“We are all teachers of writing,” is not only a good principle of education, or a good mantra of focus for teachers overwhelmed my the irrelevant minutae of state requirements and Common Core, but it is also a political statement – it’s the phrase of victory of rhetoric and composition, who conquered the educational world with this phrase. In many ways, it’s a rhetorical meytonomy – container and thing contained. This phrase speaks for the entirety of how we see and evaluate education. There’s no escape from the prevalence of writing in education, and there’s no escape from the consideration of writing as education.
In speech communication rhetoric, to say we’ve dropped the ball would be to understate how poorly we have fared in expressing such importance for public speaking, argumentation, and debate. I think perhaps it’s because most of us don’t believe public speaking, argumentation, or debate matter at all. Public speaking matters because it funds our departments. Argumentation is an elective that fills seats regularly. And debate is an esoteric after-hours sport that occasionally allows the name of the department to circulate on internal PR lists, making sure that the Communication department blips on the Dean’s radar rather regularly. That’s pretty much the extent of the vision of speech communication rhetoricians, whose attention is so thinly distributed across other fields that they can’t be bothered attending to the heart of their own.
Recently it has become a universal claim of fact that the United States, and the world, have lost the ability to engage one another civilly. Not a week goes by that you don’t see an article or a new book that claims that we have lost the once vibrant and common practice of engaging one another with civil and calm tones, evaluating evidence, and allowing reason and rationality to guide our way.
A quick glance at history, particularly American political history would immediately defeat this belief. The vast history of U.S. politics has involved muscle and weapons in the persona of street gangs that were regularly courted to perform voter intimidation and violence against groups who parties thought best out of sight, sound, and mind. But historical reality has never been very influential to human minds. Why are we not using this claim of the loss of civility as a way to boost our courses in the university, community, and country?
It’s a given that any course requires speech. Even if professors are not assigning formal presentations as class assignments or assessment (hard to imagine), the need for class discussion, participation, and verbal engagement is a given in every American higher education classroom.
Yet public speaking frames itself as some odd historical reenactment of the 19th century model of city hall, the Chautauqua circuit, or some fantasy of civic engagement where anyone could stand up in front of 20 people in a room and speak about anything they like without interruption. It’s an homage to historical fiction about the United States in the tune of Normal Rockwell at best, and at worst it could not be better designed to ensure our students do not and can not participate in meaningful contemporary politics.
The Argumentation & Debate course suffers from several problems, first being the conflation of two distinctly different rhetorical forms. We would never teach a course called Zoology & Botany or Poetry & Novels. There would be some distinctions that would take up most of the class time if we did. Not so here. More to come on the importance of dividing these two forms from one another.
Debate – confined to the late-night session in the basement classroom of the communication building – is just as important as writing for all university students. We are all teachers of debate in the sense that we are all preparing our students how to present conviction to uncertain others, and how to evaluate the speech of a convinced person in relation to the speech of someone convinced in some other, exclusive way.
Debate is not an afterthought to consideration and research and neither is writing. Both are ways to explore meaning and certainty. Debate often will leave you less convinced of your initial position even if the listener is more convinced of it. Debate also calls to account notions of fact, dissolving them into evidence, and further dissolving them in to support. This softer read on proof is essential for critically thinking your way through political, social, business, and scientific problems.
Debate, like writing, isn’t final, but in the realm of expression. When you argue you express a commitment, but it’s not a permanent identity. You are expressing what you feel and think at that moment, given the context and situation around you. Debate involves risk but no catastrophic loss. If you are proven to have a bad idea, perhaps it was your advocacy that allowed exploration of a seemingly good idea to the point of reconsideration. Without an advocate for a position that might not be great, we cannot fully explore ideas on their own terms, and always accept them with the blind spot of our initial approach. Debate forces us to defend the obvious with well-formed words. When we teach writing we are always asking for more explanations and more detail from the writer. We don’t want to see what’s true; we want to see how it gets there and how it is made.
Writing is the most common form of evaluation in higher education today, and students are doing more writing than ever with their devices. They are negotiating the space between expression on the page or screen and who they imagine that they are. Debate does the same thing, but with the voice and immediately with others. Teaching students how to debate an issue is not teaching them how to fight, get loud, or shake their head at their opponent. It’s teaching them that taking a stand is an essential part of being human and ironically, losing a point doesn’t lose the self, it helps create it. Debate is risky because it is creative. It’s constitutive of self in surprising ways. It helps us figure out how to know what’s out there. Just like writing, it’s a practice that helps us understand our mind’s relation to self, the world, and what we think is worth sharing.