APRIL 11, 2010. It’s hard to imagine it, but 2400 years ago, in ancient Greece, human thinking changed forever. In retrospect, this revolution exceeded the invention of the internal combustion engine or the harnessing of electricity.

Logic wasn’t there for all to see before Plato deployed it so boldly in his Dialogues.

What did the human race have before then? Superstition, competing beliefs, thousands of gods, theocracies, priesthoods, rigid group-think.

Certainly, there had been people (e.g., Egyptian architects) who could build monumental structures that would stand up and stay standing up, but the kind of fundamental thinking implicit in such designs remained in the background.

Plato pushed it into the foreground, and he utilized it so clearly in the Socratic Dialogues, no one who read them could avoid the subject from then on.

Logic naturally supports the notion of the individual taking matters into his own hands. If a person understands logic, he can use it, and no fly-by-night authority is needed. You could say, without stretching things too far, that the American Revolution would not have happened without the birth of logic in ancient Greece.

So it is no surprise, these days, as logic lies like an unread book in the dust, that the American government is doing things that deny any rationality. Another story for another time.

In my new home-school course, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, I resurrect this branch of knowledge and present it in a way that can be taught to bright high school students.

One of the most compelling aspects of the course is the study of circumstantial arguments. I made sure to include them, because the Internet is full of such cases.

The author of a circumstantial argument often piles up one factoid after another, as if the sheer weight of various details will guarantee truth.

These details swirl around the bottom-line conclusion in a largely unconnected fashion. They seem to be vaguely relevant, but there are huge gaps between this “evidence” and the point the author is trying to prove. The case doesn’t really add up. The author is relying on the fact that his readers don’t know much about logic.

When you break down and examine each piece of evidence, you find flaws: the author is really assuming what is trying to prove; he is attacking straw men he invents; he is fudging or distorting “research findings”; he is laying out a string of associations that end up with the cousin of the uncle of the “evildoer” once having worked for the nephew of a rumored CIA agent. You get the idea.

Yet this kind of argument has become very popular, and there is a wide audience for it. The audience wants to believe something, and the author feeds their belief with one lame circumstantial case after another.

I have thought long and hard about this degradation of rational thought and discourse—and finally I decided to do something about it, by going to the root: education.

How do we teach the young? How do we teach those who are bright and eager for knowledge? How do we teach the most hardworking and diligent students? Either we load them down with hundreds of facts they must memorize, and leave it at that, or we encourage them to wander all over the place and pick up whatever tidbits of faddish thinking they find attractive.

We ignore the foundation. We pretend there is no foundation. We never learned there was a foundation.

A proper course in logic can change all that.

In LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, I put aside ridiculous notions of political correctness. You may not know this, but if you are an educational writer who is hired to create passages of text for school courses, you’re immediately saddled with numerous rules and restrictions. Nothing you write, for example, can be interpreted as the vaguest slight against ANY group. By the time you’re done, you’ve written sanitized text that would have pleased any Soviet commissar.

On the other hand, I write material for student analysis that is likely to appear in a newspaper or magazine—and the students are required to take it apart from top to bottom and find the logical flaws and errors. This equips them for real life.

In the course, there are roughly 60 passages and arguments and paragraphs and sentences the students dissect. This is no brush-off. This is serious work. It’s a course, not a seminar or a workshop or a “presentation.” It’s a course of 18 classroom lessons.

The question is: do people want logic? Do they want to spend the time and effort learning it themselves, so they can teach it to bright young people? Or would they rather coast and skate and pretend they are equipping their children with the ability to think lucidly?

The teacher’s manual for the course instructs the teachers, step by step, explanation by explanation, so they CAN master the material themselves and then impart it to others.

Let me put it this way. If you, as a home-schooling parent, incorporate this course for your children, you will educate them in a way that puts them light years beyond the ordinary bright young person. That’s the bottom line.

We need a revolution in education. Rather than knocking on the doors of public schools, I’ve chosen to go to the people who care the most: parents.

In these times, we all know that personal freedom is considered to be a disposable quality for sale—and we know we don’t want to sell it or trade it. But there is another way to throw it in the wastebasket. You can cut children off from the tools they need to maintain their own liberty. The society will turn them into illogical and stunted adults; you won’t have a chance against that, unless you find a way to educate them, so they’ll face the world with a true sword of intelligence.

Logic is that sword.

It may sound strange to hear that, but it’s only strange because, over the last 80 years, logic has systematically been scrubbed from the curricula of most schools. It has become a disfavored stepchild. Tom Paine knew about logic. So did Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and many of the other Founders. They understood its power. They understood that, in the absence of logic, the American Republic could become a democracy of the mob.

I don’t know about you, but everywhere I look these days, I see political correctness and public-relations talk at the forefront of our society. We need to get back to basics—and education is the river that will take us there, if we put logic back in its rightful place.

I welcome all inquiries. qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Jon Rappoport has been working as an investigative reporter for 25 years. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize early in his career, he has published articles in LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, CBS Healthwatch, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. He has taught in several private schools in New York and Los Angeles, and has tutored extensively in remedial English at Santa Monica College. At Amherst College, where he graduated with a BA in philosophy, he studied formal logic under Joseph Epstein, a revered professor of philosophy.