What is your Opinion on Having Required Classes in Logic in Schools?

[TheRealJoeFish]

I would strongly advocate an Intro to Logic course in high school. In our high school, formal logic was taught as a chapter in PreCalculus. This was a reasonable start, but maybe only 20% ever took precalc. I took Logic 101 and Symbolic Logic in college, as well as Intro to Algebra (the college algebra, not high school algebra 1), which was largely a logic course.

This is related to a similar topic that I often mention. Having been a math whiz, with a degree in math, people now ask me "do you think everyone should have to take calculus/geometry/algebra"? Because you will get some math people who think everyone should have to take calculus. No, I say, I don't think everyone should have to take calculus. I don't think everyone should have to take geometry, although a very basic familiarity with shapes and such is good. And, even with algebra, as long as you can work with a single-variable word problem equation (like "hmm... if four tires cost $488, how much does one tire cost?), I don't think everyone needs algebra at the quadratic equation level. WHAT EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE, THOUGH, IS A BASIC COURSE ON STATISTICS. Not everyone needs to know how to create or present information or calculate figures, but EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW HOW TO INTERPRET FIGURES PRESENTED TO THEM. Every consumer should know exactly how they're being lied to/manipulated, should have a basic understanding of correlation v. causation, and should be able to read a line graph.