Words have different meanings to us at different times, a small-scale version of getting something different out of a book each time you read it at different points in your life.  Your own context matters.  In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the professor’s lamentations about schools’ failures to teach logic always seemed straightforward to me, a simple critique of schools for not teaching how to apply thinking in a deliberate fashion to the usual course of study, just as I experienced.  What more could there be to such a plain, concise statement?  Simple enough, and though I pull out the quote routinely, I rarely thought more about it until recently, when I had dual reasons to revisit education in logic.

First of the two reasons is Impressions, and specifically Raven’s coursework at University, which I deliberately based upon real, medieval institutions of higher education.  Not that it is a faithful rendering as might appear in historical fiction, but this is “historically adjacent fantasy,” and I did research to create Raven’s curriculum and inform his experiences.  Notably, logic is not merely something that medieval universities taught; it was its own course, like we today study geometry or literature.  Again, this is not some mind-boggling twist or insight, the idea of teaching a course on logic, but it is something I might never otherwise have thought of, simply because my context strongly assumed that logic is something to be learned adjacent to other subjects of study, not something to be studied by itself.  How wonderful!  How obvious!  How utterly dull and unimaginative of me to have never thought of it before.  Surely, it is no wonder that logic is not commonly implemented if we do not even prioritize or value it sufficiently to dedicate a single course to it.

This realization and the further study which accompanied it were paired with investigation, for entirely separate reasons, of how to teach “critical thinking.”  I took a single “critical thinking” course in high school, and it was amongst the most preposterous wastes of time of any class I took in high school or higher education.  Instead of instructing us on rigorous methods of thinking, showing us the means by which to think in a reasoned and deliberate manner, the course was almost entirely subjective, dedicated to “exploring ourselves,” “understanding each other,” “what does art mean to us,” and so forth.  This constituted an excellent example of how I did not want to teach critical thinking.  Of course, the investigation into teaching critical thinking arose from an examination of how to teach more effectively in general, specifically with regards to student considerations, not the instructor’s presentation of material.

These two prongs converged on the teaching of logic and critical thinking, and when I went to describe Raven’s coursework in logic, I realized how inadequate my own systems are.  For all I consider myself logical, I could not define a rigorous process by which I applied “logic,” and my reading on the subject consisted mainly of Euclid’s Elements, and Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric, which tangentially discusses logic.  If I studied logic rigorously before, it was only in the context of mathematics: how to construct a proof, a skill relegated solely to geometry and never deployed in education for other fields of mathematics, despite being equally relevant to everything from algebra to calculus, and Boolean mathematics, which is really a way of defining logic algebraically.  It is my intention to read and study logic in more depth now, primarily from historic sources, since I am aware of my inadequacies.

For now, I identified two lists which may be useful.  One is a process of medieval logic, specifically dialectic, which forms the precursor to the modern scientific method of inquiry.  It is based primarily upon Aristotle’s works and forms a six-step process: the question to be determined, the provisory answer to the question (what we would today call the hypothesis), the principle arguments in favor of the provisory answer, arguments against the provisory answer, the answer to the question to be determined after the arguments are considered, and replies to each objection.  This is the process which I had Raven demonstration during his first-year examinations (or a version of it, rather).

Logic, such as that demonstrated by the method of dialectic, can be considered part of a larger idea of critical thinking, or critical thinking can be defined as the process of applying logic to thought.  Modern theories of critical thinking identified six stages: the unreflective thinker, the challenged thinker, the beginning thinker, the practicing thinker, the advanced thinker, and the master thinker.  This sounds rigorous and structured…until you dig into what each stage means and realize how vague and uninformative these stages really are.  Oh, they might provide a useful common vocabulary for discussing critical thinking, but that is about all they can offer; they are not a method of critical thinking and knowing them will not make you a more critical thinker.

One might argue that we have far too much to teach students to dedicate years of coursework to the study of pure logic.  It is enough, surely, to point out, highlight, and laud examples of critical thinking and its application.  Looking at the quality of thought and discernment on regular display in our political discourse, our news articles, our consumption of information, and routine conversations makes it clear that this is not the case.  Logic and the discipline of critical thinking (not some loose, vague idea of ‘critical thinking’) are not developed incidentally or through osmosis; they are rigorous, systematic approached to thought that must be defined, practiced, refined, and implemented.  You will see reviews soon for books I pick up to enhance my own studies in this field, and I hope that you will join me in becoming more logical, and more critical, in your thinking.