Favorite American History Documents and The Pedagogy of Argument and Debate

Two days ago, someone asked me what my favorite American historical text was. It wasn’t that weird of a question: This is the time of year where I start to plan out my next semester’s courses and figure out the themes I want to teach.

Something that has been on my mind since the Amy Comey Barrett hearings has been the position of Constitutional Originalism. Although made fun of endlessly by the left – mostly revealing the shallow nature of political conversation these days – I am much more intrigued by the nature of this position as a hermeneutic. How do you read this ancient document? Surely you can’t just read it like you are this post? Can you read it like an older book, “Oh that was a good view for back then, but now . . .” – How are you determining that it was a good view? I have so many endless questions about this hermeneutic, and I have to resist the urge to buy a bunch of books on it and just lose myself in figuring it out.

I assume it’s a hermeneutic, but it’s more likely a practice. Joseph Ellis in his recent book American Dialogue: The Founders and Us shows that there is no such thing as being able to read these ancient documents without the practice of engaging the archive and positioning one’s read among the documents that exist there. Although we can never know the minds of the founders, we have many of their expressions of belief, feeling, and attitude about things, and we can assign convincing motives to them that will then apply to other matters. His book is masterful in how to use archival documents to create contemporary arguments.

Originalism, if it makes any sense at all, would be a practice in continuous re-reading of the archive. I doubt that’s what most originalist justices do. Re-reading is a notoriously unstable and threatening practice that people whose credibility rest on them being THE interpreters of something would not be willing to accept. Credibility of the Supreme Court is based on them being the last word, not one word among many (perhaps one of the best reasons we shouldn’t have a Supreme Court under democratic governance, which, is many things but most commonly ‘some words among other words’).

One of the themes I thought about teaching my debate class under would be the Constitution. Read the Federalist Papers (not all of them), Ellis’s book, and perhaps some of the originalist stuff (conservative and progressive texts on originalism [yes, there are progressive originalists]). Traditionally I have just taught the course based on examining the Presidential Debates, Malcolm X’s debate at Oxford Union, James Baldwin’s debate with Wiliam F. Buckley, Jr. at Cambridge Union, and John Quincy Adams’s many debates in the House on the question of abolition. Could still do this course, but would cut the Presidential Debate part out I think. Maybe wishful thinking that the Commission on Presidential Debates will be irrelevant after this election.

So I have been thinking about this list, here it is in no particular order:

The Federalist Papers

Who wouldn’t love a collection of arguments aimed at the public about why the Constitution is a really good idea and not a trick to enforce tyranny and absolute rule on everyone? These were all published in New York newspapers, and well, like we see today, the Federalists had the upper hand because their opponents didn’t own as many great newspapers as the Federalists did. All of them are great, but there are a few standouts, notably 10 and 51, but I’m sure you’ll put your favorites in the comments. A great way to teach this is to have students read the Constitution without the Bill of Rights, since those were not a part of the document being debated – they came along after ratification, and mostly due to the work of James Madison.

Notes on the State of Virginia

The only reason I like this collection of really, really weird observations about Virginia is that they reveal what a messed up person Thomas Jefferson was. Imagine being smart enough to understand the deep connections to scientifically gathered data to agriculture and national/global politics, but also being able to predict the hazards and benefits of a globalized economy. Now imagine you can see all that, but you can’t accept for one second that your slaves are human beings. What a mind?

Common Sense

Thomas Paine was a madman. Not only did he write this document knowing full well that if the revolution didn’t happen or was lost he’d be executed, that wasn’t enough for him. Later on he wrote Age of Reason, an argument against Christian thought in governance while waiting to be executed for being a foreigner involved in the French Revolution. I think I’d be a bit distracted. Anyway, Common Sense is fantastic, making a direct, public argument for why the colonies have a unique duty to resist British rule as they are one of the last safeguards of the concept of liberty (not just liberty, but the concept of it, which is a pretty cool argument).

Civil Disobedience

Henry Thoreau, according to all scholars, was an edgelord, but even edgelords sometimes have a really good point. This is pretty far removed from the earlier documents (which really don’t have that clean of a temporal relationship) but probably wouldn’t exist without the historical sediment of all the rhetoric of the earlier documents. Thoreau writes masterfully here on the duty we have to not obey or follow unjust laws, and that resistance can be many things. Would be nice to assign students to re-write the argument in the contemporary context of police violence and America’s role internationally in making many people’s lives miserable so we can have cheap sneakers.

