The Art of Arguespeak

That such discussions proved difficult to sustain in the weeks and months after 9/11 should not surprise us. As the country moved toward war, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, and the political climate tensed, advocacy groups on both the right and the left mobilized to ensure that this "teachable moment" was taught in the right way. Some schools, fearful that the curriculum would become politicized, discouraged discussion about the war, and a few — in Arizona, Florida, and New York — disciplined teachers for bringing the war directly into their classrooms, even though, as David Flinders demonstrated in a 2004 Phi Delta Kappan article describing adolescents' views on the war in Iraq, students are hungry for such discussion.

It was from a desire to sustain — and, indeed, formalize — the discussion of such issues that, a few years ago, I began thinking about a new kind of course, one that would bring the rigor and seriousness we associate with other "academic" subjects to the hurly-burley of contemporary history. My reasons were, at first, selfish. I am deeply interested in national and world events, and a yearlong sabbatical, much of it spent in Cairo, Egypt, had only deepened this interest. Living and traveling in the Middle East offered me an important perspective on America and the powerful role it plays in shaping the world.

But I was also acting out of curiosity: I wanted to know more about what my students thought about their world. If, as the 2006 National Geographic-Roper Survey of Geographic Literacy reported, most of my students were unable to locate Iraq on a world map, I would soon know that — and much more.

Most of all, however, I wanted to encourage my students to form the habit of disciplined civic inquiry and provide them with the intellectual skills necessary for citizenship. I hoped that such a course might offer an intellectual context for other initiatives at my school and provide a bridge between my school's formal curriculum and its emphasis on service, stewardship, and citizenship. With these goals in mind, with time to reflect provided by my sabbatical, and with the support of a school that encourages curricular innovation, I got to work.

The result was a course that came to be titled, somewhat awkwardly, "Global Studies." Although it is offered under the auspices of my school's history department as an elective for juniors and seniors, it differs from other "history" courses in a number of ways. So, when I introduce the course to students on that first day of class, I am explicit about its underlying assumptions and goals. I explain that the course is issue-centered, rather than content-driven; that, unlike other history courses, it is unapologetically rooted in the present; that there is no textbook (all the course materials would be drawn from newspapers, magazines of opinion, and academic journals written for a general readership); that it will often, from necessity, veer into disciplines other than history, including ethics, media studies, political science, economics, geography, and, on occasion, science; and that it shares with their English classes an interest in how language is used — and misused — to make arguments about matters of common urgency.

On this last point I am emphatic. I explain that, as much as any course they will have taken, "Global Studies" is a writing course; that we will conceive of writing not simply or exclusively as an exercise in disciplinary mastery, but as an expression of civic engagement; and that they will be required regularly to think and write as citizens.

Following Nel Noddings' suggestion that the best way to encourage critical reflection is to embrace controversy, I designed the course around a series of carefully selected "issues." Over the last decade, a remarkable consensus has emerged in support of such an issues-centered approach. Richard Light, who spent years interviewing Harvard undergraduates about their academic experience there, reports in his book Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds that, "when asked which small classes are particularly effective, many students mention a certain organizational technique: organizing classes around some sort of controversy." What is true of Harvard undergraduates also appears to be true of secondary school students. Katherine Simon, the former co-executive director of the Coalition of Essential Schools and the author of Moral Questions in the Classroom: How to Get Kids to Think Deeply About Real Life and Their School Work, spent over three months observing classrooms in three different schools (a Catholic, a Jewish, and a suburban public high school). On the basis of her research, Simon concludes that the best way to stimulate sustained engagement with "moral and existential questions" is to ask students to consider "potentially controversial topics."

In keeping with this research, I design my syllabus not as a list of materials to be covered, but as a series of "structured disagreements" (Light's phrase) on matters of public concern: the duties and obligations of citizens in the 21st century, human rights, economic and cultural globalization, propaganda and the power of the media, genocide, and global climate change. In constructing each of these units, I strive for what Simon calls "pedagogic neutrality." I offer multiple perspectives on each issue, selecting readings that offer competing and, whenever possible, equally compelling arguments.

