Appeal to Tradition Question Pack - Free Download

In 1847, in a Vienna hospital, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that mothers giving birth in the doctors' clinic were dying at terrifying rates - up to 30% - while mothers in the midwives' clinic next door were mostly fine.

The difference? Doctors walked straight from autopsies to delivering babies without washing their hands. Semmelweis told them to wash. They refused.

"Gentlemen don't have dirty hands." "We've always done it this way." Mothers kept dying. Semmelweis was mocked, dismissed, and committed to an asylum, where he died. 

The doctors weren't stupid. They were stuck. They mistook "this is how we've always done it" for "this is how it should be done."

That's the Appeal to Tradition. Believing something must be right, safe, or best because it's old, familiar, or "the way we've always done it" - without ever checking whether it actually works.

This free Question Pack uses Semmelweis's story to show kids exactly how this fallacy works - and why "we've always done it that way" is one of the most dangerous reasons in history.

Your kids will hear it more than almost any other fallacy. At school. At home. In every "because that's just how we do things" they'll ever be handed. This free Question Pack teaches them to catch it.

What's in the free Question Pack:

• Discussion and research questions that get kids arguing about the Semmelweis story - the productive kind of arguing
• A guided walk through how an entire profession chose habit over evidence while mothers kept dying
• An answer sheet, so you can run it at the dinner table or in a classroom with zero prep

The deal, stated plainly We teach people to spot manipulation, so it would be a bit rich to hide ours. This pack is free because it's the best advertisement we have. You hand over your email, we send the download, and every so often we'll email you about new comics, book and our card game. Unsubscribe the moment we get boring. 

One email. Check your spam folder - our goodies have a talent for landing there. 

What the free pack doesn't include

The fully illustrated Semmelweis story. The Duchess & Bruno comic. The Spot-the-Fallacy hunt through real ads and headlines. The Code Breaker, the Draw Your Own Comic page, and the hidden Gizmo kids go feral trying to find.

All of that lives in the Appeal to Tradition Activity Pack - a 20-page printed booklet, rated 5.0 by teachers and parents on Etsy and TPT. 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "My kids absolutely adore the characters and story! It reminds us of horrible histories. I haven't found anything like this pack before." - Sandra

It's one of 24. Every pack takes one fallacy, one historical disaster and one comic - and turns them into a kid who is very hard to fool.