There's a footnote on p. 55 of John Piper's recent book Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God that I found a little disappointing:
I haven't devoted a section to the formal rules of logic because it seems to me that realistically most people do not learn how to be logical and rational by reading books on logic but by asking questions and thinking hard as they interact with reasonable people (especially parents, while growing up) and as they read books that embody the truest way of thinking. I believe that if you will look long and hard at the way each passage in the Bible is written, and if you ask relentlessly why the words and sentences are connected the way they are, you absorb the logic of heaven and grow in the truth that leads to love.
True, people do gain from conversations with others, and from asking questions. However, I'm not sure that this should be separated from a little formal logic, particularly in a book on thought.
What I've found quite evident, both as a student of logic in the past and now having had the opportunity to try to teach this others, is that logic takes hard work. Thinking logically isn't always the most easy thing to do. And I've also seen people drawn by studies of formal logic to tackle their entire view of life in new and challenging ways. i.e. don't be afraid of it, but don't avoid it either.
Teaching formal logic shouldn't be separated from "asking questions" or from "thinking hard" - these latter two seem to be often applications of this and part of what makes such lessons stick.
