Logic is not only an exact science, but is the most simple and elementary of all sciences; it ought therefore undoubtedly to find some place in every course of education.
William Stanley Jevons, Elementary Lessons on Logic (1870), Preface.
Categories
W.S. Jevons
3 replies on “W.S. Jevons”
Jevons’ remark probably is just why the Los Angeles Unified School District dropped the teaching of formal logic when I was in school, many decades ago. (I decided to study it on my own at the time.) Without logic, one’s aims are directed more by whim than anything sensible, and force replaces reason.
One of my high-school English teachers made fumbling and incompetent but sincere attempts to teach logic.
It’s hard to tease-out the extent to which the subversion of logic, of mathematics, and of science in the schools originates in bad ideology as opposed to both the bad ideology and subversion originating incompetence. I believe that the two explanations should be combined.
It’s no accident that Whately and Jevons were each logicians as well as significant figures in finding the foundations of economics in the attempts of individuals towards their goals to use resources rationally.