[rramadass]

Well said.

Also i highly recommend everybody to read the great logician Alfred Tarski's classic book Introduction to Logic: And to the Methodology of Deductive Sciences to really understand "Logic" which is what Formal Reasoning is based on.

[chrisweekly]

Agreed. Also, I feel strongly that logic should be part of the core curriculum in liberal arts colleges if not high school. I took a Logic class as an undergrad, in a course that covered Sentential, Predicate, and Aristotelian (syllogistic) Logic, then became a paid tutor the next semester. It was profoundly useful, and applicable to nearly every other field of study. So many otherwise well-educated people frequently fall prey to common logical fallacies, likely because their grasp of logic is strictly intuitive and implicit.

[rramadass]

Logic should be taught from the intuitive aspects first before turning it formal; With lots of domain examples to show how sentences often have a common Form (i.e. structure) which can then be generalized as Symbolic Logic ranging over a Domain of Discourse/Domain of Interpretation. Once this distinction between "Structure/Form"(i.e. Syntax) and "Meanings"(i.e. Semantics) is grasped then mechanical manipulation strictly following rules, starts to make sense.

Instead, what is taught is starting with truth tables for logical operators and thus students simply don't learn to think/understand. For example, almost everybody is thrown off by the "implication" logical operator (evaluates to True when the antecedent is False irrespective of the consequent). But if you use some actual domain examples then it becomes clear why it is so.

Alfred Tarski's classic book mentioned above does a good job of building up logic from the first principles and hence is a great companion to any standard textbook.