What grade does Goebbels get, pt. II
In an earlier post, I argued that a common way of thinking about first-year composition courses that claim to teach argument means that Goebbels could easily write an essay that would fit the criteria implicit in what remains a tremendously popular prompt. I said that the prompt forces teachers into a false dilemma of either giving Goebbels a good grade, or suddenly introducing a new criterion. The problem is the prompt.
I have a lot of crank theories, but this isn’t one of them.
In fact, what I’m saying is pretty much mainstream for scholars of argumentation, informal logic, cognitive psychology, policy argumentation, or political psychology. Just as what apparently controversial scholars in our field say about “grammar” is old news to anyone familiar with sociolinguistics, so anyone familiar with research in any of those fields would know I’m saying anything particularly insightful or new.[1]
And, because what I’m saying isn’t particularly controversial to anyone who is reading the relevant research, there are lots of ways of teaching fyc that don’t get teachers into that false dilemma. One solution is not to claim to teach argumentation, and to do any of the many valuable things that non-argumentation fyc can do.[2]
But, if we’re going to claim to teach argumentation, let’s do it. And there are lots of ways of doing it. That’s the next several posts.
Here, though, I need to argue why we should teach argumentation.
The problem is that fyc has long been dominated by a uselessly formalist presentation of argument, strongly connected to self-serving (and incoherent) definitions of rationality, teaching generations of people that having a “good” argument means having a “rational” tone, giving evidence from a “good” source, and giving reasons from “good” sources.
We do so because of staffing. FYC arose in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century when the notion was that there was a mental faculty, judgment, which could be trained through study of literature, music, or art. A person taught to have good taste would necessarily have good ethics because both were questions of good judgment. Similarly, writing “correct” English meant that they were thinking correctly, and communicating clearly (thesis first, list reasons) meant having a clear understanding of the situation. Interpretation was a universally valid skill, so teaching someone to read a poem was the same as teaching them to read a scientific study. College was seen as training someone to join a community of like-minded people with good judgment, good taste, and “good English.”[3]
Thus, teaching students to appreciate literature, and to write “well” about that literature made students better citizens. With that model of citizenship, it made sense to assume that graduate students who had been excellent literature undergraduates, highly skilled in meeting standards of “correct” grammar—even with no training in argumentation or linguistics—could teach first-year composition classes that would help students as citizens and students. That’s the staffing model we still have.
And, just to be clear, I think college students should study literature, although not for the reasons above. Reading literature cultivates empathy , can help people become more comfortable with uncertainty, fosters perspective-shifting. Literature courses can be tremendously important for an inclusive democracy.
But literature courses do not teach argumentation, and people skilled in literature are not magically capable of teaching argumentation.
This whole set of posts began because, in a comment thread about how our problem (meaning why do so many people think Trump’s open refusal to follow legal or cultural norms is okay) is that students don’t have civics classes,[4] I threw out the comment that fyc could be that class, but it would require a different staffing model, and someone asked me to explain. This set of posts is the explanation.
I meant something like, fyc could be a pretty effective civics course, but not a magic wand. And, of course, the very notion of a civics course that would make people reject toxic populist authoritarianism means a course that is grounded in a particular notion of democracy. It assumes seeing the democratic ideal as a community of people who value disagreement, who strive for a pluralistic world not about your group triumphing, but about a one in which we are all fairly represented, included, and accountable, and held to standards of fairness in terms of benefit and burden.
Depending on your model of education, there are lots of courses that could do this work–history, government, sociology, psychology, and first-year composition. Whatever class it is, it is not a course that relies on the transmission model of education; it has to be a course that persuades people to do the hard work of democratic deliberation. Telling students how to think about politics doesn’t work. I’ll come back to this.
Democracy is counter-intuitive. When we are making decisions, we are tempted to rely on what cognitive psychologists call System 1 thinking : we let our cognitive biases (especially in-group favoritism, binary thinking, associational thinking, naïve realism) drive the bus. Democracy requires that we step out of our world and engage in perspective-shifting, value fairness across groups (do unto others), are willing to lose, and can make our arguments rationally.[5] Ida Wells-Barnett’s Southern Horrors, Martin Luther King’s “Beyond Vietnam,” or Hans Morgenthau’s criticisms of Vietnam were all rational, offensive (condemned as violating norms of civility in their era), and deeply committed—perhaps even vehement—texts.[5] They are fair to their opposition not in terms of niceness, or attributing good motives to them, but in terms of accurately representing their arguments. Their arguments are internally coherent, applying standards across all groups.
