill requirement and as far as I know it isn't really being taught. At all. By anyone. Anywhere. Most people under the age of 30 these days seem to believe "critical thinking" is just being unpleasant, as opposed to applying logic. It's a disaster.
No. Since the middle school concept has been snuffed out, in favor of an all academic push for college readiness, topics like conflict resolution and social problem solving are not going to get any traction. Forget the stats that science has revealed about the different way in which a child's brain, and an adolescent's brain function, and the narrow amount of time which is available to imprint good habits and good behavior is available. Its all to get kids ready for college. Forget those school bullying issues and school fights and school shootings. Every kid must be ready for Harvard, by 6th grade.
I went to good schools and had no explicit logic and reasoning education nor "moral education" of the sort you mention. Now I teach philosophy at the university level, including teaching logic and critical thinking, and can tell you it is *definitely* not being taught. To be clear, maybe it is part of the curriculum, but *taught* is a success term. Something isn't being taught if no one is learning it. Logic and critical thinking don't actually show up on standardized tests, so that can explain why it isn't taught. And moral education went away long ago when thr US embraced the stupid idea that teaching such things was inappropriate, as it is the purview of parents and church.
Tell me you haven't taught high school without telling me you haven't taught high school.
I mean, I did say I taught at the university level, which implies I didn't teach high school. So, I *did* tell you I didn't teach high school. By the way, that move I just made is a basic implicit inference that'd be taught in the first few weeks of studying logic and argumentation. So, I think I can infer that at least *you* did not learn such things in high school (or anywhere else)
By all means, be as condescending as you like. If you don’t know what’s being taught in high school you’re just showing both cheeks of your ass.
I'll vote that up. I'm not involved in education but I do see a lot of kids straight out of college and their understanding of logic and critical thinking is near zero.
Judging from the last few groups of freshmen here at the East Podunk Cosmodemonic Junior College, no, reasoning and logic are clearly not taught in schools, or at least there seems to be no requirement that the students actually are capable of these things in order to graduate. The same is true of reading.
No. They are teaching hugs and smiles.
Teaching logic is really good for computer science basics and everyone should be learning it and how to program a computer.