That’s the list I came up with but I am sure there are many others that I could add here if I thought more about it, but that was my initial reaction. Some other ones that really matter would be Leaves of Grass and of course Adams’s Lectures on Rhetoric which might make fragmentary appearances in any course.

I think an examination of America as a country that was founded on really intense, high-stakes debates would be a nice contrast to all the calls for civility, logic, and empathy that we are seeing from people who really should know better. People don’t have long public debates about things that they aren’t passionate about, and our feelings have just as much right to expression as the cleanest logical formulation. Argumentation and debate are human activities after all.

Explaining Pragmadialectics to Undergraduates, or Why Do I Assign Readings Like This?

Well another week, another slew of video lectures to record. I much prefer doing it this way to doing it on Zoom live or something. At least this way I can say everything I need to, and the students can use it more as a reference rather than a one-off “I attended” check box sort of thing. By the way, it’s not their fault they would think of a class that way; it’s all the bad teachers they’ve had who trained them that you should get credit for being present that are responsible.

Pragmadialectics -I think it’s important to know this theory, but I’m not even sure I fully understand it. Sometimes trying to explain something to yourself might be considered to be pretty good teaching. At least I hope so.

All comments, thoughts and questions welcome, as always!

A Course Description for a Class About Argumentation

A friend of mine clued me into a new program called Gitbook, which is sort of like a blog, but more of a private journal/documentation site. I signed up for one, but not sure if I am going to use it. It might be a great place to keep notes on the classes I’m currently teaching.

When there’s not a global pandemic, I document everything about my courses. I audio record each one, and I also keep a notebook, usually a diary where I can write down things that worked or didn’t work for each day’s course. When things start to get busy what I normally document is just the weekly feel of the course, what’s working and what’s not. Might use it for that.

Something I thought might be good in there are course descriptions, however once I had a look at one I was working on for the upcoming course flyer for the undergraduates, I thought of this blog first. I prefer public-facing sort of stuff I suppose, or maybe GitNotes is too new for me to imagine how it will work in with what I’m doing here and in other places. Maybe GitNotes is a journal for me, and this is my social media replacement site. I think that works best for the way I’m thinking about things (kind of tired of looking at social media to be honest).

Anyway, here’s my revised course description for Argumentation:

What does it mean to argue? Have you ever been in an argument? How did you know? How did you know when the argument was over? What makes an argument happen? Is argument good or bad? 

These are the sort of questions we address in Argumentation. The concept of argumentation, even after thousands of years of people arguing about it, remains open. Nobody is sure what an argument is, how it works, or what the function of it really should or can be. The conversation about argumentation is international, involving experts from philosophy, law, history, sociology, languages, and rhetoricians. The only thing missing is you.

In argumentation we will read and examine the opinions of scholars, thinkers, and practitioners of argumentation. We’ll determine if they have a good grasp on what argument is. Then, after discussing, writing, and speaking about these ideas, it will be our turn. At the end of the course you’ll be able to advance your own understanding of what a good argument is, how to know, or even if you think that there’s such a thing as a good argument at all out there. 

This class is for anyone interested in the role of argument in society, be it political, social, or personal. This is a class for people who love to read and share their thoughts on the questions of why people act they way they do and say what they say. Argumentation is a difficult concept to grasp, but easy to do when we find ourselves in one. Come add your perspective to one of the oldest questions out there: Are we having an argument?

First, it’s a bit too long. Secondly, it doesn’t really communicate exactly what we do in the class. I think perhaps I should talk more about conversation or oral assessment in the course, but I really just want people who are interested in thinking about the role and nature of argument.

Maybe next week I’ll post a revised one, or perhaps this is the kind of thing that should go into the GitNotes? I think I sort of prefer working it out with you, whoever you fine people are. Having an audience in mind is far superior than just journaling to me. I already know what I’m going to say. But you are kind of a mystery. Who knows what you are thinking.