Of course, there will always be questions about how fairly a given issue is represented, especially from students (and occasionally by parents) who bring to the course a distinct political perspective. In practice, "pedagogical neutrality" is an elusive goal. Rarely a week goes by without someone raising an intelligent objection to one reading or another or questioning whether or not I am implicitly championing, in my selection of readings, a certain political position. Since it is impossible to capture all sides of debates that are complex, ongoing, and, in important ways, unbounded, I welcome — even encourage — these objections. They deepen the discussion, broaden our frame of reference, and offer students the opportunity to shape and reshape the content of the course. For this reason, the syllabus is subject to frequent revision, both in terms of the issues we cover and the materials we read, and I conceive of it as a kind of living document that is regularly updated in response to the questions, interests, and concerns of the class.

Indeed, having students question the "politics" of the syllabus is an important feature of the course. As Joel Westheimer remarks, educators interested in teaching students "to participate effectively in contentious public debates" have an obligation to risk "being political," if by "politics" we mean "embracing the kind of controversy and ideological sparring that is the engine of progress in a democracy and that gives education social meaning." This does not mean we should use class time to foist our own political views upon our students, but it does mean envisioning the classroom as a place where young people can express their own views on matters of public controversy, learn to uncover the assumptions behind various claims, explore a variety of perspectives, and practice the skills of civic deliberation. Yes, students may find Krauthammer's pro-torture argument morally repugnant. They may not agree that we owe the same moral consideration to "strangers" (particularly the world's poor) as we do members of our own local communities, as Nussbaum claims. And they may find ludicrous Peter Singer's proposal that we grant "human" rights to great apes (including the right to life, the protection of individual liberty, and a prohibition against torture), but they will have to offer reasoned arguments in defense of such positions and engage with classmates who think differently.

Organizing reading and discussion around potentially "contentious public debates" has a number of other advantages. First, such debates are intrinsically interesting, and in ways other course materials, like textbooks, which often suppress controversy with a static recitation of facts, are not. There are few more effective ways to grab young people's attention — and hold it — than by dramatizing for them a lively discussion on a topic of contemporary significance. That adults disagree about such matters — and care enough to devote their lives to thinking about them — often comes as a surprise to many young people, and inspires their interest, engagement, and curiosity.

Secondly, assigning arguments from a range of publications allows students to explore print materials with which they are probably unfamiliar. Few young people have the time to read a newspaper — less than 20 percent according to David Mindich, author of Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News — much less periodicals and journals that carry longer, more closely reasoned essays. A course like this challenges young people to read more widely than they otherwise would and serves to introduce them to that constellation of publications, in both print and electronic form, where civic issues are discussed and debated — to what scholars of print culture call the "public sphere." In my experience, students find themselves reading far beyond the required syllabus. In an evaluation of the course, one of my students remarked that, having taken it, he was "more likely to read an article, essay, or editorial on foreign affairs than I was nine months ago," while another wrote that she found herself "following the news more regularly and actually caring more about what is happening in the world."

If few young people have the time to read a newspaper, fewer still graduate high school with a working understanding of how public discourse actually works. This is a kind of civic illiteracy that goes much deeper than a student's inability, for example, to name a member of the Supreme Court (which, according to Mindich, very few can do). For many young people, the language of argument — with its distinctive vocabulary and repertoire of conventions — is a kind of foreign tongue, and I approach it almost as if I were teaching a foreign language.

To this end, I teach the argumentative essay as a distinct and vibrant literary form. I remind my students that many of our most widely read public documents — Thomas Paine's Common Sense, The Federalist Papers, Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government," Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July," and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," to name only the most famous examples — originated not as the canonical works of literature they have since become, but as pamphlets, newspaper articles, periodical essays, speeches, and public letters — works of the moment. I teach each essay in the course as a continuing part of this argumentative tradition and an expression of civic engagement.

