APRIL 14, 2010. I’m approaching home-schooling parents with this course, because I believe a revolution in the education system should begin at home, with the family.

There are several confusions about how logic relates to faith, and I’d like to clear those up.

Consider the amazing amount of information floating around in our culture. Books, articles, internet postings, television news, videos, lectures, seminars, political talk, sales pitches, public relations chatter, scientific claims, educational material, and so on. In this arena, there are HUGE numbers of logical errors. As a reporter and educator, I’ve been cataloguing the errors for 25 years.

If children approach this mountain range of information with no understanding of logic, they will accept some ideas and reject other ideas in unpredictable ways—almost on a random basis. They will walk unarmed into the future and have no basis for judgment.

Who in his right mind wants to encourage or condone a situation like this?

That’s why I created the LOGIC AND ANALYSIS course. It provides a very thorough grounding in a tradition that is all about rational thought. The student gains the ability to analyze information from many different fields and find the flaws. The student becomes very skilled at using the superb tools of logic.

On the other hand, there is faith. This is very personal and very profound. Logic doesn’t touch faith. It is a separate subject.

I have found, in fact, that people armed with logic become much clearer about their own faith. Why? Because they aren’t trying to put that faith under the magnifying glass of analysis. They understand that faith and logic are two different worlds.

However, when people try to attack faith with their own version of logic, those who really know logic can respond immediately and lucidly—and fend off those arguments with great ease.

When, many years ago, I studied the great Western philosophers—especially Plato, the father of rational thought—I was struck by how clearly he admitted his own faith.

These days, some scientists are finally coming to grips with these issues. They are climbing down off their high horses and saying there are matters beyond the scope of the physical sciences.

There is no contradiction here.

If I said the existence of a hammer somehow eliminated the need for a screwdriver, everyone would know I was off my rocker. If I said travel documentaries completely negated the idea of actually going somewhere and seeing life firsthand, people would know I needed a good brain-nutrition supplement. If I said music clearly eliminated the need for science, I’d be laughed out of court.

So it is with logic and faith. The existence of one doesn’t challenge the existence of the other.

They actually support each other.

Some people of faith are a bit nervous about logic. Here is the reason: They haven’t studied enough logic. If they had, they would know that logic eventually brings you to a place where you have to confess you are now navigating by other means. You are crossing over into a territory where different rules apply. Your deepest convictions are now your compass, and those convictions don’t require a foundation of proof. They only require the reward that comes from believing what you believe.

Feel free to inquire about my logic course. qjrpress@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.

APRIL 12, 2010. I have received MANY inquiries about my new course. People have asked me for an outline or syllabus of the course. So here it is.

I’m happy to answer any and all questions that come up while people are reading the outline, including queries about cost, shipping details, etc.

When students complete this course and know the materials, their world has changed. They can approach other material in school and out of school with vastly increased awareness—and they are, in fact, eager to dig into new information and analyze it with these new tools. The students become the inheritors of a profound Western tradition of thought, a tradition that brought tremendous progress to civilization.

Two significant points: Unlike some other educational publishers, I offer the course for use as many times as the teacher wants to teach it to his/her student classes, on into the future—the price of the course remains the same. And I do not increase the price of the course on the basis of how many students are in a given class.

I’M AVAILABLE TO HELP TEACHERS MASTER THIS MATERIAL, SO THEY CAN TEACH IT WITH CONFIDENCE TO THEIR STUDENTS.

Keep in mind that this outline only begins to describe the depth of the material. The student, in many classroom sessions, analyzes passages of text that contain multiple logical errors. The student learns how to dissect these passages and find all the flaws. This is an experience that can literally change lives—because the student wakes up to what logic is all about in a real-life situation—as opposed to passively accepting whatever information comes his way.

OUTLINE

The course has 18 classroom sessions. The last two sessions are the final exam and the teacher’s step-by-step review of the exam.

The teacher’s manual explains how every lesson is laid out.

EVERY CLASSROOM LESSON IS FILLED WITH EXAMPLES THAT ARE STUDIED BY THE STUDENT, UNDER THE GUIDANCE OF THE TEACHER.

