logic

In elementary school, you studied such things as reading, writing, and arithmetic. These subjects are correctly regarded as basic to all further education: One cannot study history, botany, or computers without being able to read. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are the basics, the tools that permit one to study further, and also to drive, to shop, and to get a job.

But could there be something more basic than the three basics? Something so obvious that most people do not see it, let alone study it? What is there in common between calculating, reading, and writing? The answer of course is thought. One must think in order to read and write. Thinking, just as everything else, is supposed to follow certain rules, if we are to think correctly. Sometimes we make mistakes in thinking. We jump to conclusions; we make unwarranted assumptions; we generalize. There is a subject that catalogs these mistakes, points them out so that we can recognize them in the future, and then explains the rules for avoiding mistakes. That subject is logic.

The study of logic, central to Western education since the ancient Greeks, has been marginalized by the US government, in the public schools and universities, so as to dumb down Americans. They're so much easier to fool and to rule that way.