This means asking students to discuss not just ideas, but how ideas are shaped and presented. I begin with some fairly simple questions. With whom is the author in conversation? Where in the essay does the author position herself in the conversation? What is her claim? Her evidence? I ask them to note — even underline — those moments in the essay where the author uses the kinds of argumentative "moves" — summarizing and quoting, questioning, claiming, refuting, and conceding — that Graff claims are the DNA of written argumentation.

When, for example, we discuss the debate between Charles Krauthammer and Andrew Sullivan on torture, we discuss not just their respective positions, as interesting as these are, but also the manner in which each author presents his arguments. The rubric I provide students grounds the discussion, defines our critical standards, and encourages them to make informed judgments and evaluations. Such discussion also demystifies and clarifies my own grading practices. While teaching these essays, I am inevitably asked: Which of these essays, considered as a work of argument, would you give the higher mark? I respond that, of these two very accomplished essays, I rate Sullivan slightly higher. The resulting discussion is always a lively one as I am obliged to provide evidence that Sullivan wields what Graff calls "arguespeak" with greater skill, that he engages his opponent's position with greater vigor and generosity, and that he writes with greater style. Students quickly learn that critical evaluation (even of something as elusive as "style") is neither subjective nor capricious, but evidence-based and driven by clear standards.

Of course, asking students to read about issues of public urgency is just a beginning. I also want them to write about them: to demonstrate that they can make informed, reasoned judgments and present their views in a convincing and compelling way.

An essay assignment I recently gave might clarify how I go about doing this:

In October of 2003 and in reaction to a number of scandals that had recently befallen the paper, The New York Times appointed its first "public editor," or ombudsman. His job is to address readers' comments and concerns about The Times coverage and to raise questions about its accuracy and fairness. He does this in a bi-monthly Sunday column. He operates outside the management structure of the newsroom, and he is free to comment on any aspect of The Times coverage without fear of being fired or disciplined.

Imagine that you are The New York Times public editor. The paper has just published an article, "Bank Data Sifted in Secret by U.S. to Block Terror," describing a secret government program [SWIFT] used to track the international bank transfers of suspected terrorists, and it has proved highly controversial. You have collected, in addition to the article itself, a great deal of material on this issue — including essays from The National Review, The Nation, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Post, Slate, and The New York Times. You have now decided to write a short argument on this subject, reflecting on The Times' decision and describing your own views.

Your article should describe the controversy, explain what is at stake, and take a clear position. It should also, regardless of the position it takes, summarize and address, in a thoughtful and sensible way, counterarguments.

Making sense of this debate involves more than simply reading for content; students must identify what issues are at stake and isolate which of these issues has the greatest claim on our attention. As students quickly recognize, there are many questions at issue in a discussion as complex as this one: What is the function of the press during times of war? How effective was the SWIFT program in combating terrorism? Can we trust the Executive Branch with such broad investigative powers? For each of these issues, there are different ways of proceeding and different bodies of evidence to consider. Because there is no necessarily correct way of proceeding, and no single authoritative position, students are empowered to shape the direction of their own inquiry and come to their own conclusion. In so doing, they become apprentice citizens practicing the skills of citizenship; they learn to evaluate expert opinion, recognize bias and root out questionable assumptions, adjudicate between competing arguments, assess and marshal evidence, and frame their own arguments in the context of other arguments. They make the difficult passage from what Derek Bok calls "naïve relativism," in which all views are equally acceptable, to "informed judgment."

Such assignments also offer us an opportunity to explore with our students what it means to think in a way that is honest and true to the complexity of real-world problems. As a prelude to the SWIFT assignment, I often assign Michael Massing's 2005 New York Review of Books article "Now They Tell Us," in which Massing analyzes the "failure" of The New York Times to report accurately on Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. Students read not only Massing, but also Massing's numerous critics, including the responses of the very journalists whose work Massing criticizes: Judith Miller, Michael Gordon, and James Risen (co-author of the SWIFT article). As students are quick to point out, these reporters and their critics argue the same point: that the other has "cherry-picked" his/her evidence in a way that, in the end, is fundamentally dishonest. Depending on how you read the evidence — and students inevitably read it in different ways — Judith Miller is a credulous and willing pawn of her sources (and the Bush administration), a committed professional working under deadline to tell a complex story, or just a rotten reporter.

