20170409

Logical Fallacies must be a High School class

If we look at history of humankind since the beginning, there are so many examples of bad people (like dictators and demagogues) rising to power and manipulating masses to do bad things and causing big damage by using logical fallacies.
I have no doubt it also happens a lot everyday in smaller scales like in companies, schools, hospitals, stores, even in families.
Advertising industry also makes use of logical fallacies a lot.
Sometimes they used intentionally to manipulate people and sometimes it is just because no one with a good understanding of logical fallacies is around.
I think there are many more kinds of logical fallacies than most people realize.
(Of course many are just modified versions of some basic types.)
Each type of logical fallacy is like a software bug of human mind waiting to be exploited, just like software bugs in computers are used by viruses to take control and spread.
Also I think explaining logical fallacies to adults is never an easy task.
That is why I think logical fallacies must become a separate full time high school class, at least.
Of course starting to teach them even earlier would be much better.
K-12 students should come across testing for each and every kind of logical fallacy again and again with different examples until they have a good understanding of them all.
This is something extremely important for future of humankind!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

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