The wish to skip ahead to “critical thinking” is often a wish for what logic really is: not being taken in, seeing what follows, refusing a bad inference. That wish is honorable. A mind that cannot tell a contradiction from a mere disagreement is already in trouble, in politics as in geometry.
School grammar, as many students meet it, can seem a list of corrections disconnected from any question worth asking. If that is what “grammar” has meant, the impulse to skip it is intelligible. Why linger over parts of speech when the world is full of claims that need testing?
Puzzles and brain-teasers can even be a first taste of necessity: if these premises are granted, that conclusion is not optional. A grid that will not come out unless the rule is kept is a small image of what it is for something to follow. This course does not despise that taste. It is one of the ways a student first feels that thinking has a discipline, not only a mood.
What is true, then, is the hunger to reason well, and the suspicion that mere correctness of form is not yet that. What has not yet been shown is that you can have the one by skipping the other.