Bad Teaching, Bad Graduate Student Mentoring, Bad Pedagogy

There really isn’t such a thing as “graduate student pedagogy,” but I thought I would write about it anyway. I’m always hopeful about it, but I know why it doesn’t exist: People who want to teach graduate students don’t understand how teaching works, they aren’t interested in thinking or talking about teaching, and they also have a very high self-image of their own importance to the field and to their studies.

Graduate student pedagogy is essential, particularly in pedagogy. It is clear that nearly all future jobs for advanced degree holders are going to be in teaching, and will likely consist of a lot more teaching than we are used to in academic appointments. When departments don’t have serious conversations about course and assignment design, and don’t have regular conversations about how to teach, pretty terrible things happen as they recently did on my campus.

A graduate student was removed of his teaching duties after he tried to get a class to come up with arguments in favor of slavery. As someone who teaches argumentation for a living, and someone who thinks a lot about the power and nature of classroom speech, this assignment cannot adequately be described as terrible. It’s the epitome of bad graduate student mentoring and what happens when you don’t have open conversations about teaching and what it’s about. Professor Taylor’s terrible assignment is a symptom, not an independent problem. And it’s a symptom that exists at some level in higher education in general.

Graduate student supervisors, as a rule, are really nervous about talking about teaching quality with graduate students. I wonder why this is? Are they afraid? Are they unwilling to let the graduate students know that teaching is an art that requires a lot of work and thought just to realize you could have done it so much better? Is it that they don’t know what to say, they believe in a simple transmission and response model? Taylor is, to his credit, trying to have an interactive classroom. But his assumptions about things like critical thinking, student engagement, and what his role is as a professor are detrimental to his ability to teach. He is one of these people who seems to believe the professor’s role is to offer the opposite, to teach from the point of opposition, to take up the impossible position and push it toward the students to see if they can push back correctly. This is not teaching. This is like mixing chemicals as a Chemistry teacher to see how the students will react to the explosions. It’s irresponsible, and it’s simply not teaching.

This professor was trying to be edgy, he was trying to really get the students to “think outside the box” to have that moment of “Wow! I’ve never thought of that before,” or whatever trendy nonsense was going through his head. It is not teaching to rupture the students’ relationships with the things they bring into the classroom. It is also not appropriate to think that you are offering radical expose about ideas to them. This assignment screams the attitude that Taylor believed he knew more about this issue than his students. This is an inappropriate attitude for teaching anything. Good teaching is realizing that you know different ways to encounter knowledge, not that you have amassed more than they have.

Secondly, Taylor did not do any adequate research to try to teach this assignment. People have written books where they have contextualized the arguments in favor of slavery from American history as well as the history of other countries that practiced it. But this was done carefully, with research, with context, and with the understanding that bad and good are contextually understood. Taylor did not offer any of that to his students, by all reports, and just tried to get them to speculate what good could come from slavery as they were sitting there, in a classroom, in 2020, with no other resources than their own feelings and thoughts. Of course that is inappropriate. More than that, it’s irresponsible to think that this would help teach these students anything about how slavery was permitted to survive so long, or how people justified it in the time and place where it was practiced. How is this the teaching of history if you are not providing deep context? Again, there are entire books written on this topic.

Finally there is this idea floating around that the pedagogy of critical thinking consists of examining the extant “two sides” of every issue. These two sides exist already and can always be accessed. One is preferred now, the other is not although it could be preferred given the right argument.

This is an unhealthy and improper model of argument, controversy, and critical thinking. If you can access arguments in favor of something it does not mean this side of the issue has legitimacy. That legitimacy is always conferred by audiences. In order to think critically about any controversy, all positions must be situated within the discourse, the context, and the ideology of the time. This requires a lot more than just sitting and staring into space in a classroom and writing down whatever reasons come to mind.

Taylor seems to believe that a starting point for critical thinking and teaching is to tell students to imagine a horrible atrocity from a positive point of view. This stereotype of thought often appears in popular culture as what rhetoric or debate offer. Nothing is further from the truth. If Taylor had actually prepared to teach his class, he would have provided them ample readings from scholars of the time who discuss why it was that people who were decent citizens in every other respect would consider it normal and healthy to own other human beings. That’s a conversation worth having, and that’s something where the critical thinker could make connections between our discourse about global economics and the terrible conditions of Chinese labor could be recognized as a more modern version of this atrocity.

