This project began around 1995 give or take a year or two. It started out with a lot more ambitious goals than the finished product. I wanted children, my grandchildren to learn logical thinkgin. I'm no expert in logic, by any means. But it seemed to me then, and still does, that the experts were not very good at explaining their knowledge. The academic logicians got lost in the details and technical jargon. The professional logicians always seemed to serve their knowledge up with equal helpings of rhetorical tricks and ways to get away with using fallacies, which I find repugnant. Nothing for kids.
However, I believe this is better than the original vision. The original idea was to have a series of stories which taught children the rudiments of critical thinking. As conceived there would be a series of dragons, each of which was responsible for enslaving their subjects with a family of logical fallacies. (Fallacy dragons = Fay Lacy Dragons = Fat Lazy Dragons.) They lived on a continent or large island on another world called Low Check. (Low Check = Logic) Each dragon ruled over a country and each community in the country was controlled by a different logical fallacy.
The idea was that the heroes would go through each community in a country, learning about the various fallacies as they went, until they finally met the dragon. The dragon would then try to use the fallacies to cast a spell on the children, but would fail because the children had learned about the fallacy and how to refute it. Then they would use a key they had to return to their home, until they found another key, and came back and worked their way through another country.
The first community was some sea snails hopelessly trapped by amphiboles. From the swamp they lived in I hoped the children would learn something about the biosphere. I also had in mind encouraging the children to begin to understand the infrastructure required to support various kinds of technology. The snails for instance would have modern conveniences that worked, but there would be no power grid in place to actually make them work. This would also encourage critical thinking by getting them to consider which parts of a story were possible and which required suspension of disbelief.
The second community was about using exact numbers in vague ways. The story meandered into nonsense and I abandoned the project for a time. Then in early 2009 I was reading a allegorical story by John Bunyan called Holy War and was inspired to try again.
I whittled the goals down to size. Instead of trying to teach the children the technical names for all the fallacies I instead gathered most of the more common informal fallacies into 11 families and gave them the names of colors, or a color and a simple object. The 12th family introduces formal fallacies, which I intend to make the topic of my next book. It seems to me the important thing is to learn to listen for and categorize fallacies. It is like learning to count before you learn to add, subtract, multiply and divide. If they get the chance to learn the technical jargon later, there is nothing here to hurt them doing that, and a few hints that might help them. (I'll describe these momentarily.) If they never learn the technical details they have still learned an important skill of listening or reading carefully.
The opportunity to study the natural world and technological infrastructure still exists in the story. The different countries and allusions to various industries and infrastructure have survived in this version of the story, albeit in less detail. These can serve as springboard for specific assignments for the students in various disciplines. I have some specific recommendations along that line which I will include as a part of the teachers outline of the book.