Everybody encounters obstacles in their daily life and UConn students are no different. If, however, graduates are equipped to handle adversity and thrive under pressure with the utilization of logical reasoning skills, then the university is doing a massive part of its job successfully. (Kurtis Garbutt/Flickr Creative Commons)
The University of Connecticut is to begin teaching a course in logic to students seeking to develop their critical thinking ability. This is likely to make waves around the campus and improve the diversity of thought and reasoning among students and faculty alike.
College campuses are intended to serve as higher institutions of learning in which free-thinking and abstract reasoning are central to the advancement of young students’ lives both at present and in the future. Students are supposed to question everything, challenging the ideas of history’s greatest thinkers and debating even their professors in order to siphon truth from the curriculum.
Higher education is about students learning to think for themselves in order to discern logical arguments from incorrect or possibly dishonest fallacies; to form their own opinions and arguments on the basis of logical reasoning and factual substantiation.
Frequently, students fall into the trap of believing that concurrence with the majority must be adherence to the truth. This, however, is not the case in many situations and logical reasoning abilities are valuable to possess in such circumstances.
It is with this in mind that students ought to consider the new course, which is being offered as a professional graduate certificate. In exploring this program, participants will be exposed to a vast array of diverse thinking which they are likely unfamiliar in the hopes of attaining the ability to sift through the sand and uncover a logical understanding of the issues. Furthermore, the fields included with the curriculum are as diverse and expansive as the thinking itself.
According to UConn mathematics professor Damir Dzhafarov, “Traditional programs may offer logic from one or maybe two of these viewpoints of logic, but we have an extraordinary group of over 40 members from math, psychology, law, computer science, among others”
The skills learned in this course are likely to transfer nicely into professional life following graduation. The hope, according to Dzhafarov, is for students to become proficient in deciphering and comprehending various problems and conceiving an effective and efficient means of solving them.
Everybody encounters obstacles in their daily life and UConn students are no different. If, however, graduates are equipped to handle adversity and thrive under pressure with the utilization of logical reasoning skills, then the university is doing a massive part of its job successfully.
