Why I Want to Write a Homeschool Resource Book

One of the things I’ve noticed over the past 10 years or more is the way we have become less and less capable of critical thinking and more and more prone to see a headline and jump to conclusions.  We are so easily manipulated by the mainstream press that we cannot see that they are carefully wording things in order to get us to react emotionally so that we cease to think through the facts. 

Emotional reactions are more useful for those who seek to control us than critical thinking.  We no longer teach logic. We talk too much about how we feel about things rather than trying to look for truth and facts.  I remember way back in high school talking to the couple that ran our campus Student Venture group about facts, feelings and faith.  They taught that feelings are unreliable. Sometimes we have to take a step back from our emotional reaction and remember what is true in order to keep ourselves from doing something wrong or embarrassing.

I spent several years doing an hour a week on a local radio morning show in Cartersville.  It was kind of like Hannity and Colmes, if you remember that old Fox News show. One thing I tried to do every week when I brought in stories was to break down the issues into facts to combat my sparring partner’s sometimes outrageous barbs.  If we could calm down and plug in our brains more, we might be able to wade through the news that is thrown at us on a daily basis and figure out how much we are being played by the media with half-truths, omissions of pertinent facts, and sometimes outright lies.

We have seen this in so many areas the last few years.  Just asking questions is frowned upon.  Poking holes in arguments or pointing out illogical lines of thinking gets you banned from social media.  Stating the obvious (like men cannot have babies) makes YOU the anti-science one.  Reading both sides of a political story and concluding that the media is lying to you is not something we do very often.  We are taken in by conspiracy theories on both sides of the aisle. We live in fear based on headlines and then we are surprised when it turns out the media hysteria was not even close to the truth.  (Go read the recent Washington Post article about Georgia Democrats who were surprised it wasn’t hard to vote this time around, because they believed the uproar over the law passed last year cleaning up some of the problems we had here in 2020. Also, no one is dying of hunger or thirst waiting in line at the polls.) People join in protests over one issue or another and if they had the ability to think logically about these issues and didn’t just react emotionally, they might conclude that some of these things are not worth the emotional energy because the facts are not exactly what the media has fed us. The media tells us some protests are good and others are bad, and we emotionally agree with them without realizing how inconsistent we really are. We believe the headlines and the pundits instead of going to read actual bills and laws passed ourselves. (I know those are not easy to read; reading comprehension is another topic for another day.)

This kind of stuff frustrates me to no end, because if we still taught logical thinking skills, we wouldn’t be having all of these ridiculous controversies every other day.  I have been advocating adding logic, both formal and informal, into our school curriculum for years.  We won’t survive another 100 years if people stay so easily led astray because we have not given them the tools to look at information and find the illogical inconsistencies in what they are being told.

So this is what inspired me to try to write a homeschool resource book.  I don’t have all the answers, but we did things a little bit differently and made sure logic was part of the mix.  I’ve heard my girls pick out logical fallacies and poke holes in things they hear over the years, and I believe it is up to us to make sure the next generation has the tools to avoid being led astray by every shiny new thing the mainstream press throws in our faces in order to get us to act a certain way.

**I cannot guarantee what we did will work for everyone.  But it can’t hurt to try.**