FAQ on Rappoport Logic & Analysis Course

FAQ on Rappoport Logic & Analysis Course

by Jon Rappoport

September 2, 2017

I’ve been getting requests to describe my logic course–hence this FAQ, which answers a lot of questions.

Note: The Logic & Analysis course is part of a much larger collection, The Matrix Revealed. The course was selling, alone, for three times as much as the entire Matrix Revealed collection but I decided to roll it into the Matrix Revealed collection to reach a wider audience.

I’ll make this FAQ as complete as I can.

Q: How long is the course?

A: Eighteen classroom sessions. That includes a final exam.

Q: So it isn’t just a workshop or a seminar.

A: No, it’s a real course.

Q: At what pace would you recommend teaching it in a home-school setting?

A: Three sessions a week, if possible. An hour per session.

Q: Is the course available online?

A: Upon purchase of The Matrix Revealed, you then download the document and audio files.

Q: What are the course materials?

A: A extensive teacher’s manual, student study sheets (text passages), and audio files.

Q: What’s in the teacher’s manual?

A: The manual contains a layout for all the lessons, in chronological order, and explanations for all the passages that are analyzed in the course.

Q: Passages?

A: Yes. There are short and long passages of text. I wrote these with logical errors embedded in them. Students and teachers work over the passages and discover the specific logical errors. The main passages are written to resemble news stories, press releases, political-speak, science journalism, and internet reporting.

Q: Why?

A: Because they resemble what you encounter in the real world. The whole point of the course is gaining the ability to deal with information in any form, in life. That means being able to take information apart and pinpoint the specific logical mistakes, and analyze those mistakes, in detail.

Q: If an adult is studying the course on his own, how does he proceed?

A: Actually, whether the adult is studying the course on his/her own or preparing to teach it to children, the approach is the same. Go through the entire teacher’s manual, step by step. Master everything.

Q: What is on the audio files?

A: My analysis of the six long passages of text that make up the core of the course. I wanted to do this part in audio, so the teachers can listen to me attacking the text and pulling it apart. It gives a sense of what it’s really like to dig out each logical error and identify it.

Q: When a home-schooling adult teaches the course, is it a process of the teacher and students mutually discovering logical fallacies?

A: No. The teacher already has mastered the course and knows where all the errors are. However, in class, the children first battle through a passage on their own, with the teacher noting their findings. Then the teacher explains each actual logical error in detail. Then, as homework, on their own, the students go back to that passage again and find all the logical errors, and describe them in writing.

Q: These logical fallacies—are they written in stone or did you dream them up?

A: The traditional fallacies have been discovered and described, in various ways, over the last 2400 years. They are very real and very exacting.

Q: What is your background?

A: As a college student (Amherst College), I studied logic as part of my major in philosophy. I had extensive training in logic there. I taught in several private schools in New York and Los Angeles, and tutored remedial English at Santa Monica College. I’ve had a 25-year career as an investigative reporter—LA Weekly, CBS Healthwatch, Spin Magazine, Stern (Germany), etc. During this period, I applied logic to my investigations on a regular basis. Particularly in the area of medical fraud, I had to use logic to get behind the PR pronouncements of various “authorities” and find the inconsistencies and deceptions that were occurring in published research.

Q: On what basis do you sell your course to home-schooling parents?

A: They may use it with any size class for as long as they want to teach it, as many times as they want to teach it, but the course must be taught in their own home-school. The course is copyrighted and cannot be sold or given away to other teachers.

Q: I have a plan to teach it to people in my community. Is that all right?

A: Absolutely. You can deliver the course as many times as you want to–as long as you are the teacher.

Q: Is your course given for academic credit in home schools?

A: No. It is for enrichment. I don’t use sanitized and silly politically correct passages in the course—most if not all school systems would refuse to allow real-world-type passages. They want largely unrealistic material. That would defeat the whole purpose of the course.

Q: Why is logic so important?

A: Because it is the foundation on which all other fields of study are built. It is a priceless Western tradition, and it is being lost. We need to reverse that trend. A student can’t be truly literate unless he can analyze what he is reading. This fact is ignored in most schools.

Q: Do you oppose rote learning?

A: Actually, no. I oppose learning that is exclusively and only rote. Students also think. Everybody thinks. There is a choice. You can learn how to think clearly, or you can remain passive and accept whatever is thrown your way. People have a confusion about this. They sometimes believe independent thinking is the same thing as rebellion. Clear thinking is clear thinking. It enables you to face information, reporting, and argument head-on, and make judgments on the merits. The logical merits.

Q: But what about, say, faith? How does logic relate to faith?

A: Learning how to think lucidly strengthens any faith or first principles you live by, because logic is about something else. Logic shows you the difference between profound faith and analysis. You don’t need to confuse the two.

Q: How many long passages are there in the course?

A: Six. They are taken up and analyzed during twelve classroom sessions. They are analyzed deeply.

Q: Is each classroom lesson of the course based on the prior lessons, or can it be taught in any sequence?