LESSON 1—The student learns how generalizations and vague terms can infect the reasoning process and make it useless and misleading. What is a generalization? What is a vague generalization? What is a vague term? Examples are studied. Vague terms and generalizations are the most common errors found in the reasoning process.

LESSON 2—The student learns to analyze several traditional logical fallacies that occur in a line of reasoning. These fallacies are shown in many examples. They are concise and clear. These are the flaws first described by Aristotle in ancient Greece.

LESSON 3—The student now begins to examine actual passages of text that contain multiple logical errors. The passages are short. With the teacher’s guidance., the student comes to see how these passages are misleading. This lesson is the groundwork for everything that is to come in the course.

LESSON 4—The student tackles a whole host of text passages that contain logical flaws. These passages illustrate such fallacies as: polemic; attacking the person rather than the argument; vague terms; inappropriate analogy; “sales pitch”; omission of vital information; circular reasoning.

LESSONS 5-16—The student now embarks on the analysis of six much longer and more complex text passages. Each long passage is studied for two classroom sessions. These passages resemble news stories, political promotion, internet journalism, science press releases—in other words, just the sort of material we all come across every day. The teacher has the students take apart each passage and offer up the errors they find; then, the teacher explains ALL the errors.

In my CD that accompanies the teacher’s manual, I go through each of these long passages and describe the errors contained in them. The teacher can play my descriptions to the class.

Lessons 5-16 are the core of the course. The student gains confidence in being able to dissect, SPECIFICALLY AND IN DETAIL, realistic written material that contains multiple logical errors. Step by step, passage by passage, the student learns how to find the flaws and see through the misdirection.

LESSONS 17 AND 18—The student takes the final exam. In it, the student examines a new long text passage and writes down all the SPECIFIC errors he/she can find. Then, after grading the exams, the teacher gives, in the last class, a detailed analysis of the exam passage.

This outline can’t possibly present the experience of actually doing the course. So after reading this, feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

HYPERLINK “mailto:qjrconsulting@gmail.com” qjrconsulting@gmail.com

The teacher’s manual is very complete. It contains every passage contained in the course—and a detailed explanation of how the major passages are flawed. Essentially, the teacher studies the manual and then teaches the course. I am available to answer questions teachers have as they study the material themselves.

The course is geared for bright high-school students. I am, on request, available to design logic courses for children of different ages.

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.

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.

APRIL 11, 2010. I’m writing this article because I’ve just finished creating my home-school course called LOGIC AND ANALYSIS. In the process, several things became clear to me.

Over the last 40 years, the assault on Western culture and civilization has taken people so far away from lucid thinking and logic, they don’t even know this discipline exists at all.

What has replaced it is entertainment.

It seems that hundreds of gimmicks and machines are now necessary, in order to keep the attention of children in school. There is a fear that without these “up-to-date” items, the kids will drop into a coma or walk out of the classroom.

Well, entertainment has an interesting side effect. It enables humans to jump quickly from one moment to another, leaving the last moment in the dust, forgotten. In other words, all-pervasive entertainment contributes mightily to short attention spans.

I’ve encountered this phenomenon as a lecturer. Standing at the podium, I’ve seen light bulbs of discovery go off above people’s heads as I explain the specifics of medical fraud.

And then, an hour later, standing in the lobby, surrounded by audience members, I’ve heard these same newly enlightened people ask questions that reveal they’d heard nothing of what I’d just said inside the hall.

Ah, but they had heard it. It was illuminating, to be sure, but it was also entertainment—as far as they were concerned. Therefore, they could shrug it off and kick it to the floor under their chairs and forget it.

Why do people opt for entertainment rather than education?

Because they have no mental foundation to which they can attach new learning. It isn’t there.

Yes, learning to read and write and do math are basics—but there is another basic that has been expunged from our curriculum: logic. Most people in America don’t even recognize logic is a body of knowledge in the same way that biology, geology, physics, and chemistry are.

Astonishing, when you realize that learning has to be hooked to the star of logic, so it can flourish.