Assigning materials such as these is also a valuable way to explore with students the nature of intellectual civility — what it means to conduct oneself in a way that is generous, tolerant, and civil. A remarkable 89 percent of Americans believe that incivility is a major social problem — and perhaps with good reason. Our political discourse is often vulgar, bullying, and intolerant of opposing views. Because so much public discussion fails to meet our standards of civility, it is particularly important that we explore with our students the difference between language that is ugly and mean-spirited and language that is generous and tolerant of difference. We should not flinch from bringing to our students examples of argument that degenerates into name-calling, invective, and abuse. (I have a grab bag of such examples drawn from places as different as The London Review of Books, National Public Radio, and The O'Reilly Factor.) By drawing our students' attention to such moments — and other more subtle breaches of public decorum ("straw-man" arguments, the misrepresentation of others' views, willful contempt for evidence and complexity) — we help them see the difference between irresponsible argument and argument that is generous and civil, between judicious inquiry and blind advocacy.

In the context of a course like this, then, the assigned readings perform two functions. They provide "content" for the course — a body of material to be read, mastered, and discussed — and also models of analysis, engagement, and civility that our students can imitate. When, for example, we bring our discussion of SWIFT to a close, I ask my students to read the article that Brian Calame, the public editor of The New York Times, actually wrote in response to The Times' decision to out the SWIFT program. Because students have written on this very issue themselves, they bring to this discussion more than an academic interest: they approach it with the excitement of an engaged colleague and fellow craftsman. Calame's essay becomes more than just another perspective; it becomes a realistic standard of excellence against which they can assess the effectiveness of their own writing. In this way, the syllabus becomes not just a timeline of what to read and when to read it, but an inventory of prose models that embody the kinds of civic literacy and civility we want our students to practice. In writing about the various authors assigned in the course — Mark Danner, Howard Zinn, Susan Sontag — students can also aspire to write like them.

Ido not mean to suggest that argumentative writing is the only kind of writing schools should teach. Students should be familiar with a range of literary genres and asked to write in a variety of forms for a variety of audiences. But argumentative writing does have a special claim upon our attention. As the Nobel-Prize winning economist Amartya Sen has suggested, skill in argument — what he calls, following John Rawls, the "exercise of public reason" — is a feature of all civilizations, past and present, that value pluralism, tolerance, and free and open debate. "Argument" is the language of citizenship and scholarship — a truly global language that both transcends and unites otherwise distinct cultural traditions.

In his recent memoir, Mirror to America, the distinguished historian John Hope Franklin describes how he and a group of colleagues, in the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor, "decided… to teach our students about the war and to alert them to their responsibilities as citizens in a country at war." We would do well to follow Franklin's example. If we wish to encourage informed and engaged citizenship, we must provide young people with formal academic opportunities to practice the skills of such citizenship. We must ask them to read, think, deliberate, and write as citizens, and we must give them the perspective to see their own aspirations within the context of our changing world.

References

Bok, Derek (2006). Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Flinders, David (2004). "Adolescents Talk About the War in Iraq." Phi Delta Kappan, Volume 87, Number 4.

Franklin, John Hope (2005). Mirror to America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Graff, Gerald and Cathy Birkenstein (2006). They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.

Light, Richard (2001). Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Mindich, David (2005). Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Noddings, Nel (2006). Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sen, Amartya (2006). Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.

Simon, Katherine (2001). Moral Questions in the Classroom: How to Get Kids to Think Deeply About Real Life and Their Schoolwork. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Westheimer, Joel (2006). "Politics and Patriotism in Education: What Does It Mean to 'Teach Patriotism.'" Phi Delta Kappan, Volume 87, Number 8.