Kevin Baldeosingh
?Many years ago, a reader wrote to ask whether I thought the trivium should be made part of the school curriculum in T&T.
In medieval universities in Europe, the trivium consisted of three components: grammar, rhetoric and logic. These subjects were considered foundational tools for the mind of an educated man. The reader felt that teaching children these courses would help elevate learning in this place.
Save for the logic course, however, I didn't agree with him. The teaching of grammar (meaning Latin) has been romanticized as aiding in clear and structured thinking, but Latin has no advantage over any other language in this regard (including, contrary to Indocentric propaganda, Sanskrit). Rhetoric, similarly, was taught because an educated man was expected to be an effective debater: but the tools of rhetoric are primarily eristic�that is, intended to win an argument, not to discover its truth or expose its falsity.
But the reader's query set me thinking about what subjects children should be taught in order to help them think clearly when they become adults. From my own experiences as a commentator, I knew the main obstacles to intellectual rigour: ignorance of science, philosophy, economics, history, and mathematics. Yet nearly all these subjects are taught in school already, so the issue wasn't familiarity with facts but, rather, ignorance about how facts are generated to create knowledge about the world. Thus, because even empirically-based facts are often contested by ideologues�eg, that Africans, not Europeans, established the first contact between the Old World and the New�ignorance of the foundations of knowledge makes even educated people unable to distinguish between valid and invalid factual claims.
In the end, I came up with three components which, if properly inculcated in the minds of students eight to 13 years old, could transform this society in one generation.
The first component comes from the original trivium: logic. But, for the general purpose of fostering clarity of thought, I would use only one aspect of logic�truth. This would start with Leibniz's Law, invented by the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. This says that two things are identical if everything that can be said of one can be said of the other. This assertion might seem absurdly obvious but, as developed by Leibniz, it facilitates truth evaluations of all syllogistic statements using the four following steps: (1) a=a; (2) if a=b and b=c then a=c; (3) a= not-a; (4) 'a is b' = 'not-b is not-a'. Leibniz employed these rules for the proof method known as the reduction ad absurdum, in which a statement is assumed to be true and conclusions drawn. If these conclusions lead to a contradiction, the statement is thus proved false.
The second component I would teach is the part of philosophy called epistemology, which deals with methods, validity and scope of knowledge. The main benefit of this would be to teach students the limitations of what we can know. This might seem a peculiar goal in a place where ignorance is so widespread, but in fact a key cause of ignorance is people's belief that their perceptions are equivalent to truth. Epistemology would be a corrective to the attitude, held by people who don't even know the concepts, that metaphysics is as valid a source of knowledge as physics. This is why, confronted with a scientific argument, so many people respond "Science doesn't explain everything" as if this is actually a rebuttal. Another favourite response is "You have your facts and I have mine," as if there are no criteria to judge the quality of facts.
This leads to the third, and in a sense most important, component: probability. I consider this the most important thing to teach young people because too many arguments in this place founder on two mistaken assumptions: that any dispute must have a clear either-or answer; and that a valid conclusion can only be drawn if you have complete empirical proof of an assertion. (This, by the way, is an example of a mutually incompatible belief, since the people who make it simultaneously hold that proof is a matter of opinion.)
For this component, I would emphasise the calculation of odds as developed by Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat, such as the chances of rolling, say, two sixes with a pair of dice. This would at least reduce the number of people wasting their money on Lotto. The other aspect I would recommend is the Law of Large Numbers which shows why, given enough instances, even improbable events can occur. I can think of no concept which, properly understood, is as effective a corrective to conspiracy theories. Lastly, learning to apply Bayes' Theorem would help citizens use a mathematical equation to judge even political scandals as to whether Housing Minister Marlene McDonald probably finagled a HDC house for her boyfriend.
All these can be introduced as subjects in themselves or within the standard timetable. At any rate, it is obvious that how students are taught at present doesn't help them think.
Kevin Baldeosingh is a professional writer, author of three novels, and co-author of a history textbook.