Logic is not a single year course. Well it is. But learning and mastering logic and the art of thinking and reasoning well takes time and practice.
Logic is not often taught in school, but thanks to the surge of classical educators more and more home educators are taking on the challenge of teaching logic. Students in the dialectic stage will spend about a year studying formal logic with propositions and informal logic with fallacies. Through the year of logic studies, a student learns how to think and reason well. He wrestles with ideas, tests them against specific forms, and learns to analyze them. Unfortunately, that’s where most formal logic courses stop. It’s obvious as to why, because we simply run out of time. Besides, what is the next step?
The next logical (pun intended) step is to test these ideas against other students logic. Once we’ve thought through, analyzed, and tested an idea in the laboratory, as it were, we need to test these ideas in the real world. Otherwise, they end as ideologies and go nowhere. The first way to test an idea in the real world is to bring it before other people and welcome them to counter it. This is the process of debate.
In debate a student learns how to present and defend the conclusions that he made in logic. For example, if his logic studies helped him to see that the proposition “All men have a right to life, liberty, and property” then his debate practice will challenge him to defend this proposition with research, evidence, and authority. In debate, he learns how to engage with his audience through ethos, pathos, and logos. All three of these appeals are needed to truly persuade. In logic, we focused primarily on logos, but in debate, we make our logos persuasive with pathos and ethos.
If you have a student of logic, let this be an encouragement to you to put those logic skills to the test with debate. Find a small group of logic students and test some of those ideas from your logic class. Because as Plato says, “For what should a man live, if not for the pleasures of discourse?”