Learning Critical Thinking at home

One of the best classes I ever took was Logic and Critical Thinking. I sometime think I would be further along in life if I had been exposed to that kind of discipline earlier.

I want this to be a part of my children's education. To this end, I've discovered some excellent resources on logic published by home-school and classical education groups. Unfortunately, these resources are expensive and designed for full time teachers. So my best option is to cobble together exercises I find on the interwebs, and distill them into something I can do in 10 to 15 minutes with my kids. Compounding the problem is that I might be able to provide the repetition they need- if it were the only thing I was trying to cover. But I am more sporadic than not because I have a narrow time span in the evening to help with their homework, supplement what they learn in school, and squeeze in some geography and classics.

That's why I was interested to learn that a local university hosts a skeptics' club. Since it is affiliated with a university, I hoped it would offer extra curricular activities related to skeptical thinking in the same way that science clubs do sciency things (like go hiking or look through telescopes); or the way a political science club observes congressional sessions. I am fully aware that "skeptic" is a misleading term... such groups are usually atheist (a different thing altogether). But that's fine, I can handle the atheist part.

After observing the club conversation on facebook for about three weeks, I didn't see anything extra-curricular. I understand that as a campus club, its purpose is to provide a social outlet for students, not for community folk. Still, my hopes for something accessible were dashed. I did find some of the typical condescending posts but thankfully the tone was less severe than what is offered by other, hipper atheist groups. As I've blogged about elsewhere, people are too quick to believe (!) that merely identifying with a skeptic group immediately gives them powers of deduction and immediately raises their intellectual capacity above people (usually religious) they have decided to align themselves against (usually for political reasons). It seems I am disillusioned by the claims of skeptics. So if I want my children to be exposed to logic and critical thinking, our best option is the classical and home-school organizations, most of which have a conservative religious orientation. And judging by the club's posts regarding the Bible, my kids will receive from home a broader and more complete understanding of the Bible, its place in Western civilization, and the literature it  influenced. I figured all that syro-aramaic would come in handy one day.

"Atheist" and "skeptic" are two different things, though Webster's now lists "unbeliever" as a synonym of "skeptic". Still, the meaning of skeptic in English carries with it an attitude toward evidence and critical thinking. Despite Webster's, to call oneself a "skeptic" doesn't (or shouldn't) require a personal statement of unbelief, unless there's been a synod of atheists who've made a dogmatic statement about who can and cannot be skeptical.

What I mean to say is that anyone can be a skeptic. However modern atheists seem to be changing this by drawing firm boundaries around an "in-group", creating an unnecessary "us" and "them". Well, why not? Christianity did the same thing! Not really. Christianity (like most religions) defined its own beliefs based on a unique anthropology, for lack of a better term. But it did not say who could or who could not believe.

Truth claims notwithstanding, religions reflect differing concepts of humanity's relationship with the universe and, like it or not, are the result of centuries' worth of contemplation and philosophical inquiry. Belief in the transcendent is the consensus of the human experience. Claiming "atheist!" does not magically raise one's intellectual stature above the centuries of unwashed masses who adhere to a religion of some kind. Being an atheist is better described as a lateral move, from one outlook to another. It is an outlook that still needs to prove itself as a contributor to the human experience and not exist merely as club of provocateurs.

I will be taking my kids to science club events. But for the foreseeable future they will learn logic and critical thinking at home, as best as I can manage.