Can I Teach Logical Fallacies to Young People?

Yes, but not in the traditional school way.

Not the way where you break fallacies down into "formal" and "informal" categories. Not the way where you memorise Latin names and write diagrams to map out their structure. Blah, blah, blah. Nobody wants that.

And yet, whenever you look fallacies up online or pick up a fallacy book - even the kid-friendly versions - they make you want to hit the snooze button before you've finished the first page.

That's not how we do fallacies.

We do them the way they're meant to be taught. Through real-life examples that are funny, relatable and impossible to forget. The moment a young person sees a fallacy play out in a scenario they recognise - something that happened at school, at home, on their phone - it stops being a concept and starts being a thing they can actually use.

Take the anecdotal fallacy. Bruno's concern about his friend smoking is waved off with the classic anecdote: "My grandpa [insert anyone here] did [insert activity here] and he/she's fine!" 

Your child may not completely understand how these fallacies work on an intellectual level straight away. That comes later. But they will learn to recognise them. And recognition is everything.

They'll say "This looks familiar" or "I've seen this somewhere before" and that's when their spidey senses kick in. That moment of recognition - that slight pause before they accept an argument at face value - is the whole point. It's the thing that protects them.

Because here's the uncomfortable truth.

If we wait until young people are old enough to understand fallacies on an academic level, we've already left them undefended for the most vulnerable years of their lives. The peer pressure. The advertising. The social media manipulation. The bad arguments made by people who should know better. All of it lands hardest between ten and sixteen - exactly the years when we aren't taught to question any of it.

Familiar with how fallacies work, a young person hesitates. They question. They push back.

Unfamiliar with them, they get fooled, hoodwinked, or led down paths they could have avoided entirely.

That's why we start early.

And that's why we make it fun. 

See our "What Age is Appropriate to Start Teaching Logical Fallacies?" article for a deeper look at the research behind this.

See our What's the Fallacy game to help them practice recognising them at the dinner table.