In the previous post, I asked what grade Josef would get with a standard paper prompt, and I pointed out that, given that prompt, he would either get a good grade, or we would introduce a new criterion. That’s a dilemma created by how bad that assignment is. It’s also a dilemma created by how bad fyc argument textbooks are on the issue of “logic,” and how gleefully free they are from any influence by the various scholarly fields that should be influencing them: argumentation theory, cognitive psychology, political psychology. And that’s what this post is about.
We are faced with the dilemma about grading Josef because how fyc textbooks conflate “logic” with Aristotle’s term “logos.” (This recent article does a great job explaining that.) And can we start with: why in the world are fyc textbooks arranged around an anachronistic reading of Aristotle’s ethos/pathos/logos? If we’re going to rely on Aristotle, why not the enthymeme, which is what he actually cared about? Or, clutch your pearls, why not recent scholarship in argumentation, cognitive biases, reasoning, or any actually relevant field?
When we teach that “appeal to logos,” “logical appeal,” and “logical argument” are the same, we are conflating two very different meanings of the word “logic.” One is descriptive, and one is evaluative. The first is simply saying that the move is trying to look as though it’s logical (and maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t), and the second is saying that it is logical (it fits the standards of logic). I don’t think Aristotle meant either of those, but, if anything, something closer to the first.
Whatever Aristotle meant, he did not mean what argument texts say is an appeal to logic, since they emphasize what are surface features of a text (if anything, what he would have put in the ethos category): facts, statistics, and various other concepts that wouldn’t even have been in Aristotle’s world.
So, what I’m saying in this post is that, while teaching students to read literature is a tremendously important task, people who are deeply trained in reading and writing about literature are not a priori any more capable of teaching argumentation in a way that enhances inclusive democratic deliberation than graduate students in any other discipline. But, since that’s who’s teaching fyc courses, textbooks have to be ones that people with no training in argumentation can teach. And that is our problem.
If we want to teach argumentation, then we have to hire people who are trained in argumentation.
[1] At one point, I started trying to write a post that had all those references, and I got overwhelmed. These two articles are good starting points, with good citations.
[2] Notice that this solution is good as far as argumentation, but it still means that there are people who are teaching “grammar” without adequate training in sociolinguistics. I’ll come back to that.
[3] As a former Director of a Writing Center, and someone who argues on the internet a lot, I will also say that people who are most rigid about “grammar” are particularly likely to be wrong, even about prescriptive grammar. I have seen papers in which students were wrongly “corrected” for having said something like “The ball was thrown to Chester and me.” The number of faculty who believe in the breath rule for commas leaves me breathless.
[4] This argument is often represented as our needing to go back to some time when we had civics courses and people rejected open abuses of power oriented toward disenfranchising groups and violating democratic norms. Um, when would that be? When disenfranchising black voters was openly advocated? Granted, Trump supporters are very open that they want to go back to the early fifties, except without the taxes, because they believe (correctly) that then they could have political and cultural hegemony. In the fifties, when there were civics courses.
[5] As, I hope, will become clear in these posts, I don’t mean that out-dated, but still popular, understanding of “rationality” promoted by fyc textbooks and popular culture—the one grounded in 19th century logical positivism. All of those false models assume a binary of rational/irrational—a model of the mind falsified by research in cognition for the last thirty years, and also based in myth. Turns out the Phineas Gage story is probably wrong. Since I’ve cited that story more than a few times, my previous scholarship is part of the problem.
I think there are a lot of models of “rationality” that are more useful than the rational/irrational split, and more grounded in recent research on cognition. This research on cognition is usefully and cogently summarized in Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain, Superforecasting, and Thinking Fast and Slow.
[6] Notice that I’m picking examples that are vehement, upsetting, decorum-violating, and controversial. Also, I’m not being precise about the distinctions among reason, rationality, and logic because I think that’s sort of inside baseball.
