Reasoning in Primary Schools

Reasoning skills should be taught in primary schools because it allows people to think about the world around them in a more encompassing way. Reasoning is a skill that takes time to fully employ and teaching children at a young age can give them a better chance in the long run to use the skill to their full advantage.

According to Schick and Vaughn (How to Think About Weird Things, 2008, 78) there are four pieces in the steps to acquiring knowledge starting with perception, then introspection, memory and finally reason. The first three are basic in every human while the last is more difficult to acquire. Reasoning is methodical and not as intuitive as the other methods of information gathering. It requires knowledge of things against which to weigh other things in order to reach a conclusion. For example, if it is snowy outside it is safe to say it is cold. Without having the knowledge that snow is a frozen material, one would have no idea whether snow was cold or not and could not conclude that it would be cold outside. Of course, reason could not be without perception, introspection and memory. Once we perceive the snow, realize it is cold, and remember it to be so we can say just by seeing snow that it is cold outside.

There are critical periods in learning when we acquire these different skills. According to Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, children’s brains do work differently than that of an adult but eventually, around age eleven or twelve, they reach the capacity for reasoning of a mature adult. From age six or seven to about age eleven or twelve children become able to imagine events that occur outside their own lives. http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/i/i_09/i_09_p/i_09_p_dev/i_09_p_dev.html

Rebecca Saxe (MIT) also suggests that the human brain begins to develop the capacity for empathy, or the ability to think about other’s thoughts, around age seven. http://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments.html

This progression leads to the ability to make moral judgments. Without the incorporation of reasoning, this skill is nearly useless. She gives examples of humans at different stages of development being given moral tests of judgment and they obviously progress in reasoning with age.

What could be wrong with teaching reasoning skills to primary school aged children? Perhaps they would not fully grasp the concepts being taught to them and the lessons would be wasted. Well, while that may be true, we teach our children manners from an early age and though they rarely understand the lessons at first, after practice and cognitive development the lessons have a great impact. Teaching children reason from an early age is much the same idea. If we show children consistently lessons of reasoning that can be applied to practical situations, eventually they will understand the lessons and be able to fully apply them. Furthermore, we know that a human being can only master a second language up to around the time of puberty. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2920538 During this critical period in development, it could be safe to say that other skills are best learned as well. During this time, the human brain is developing rapidly and cell production is occurring at an amazing rate (up to 250,000 neurons are created per minute!) http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/dev.html The argument could be made that this might be the best time to teach a human being about reasoning and show them the basic skills used to reach logical conclusions. At the stage in cognitive development of a primary school student, the capacity to absorb new information is great. While the information may not be fully processed until later in development, there is no reason exposure should be withheld. We teach students multiplication in third grade so they may do algebra in sixth, so they may do geometry in ninth and so on. Giving children a basis for reasoning could only lead to a better chance of mastery of the skill at a later point in development.

Reasoning not only leads to the drawing of logical conclusions, it lends itself to empathy and morality and gives human beings the ability to accept good information and reject nonsense. By teaching our children reasoning skills at an early age, we would in turn be creating more well-rounded adults, who would have a greater sense of empathy and morality as well as a better understanding of the world around them.