Thinking that coming up with a logical argument to justify atrocity without any consideration of context is evidence of only one argument: A lazy, unprepared teacher who should not be teaching in the first place. But isn’t the blame really with the supervisors and mentors who clearly didn’t inquire, or investigate, or suggest how to teach to their graduate student?

Responding to General Criticisms of Debate

I find it very strange that there are still critiques that are alive and well of the practice of the art of debate. You would think that in an era of tea parties, conservative talk (shout?) radio, and a collection of some of the most incapable public officials in the art of justification, explanation and argument that these criticisms would be diminished to the point where they are, at the least, back-burnered in the face of our crumbling ability to advocate our feelings, thoughts, and beliefs to one another.
So this post is an attempt to craft a bare-bones defense for each of these major criticisms of teaching debate. Before I get into establishing and then responding to each of the criticisms, there are some really excellent background readings that will help bring the debate about debate into a clearer resolution (maybe not 1080p, but at least you will be able to see the trees in the distance as our protagonists engage with one another).
First, it is vital to read the Platonic dialogues Gorgias and Phaedrus to get a sense of the critique of teaching the art of debate at its limit and then in its more moderate form. In Gorgias we find Socrates objecting to Gorgias teaching an ability to persuade, argue and prove because it has no sense of absolute essence. It has no core to it, so it is difficult to determine if it is a good or bad art. Socrates confines “rhetorike” (as Plato calls it in the dialogue we might say “rhetoric” but the word in Attic Greek is a person not a noun; an orator, not oratory, but Plato tries to fix this with this word). In Phaedrus the need for rhetoric is acknowledged, but as in the speeches about love, only a love for true wisdom can craft proper rhetoric. In both dialogues though there is the concern with placing semblance or mere appearance in the place of the real or absolute.
Moving forward a few thousand years we find this same concern replicated in the very nice article by Hicks and Green on the controversy over switch-side debating in 1950s America. To give a brief summary, the choice of the national topic – that the US should recognize the communist government of China – forced a split between coaches who believed that good training in debate was centered around development of extant belief in students and coaches that believed that assigning sides to students regardless of personal belief was the best way to go. Of course, switch-side debating is not only the American standard now, but the international one (some of you are probably scratching your heads quite puzzled that this was even an issue in the U.S. at one time) and additionally, the idea that someone would need to believe one side or the other in order to participate effectively on a debate team is quite simply laughable to the majority of debate instructors, teachers and coaches in America today I would bet. The article shows how the idea of switch-side debate became not only the norm but an essential element in the defense of democracy. The ability to debate both sides of a question entered democratic ideology in the place of strong personal convictions about right and wrong articulated well as the cornerstone of good democratic practice.
All of the criticisms of the teaching and practice of debate can be seen better through the lenses provided by a bit of the history of this long debate. With those somewhat in mind, here are the most common critiques of debate practice – possibly the most common, they are the ones I hear pretty frequently.
1) Debate encourages people to game and toy with the ideas of others, rendering the most vital beliefs of other people as playthings.
2) Debate thwarts the ability of people to accept or entertain the beliefs of others as they are, seeing them as something that must be dissected, cut open, or like Napoleon looking at the Sphinx’s nose – target practice.
I hope these are representative and fair depictions of the criticisms. This is how I have summarized them after hearing them so frequently. I hope in the comments you might suggest alternate phrasings and alternate criticisms if you don’t think these are accurate or well formed.
1) This criticism assumes a lot.
It assumes that the game of debate, or the things learned there laterally shift over into mainstream discourse. Of course it is somewhat true that ideas are treated as instrumentality in debate. I believe though that this is a good thing. It allows for ideas that one would not normally approach to become closely understood. It also means that people have to respond to ideas they would probably ignore in daily life. Most importantly, it provides the practitioner with a wealth of perspective. Perspectives that he or she would not normally think about. Whether or not they adopt them as their own belief, I take the agnostic Gorgian position – none of my business. Gaming with ideas and views is a great way to lower the stakes and really engage these views. The recalcitrance of debate is that many views, once explored, are hard to forget. And the practitioner, although in the game doesn’t have much trouble distancing herself, will be confronted from time to time with the limits of her own beliefs outside of the forum.