When Plato began writing his Dialogues 2400 years ago, he was bringing to light, for the first time in recorded history, a version of logic. He apparently learned about these matters from his teacher, Socrates, and he passed the knowledge on to his pupil, Aristotle—who, in turn, created a foundation for what we now know as science.

One can trace the development (and repression) of logic all the way up through Western thought, to the present—where, in high schools, it arouses almost zero interest.

It’s now fashionable to discard logic, just as it is fashionable to grant universal “equality” to all opinions, no matter how ridiculous and unintelligible they are.

When the foundation is gone, the house collapses.

So I am about re-building the foundation and the house.

Some of you have asked me for a syllabus of my new course. Here it is.

LOGIC AND ANALYSIS is taught in 18 class sessions.

The first two sessions are filled with short examples of logical fallacies.

The third and fourth sessions examine slightly longer passages of text that contain multiple logical errors.

Sessions five through 16 take up, in great depth, long passages that read like newspaper articles, political statements, PR, and internet journalism. Students learn how to identify and explain, in specific terms, the logical flaws these passages contain.

Sessions 17 and 18 are the final exam and the teacher’s dissection of the exam.

The teacher’s manual and an accompanying CD lay out each session’s lesson plan. The lesson plans include my explanations of the passages and the errors they illustrate.

LOGIC AND ANALYSIS is designed to give students something they’ll never forget, something they’ll use for the rest of their lives.

It represents a step in the process of restoring the kind of education that once existed and disappeared many generations ago.

If you’re interested in teaching or studying the course, contact me. qjrpress@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.

By Jon Rappoport

 MARCH 24, 2010.  I have been a supporter of home schooling for many years.  There is one overriding reason: the quality of the education can exceed, in many cases, what is offered in public or private schools.

There are, of course, other reasons.  For example, parents who are dedicated to educating their own children will take part in a great adventure.  Although the experience will present many challenges and struggles, the potential rewards are enormous on several levels.

With all this in mind, I am offering certain advanced courses to home-schooling parents.

These well-shaped courses will present vital material on the art and skill of LOGIC.

In most schools, the subject of logic has been lost.  Therefore, the ability to analyze written and spoken material has faded into obscurity.

If you are a parent who home schools your children, or if you know such parents, feel free to contact me at: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

During my 20-plus years as a reporter, I’ve run into hundreds and hundreds of claims in which evidence has been lacking.  I’m talking about vague, partial, and fragmentary evidence being accepted as complete.

To put it another way, people argue for a particular position, and in support of that position, they offer proof which isn’t really proof.

When you understand and can apply logic, you see through this false proof quickly.

Once upon a time, there were textbooks which listed 15 or 20 traditional logical fallacies, and students were taught how to spot those fallacies in any argument or presentation.  Such students became very confident in their own analytical skills.

However, as public education descended into a stagnant pool of political correctness, fraudulent graduation rates, and “new values,” logic was diluted and discarded.  It was considered an enemy of preferred group-think. 

In addition to this disintegration, many bright students (more than ever) were being drawn into law schools, where they learned that any side of any issue could be compellingly argued—by the practice of twisting logic into knots.

When I was a college student, I was lucky to study under a professor who taught very rigorous courses in logic.  I found myself in possession of tools I could use in any course. 

I’ve now developed materials that are effective for teaching logic and analysis.  These courses do not challenge faith or personal conviction.  They are designed to enable a bright student to take apart a written text, an argument, a visual presentation—and discover whether it is valid, whether it truly makes sense, whether it has holes in it. 

These courses teach the traditional logical fallacies, offer many sample passages and exercises, quizzes, tests, and simple teacher’s manuals and daily lesson plans.

I am pricing these courses so they don’t destroy family budgets.  I have seen other people offering school courses that are amazingly expensive.  I undercut those levels by a wide margin.

Let’s face it.  We are living in a world where the notion of individual freedom and power are under attack.  Sustaining that freedom involves knowing how to deal with propaganda designed to make us into confused collectivists.  When young people possess the know-how and the confidence to see through these shams, they are equipped to succeed.

Again, feel free to contact me at qjrconsulting@gmail.com

JON RAPPOPORT