Let’s Return to Teaching Students How to Argue

We hear all the time that America is hopelessly polarized, that the electronic landscape allows us to stay in our own hermetically-sealed communities, and that no one can speak with anyone across the aisle. For decades now, the Left has believed that those who disagree with it are not just wrong but evil; in the last three election cycles, we have seen those on the right taking on the same position.

What if the problem is not our politics but the way we are taught to argue?

For four decades, American students have been taking “rhetoric and composition” classes that are almost completely under the ideological control of the woke. For four decades, American students have been taking misconceived “rhetoric and composition” classes, which now are almost completely under the ideological control of the woke. We need to fix that so we can return to a republic of vigorous, fair, thoughtful, and productive discussion.

We’ve traveled, in the “rhet-comp” world, from a 1970s, free-love, “expressivist” paradigm (inspired by Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers, in which freewriting, journaling, and not caring about such things as punctuation, spelling, and grammar are supposed to unlock students’ minds from the chains of rule-mongering teachers) all the way to the more recent social-epistemic paradigm, which argues that a student can write only from within his (?) / her (?) / their (?) own social and political position.

What if the solution to our republic’s woeful rhetorical culture lies in learning from the best rhetorical educators of the ancient Roman republic? A Hispanic student, for example, can write only out of his Hispanic-ness, writing what “they” know and experience from that “position.” And how dare anyone presume to judge from outside of that position whether the result is “good writing” or a “coherent argument”? But maybe that’s the point: Asking her to “improve her writing” is to impose alien standards upon her. Such a philosophy is designed to persuade students that they can’t have thoughtful arguments with anyone unlike them. And test scores have declined all the way through.

What if the solution to our republic’s woeful rhetorical culture lies in learning from the best rhetorical educators of the ancient Roman republic?

Consider: Rome was a place of astonishing cultural diversity, stretching from Spain to Gaul to North Africa to Egypt and Asia Minor, and all had to find a way to do business together. That meant law, and that meant lawyers, and that meant ways for lawyers to argue effectively for their clients. That, finally, meant teaching the art of rhetoric—the technical skill of persuading others with one’s words to think something, to change their minds, and to make something happen.

For example, no Syrian could afford to come to Rome and say, “Well, I can articulate this only from my Syrian cultural-epistemic position, and you Italics trained by Greeks will never really enter into my cultural mindset because of your biases; furthermore, your conceptions of rational argument are oppressive, so I will speak in a Syriac way that is neither rational, nor logical, nor presents evidence as a way to support its arguments.”

Nope, that Syrian had to learn rhetoric and how to persuade using logos, pathos, and ethos. He had to learn how to structure an argument, how to present it well, and how to appeal to his audience. Quintilian and Cicero taught all of these, and this conception of rhetoric became the most popular way of training those who spoke and wrote. It’s what we need today.

It was called stasis theory, and it worked on a simple principle: You can’t have a productive argument unless you figure out precisely what the two sides are arguing about.

Rhetors were taught to explore a dispute through a series of questions: What are the facts? What is this? What caused it, and what effects did it have? Is it a good or bad thing? What should be done? The point in asking these questions is to discover the point of stasis—that is, the place where the two sides need to stop, for there is where they have their differences and can engage in productive debate.

Let’s take an example I use with my students. You come upon a scene outside of a bar: a man on the ground with a bloody nose, another standing over him with blood on his knuckles. These are the obvious facts.

But first we must ask the definitional question: What is this? Is this a case of assault? Maybe we’d all agree on that. But maybe not: Maybe the puncher would argue it was self-defense, that the punchee hit first or had a knife.

Rhetors were taught to explore a dispute through a series of questions. We next might ask the causal question: What caused this, and what effects did it have? Now this could get interesting. What chain of events led to the punch? An argument? A move on the puncher’s wife? Or worse: Was the punchee sexually assaulting a young female? Would more severe effects (a broken nose, a smashed cheekbone, the punch having come from a professional boxer) change the definition of the act?

Stasis theory shows how useless it is to jump to a later stage of the stasis structure before resolving earlier ones. Next comes the evaluative question: Was this a good thing or a bad thing? Well, that depends, doesn’t it, on how we answered the first two sets of questions. What seemed initially to be an obviously bad act could now be reevaluated as an act of gallantry, even heroism.

Finally, we ask the policy question, which I like to call the problem-solution question: What should be done about this? Do we arrest the puncher—and, if so, for what? What then? Should action be taken to punish him? Do we thank him for perhaps saving a young woman’s life?

I hope it’s clear, even in this simple example, how helpful stasis theory can be at clarifying things, at getting both sides to see the nub of the issue and what needs to be debated. It also shows how useless it is to jump to a later stage of the stasis structure before resolving earlier ones. It immediately sharpens what educators are always yammering about without knowing one iota of how to teach: critical thinking.

All of this might seem a bit abstruse, but take any of the issues confronting the nation today and you will see that we can’t even decide what we are arguing about.

One side says of global warming, or climate change: We know what it is (definitional), we know that human activity causes it (causal), and we know it’s really, really bad (evaluative), so we must act right now, spending trillions to solve this problem (policy). The other side says: We’re not really sure anyone knows what it is, we think you are overplaying the anthropogenic causes, we think human causes raise temperatures only a tiny amount, and so we don’t think there’s any reason to go forward with all that spending.

The debate refuses to stop at the first point of stasis, so it gets nowhere.

Or think about abortion: Is it a human or a blob of cells (definitional)? How does it get to be a human and when (causal)? Is this one of the most fundamentally immoral acts—murder—or a sadly unfortunate but actually woman-supporting good thing (evaluative)? What should be done, at any rate, about supporting vulnerable pregnant women (policy)?

The debate goes nowhere because the necessary definitional question was sidestepped years ago.

What if we trained young people in stasis theory? If this education began to filter into rhetoric-composition classes across the country, we might start to find how to argue rather than quarrel and bring order to these rancorous debates.

I began teaching stasis theory years ago for simple pedagogical reasons. It helped students understand what they needed to do in a paper: what kind of argument they were making and how to organize their paragraphs in a logical succession according to the tasks of that kind of argument.

But I began to see that it helped them see beyond only that. They began to think of their arguments in this successive way; they started to see that one type of stasis has consequences for the rest downstream, so to speak.

Instead of teaching students that debate is impossible, let’s teach them how to do it. They began to critically evaluate the arguments around them: “He didn’t really adequately define the predicate there”; “He wanted to set up an evaluation based on sloppy criteria!” “I don’t think he gave any evidence that his solution is better than the other solutions.”

Here at the University of Dallas, a “Great Books,” core-curriculum place where students love to argue well into the night, students began to come back to me and say, “I was an hour into this discussion the other night, and I realized we’d never really come to the proper place of stasis!” In so doing, they found clarity and led friends to think more clearly.

Maybe the problem with a rancorous republic isn’t with our politics. Maybe it’s that we’ve educated students for the past 40 years without teaching them how, calmly and patiently, to argue with their opponents. Instead of teaching students that debate is impossible, let’s teach them how to do it.

Gregory Roper is an English professor and dean of students at the University of Dallas, his alma mater. He is the author of Mastering the Four Arguments: The Classical Technique That Will Help You Write Persuasively.