A: You follow my sequence. The course is built in a traditional fashion. The easier and simpler material comes first. Then, the more complex lessons and passages.

Q: Can I read an outline of the course?

A: Yes. I’ve included it at the end of this FAQ.

Q: Are eighteen classroom sessions enough to become a logical thinker?

A: Yes. You certainly don’t exhaust the whole field of logic, but you move into a new sphere. You can no longer be deceived or taken in by illogical presentations. You can take those presentations of information, in whatever form, apart and dissect the logical errors.

Q: Illogic is rampant in our society?

A: It’s the “way things are done” now. You have to realize that the higher you go on the educational ladder, the more subtle bias and coercion creep in. Teachers and institutions have their slant on things. They cleverly sell that slant and disguise it. If students don’t know what’s going on, they become captive to some form of bias. They become “products” of the system.

Q: Your course is an antidote to that?

A: It is. In our society, there are many political points of view masquerading as pure knowledge. The question is, do you want your children to fall under the sway of these strategies, or do you want their heads to rise above them.

Q: As an adult, will I be able to master the course myself?

A: Of course. The reading level required for the course is “bright high school.”

Q: I have children I want to home school, but they’re young.

A: I have several parents who have young children. These children are readers, but they’re not yet at the level of the course. So the parents are taking them through the course by reading parts of it to them, and then discussing the logical issues in those passages. Later, when these children are old enough and are reading at a high school level, the parents will teach the course to them again—fully. It’s a very good strategy, and it gives the kids a fine head start.

Q: There are several different types of illogical arguments?

A: About ten basic ones.

Q: Certain patterns of illogical argument emerge and you can recognize these patterns?

A: Exactly. I once had a student who worked for a big company. He was on the receiving end of many reports from a particular manager. After studying logic, the student was able to see that this manager was making the same basic illogical argument over and over, in different situations. He was costing the company a great deal of money.

Q: On the whole, would you say that people who offer illogical information are unable to see what they’re doing, or are they intentionally trying to deceive others?

A: Mainly, these people who chronically commit logical errors are uneducated—they don’t know logic. They’re struggling along in the best way they can. But a surprising number of people are just trying to sell their own personal bias. They’re slanting things intentionally to fit that bias. It happens in politics all the time, but I can say from experience that it happens just as often in science, and in other fields. Economics, history, psychology, for example.

Q: And students who can see this clearly and specifically would be ahead of the game.

A: Such students would have a towering advantage.

Here is the course outline:

The course has 18 classroom sessions. The last two sessions are the final exam and the teacher’s step-by-step review of the exam.

The teacher’s manual explains how every lesson is laid out.

EVERY CLASSROOM LESSON IS FILLED WITH EXAMPLES THAT ARE STUDIED BY THE STUDENT, UNDER THE GUIDANCE OF THE TEACHER.

LESSON 1: The student learns how generalizations and vague terms can infect the reasoning process and make it useless and misleading. What is a generalization? What is a vague generalization? What is a vague term? Examples are studied. Vague terms and generalizations are the most common errors found in the reasoning process.

LESSON 2: The student learns to analyze several traditional logical fallacies that occur in a line of reasoning. These fallacies are shown in many examples. They are concise and clear. These are the flaws first described by Aristotle in ancient Greece.

LESSON 3: The student now begins to examine actual passages of text that contain multiple logical errors. The passages are short. With the teacher’s guidance., the student comes to see how these passages are misleading. This lesson is the groundwork for everything that is to come in the course.

LESSON 4: The student tackles a whole host of text passages that contain logical flaws. These passages illustrate such fallacies as: polemic; attacking the person rather than the argument; vague terms; inappropriate analogy; “sales pitch”; omission of vital information; circular reasoning.

LESSONS 5-16: The student now embarks on the analysis of six much longer and more complex text passages. Each long passage is studied for two classroom sessions. These passages resemble news stories, political promotion, internet journalism, science press releases—in other words, just the sort of material we all come across every day. The teacher has the students take apart each passage and offer up the errors they find; then, the teacher explains ALL the errors.

In my audio files that accompanies the teacher’s manual, I go through each of these long passages and describe the errors contained in them.

Lessons 5-16 are the core of the course. The student gains confidence in being able to dissect, SPECIFICALLY AND IN DETAIL, realistic written material that contains multiple logical errors. Step by step, passage by passage, the student learns how to find the flaws and see through the misdirection.

LESSONS 17 AND 18: The student takes the final exam. In it, the student examines a new long text passage and writes down all the SPECIFIC errors he/she can find. Then, after grading the exams, the teacher gives, in the last class, a detailed analysis of the exam passage.

The teacher’s manual is very complete. It contains every passage contained in the course–and a detailed explanation of how the major passages are flawed. Essentially, the teacher studies the manual, listens to the audio files of me breaking down the text passeges, and then teaches the course.

Jon Rappoport has worked as a free-lance investigative reporter for over 30 years. http://nomorefakenews.com/