I’ve been a proponent of critical thinking ever since I first studied logic in college 30 years ago. Since then, I’ve often said, “We could solve most the world’s problems in a generation if we started teaching kids critical thinking today.” This is so, I believe, because too many of us regularly commit what philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called the, “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” meaning we mistake our ideas about the world for the world itself. My college philosophy professor, Wallace Roark, defines the fallacy of misplaced concreteness as, “mistaking our ideas for actualities.” I’ll never forget him saying on my first day of his logic class, “People think psychologically, not logically.” I’ve been so bothered by this tendency to let our beliefs and emotions bias our thinking that I once wrote an 18-lesson critical thinking curriculum for adolescents and teenagers. The Unitarian Universalist Association rejected it for not being “spiritual” enough. (Too bad, so sad!) More recently, during my post-election sermon, I pledged this year to “establish an International Organization that promotes and practices logic and emotional intelligence, so that more of us can more readily move into a place of executive function and empathic decision making.” I’ve been working on The Surak Society: Dojo of the Mind ever since. This is an organization that will help us learn these skills, not through teaching theory, but through their practice. (See details in additional article for time, date, and location.) Participants in the first sessions will help us, through trial and error, determine which techniques work best, which hardly work at all, and develop a few we haven’t thought of yet. Once we get the kinks worked it, it will be time to introduce the Dojo of the Mind to the world.
— Rev. Dr. Todd F. Eklof, UUCS Minister