Another assumption in this criticism is one that holds some beliefs or values as real things that are somehow discounted or diminished because they are “played with.” This might be true, but the subtle nuances of good debate require one to listen, hear, and understand the intricacies of positions. Compare this to the non-practicioner, the one untrained in the arts, who “won’t hear” or refuse to engage a position that is “dead wrong.” Even if the motives are “impure” or someone is on a crusade to convert the other, the requirement of good debate – to understand the position opposite – has the risk of infecting the interlocutors thought. Engaging with the ideas of the other in an attempt to convert them over to your side paradoxically risks the entire enterprise. For every time something is explained, it is re-created. Every alteration helps to define it. And if the debater investigating the opposite position encounters a good argument, they are likely to change their own mind. There is real risk in engagement, there is no risk, and increased polarization in the refusal to engage with “deeply held” or “important” ideas of other people. Treating ideas like pieces in a game might be abhorrent, but not if the game is recognized as such, and the goal of it is training in subtleties and to value what works – understanding and engagement of the linkages within the others’ arguments.
2) This criticism is closely related to Kenneth Burke’s idea of “trained incapacity” or “occupational psychosis” – the idea that one is trained to do things and therefore out of the ability to do things, and tends to see the world in terms of their occupation, since they are always wanting to see things through that lens anyway.
I would argue that debate training is the necessary check against such an occupational psychosis. Of course, once you are trained in something it is really exciting to try to use it all over the place – young martial arts students must be carefully taught that not everything in the house deserves a kick – and debate has this training built in, generally called the “audience.” Not every trick a student discovers will always work or always apply because the audience, the judges, must be persuaded, and they have biases as to what the good argument consists of.
In the interpersonal realm, the opponent is also the audience. This changes things around so much that the person who approaches each disagreement as if it were a debate quickly runs out of friends. Debate holds above anything else that the audience must be adapted to in order to persuade. “Occupational Psychosis” in this situation becomes self-correcting. If the audience doesn’t like aggressive debate attacks, switch the discourse to something more like a discussion, or questioning.
Is it the function of debate to teach each student to treat all people as valuable? Not directly, no. But since audiences can be vastly different, with polarities one has never thought of, debate training encourages increased respect for other people as more than targets. They are sources of inspiration and information. They help one overcome difficulties in phrasing and developing arguments. Also, most debate is a humanistic endeavor, teaching that there are some common assumptions under the surface of everyone that generally mean certain forms of arguments will sway them. But that “generally” is debate’s anti-humanistic element, the element that says there is nothing so dangerous as grouping all humans together under an essential label. So in the end, the skills that teach people to possibly see all opinions as target practice also encourage serious investigation of these opinions to see what is holding them up.
What’s the alternative here? Non-engagement? Acceptance of all ideas? I think that these would be much worse. Accepting people as flawed beings is a different thing than accepting them with their flaws. The acceptance of people as flawed is not a weakness to those trained in debate. It is a source of salvation in a sense. It means that there is always a chance to convince people who are doing bad under the name of the good, or who believe in ways that harm society to change their mind. The skills that are taught in debate naively appear to be simple zero-sum games where we start with the idea that the other person is wrong. Instead, the practitioners of debate assume that nobody is right, but perhaps through discourse we can become more right. At least in this situation and this issue. And when the situation changes, we can always return, because we are all somewhat wrong, all the time.
Going around correcting others with “truth” is an activity that looks like debate, but it’s not debate that causes that. The lack of such training is what allows such behavior to occur. They take the name of debate in order to provide a false sense of fairness. But the practitioner of debate will often call her art “discussion” or “conversation” in order to ensure the debate continues. Within debate is a respect for other ideas that is essential to master in order to win. It is a much more complex symbol system than it often gets credit for. Moving away from debate training ensures more thoughtless treatment of the ideas of others than simply using them to hone complex rhetorical accumen.
Perhaps this is a bit too rough to publish, but I thought I would give it a try. Through this exercise, I noticed I used the word Practitioner to refer to students of debate rather than debater. I think this was purely accidental, but the more I think about it the more I like it. Not as flat as debater is. More on that another time.
For now, what other criticisms of debate need addressing? I am sure there are more, but these are the ones that I think are most common, and in most need of responses.