The fallacy of the begged question is not an error in argumentation but a powerful tool for the construction of good arguments.

In a previous post, I asked: what debate format was appropriate for a social justice themed debate course? The begged question there is “what is appropriate for any course to do?”

Is there a right thing a course should teach, no matter what the subject?

Recently I have been adjacent to some school board election discussion where one candidate is running on a predictably old and outdated platform: Teach the controversy! (Intelligent Design vs. Evolution, or 2004 called and wants their controversy back). Students need moral guidance (shades of my awful experiences as a high school teacher in Texas where colleagues believed this in a simple way: Do as I do) including dress codes and time for prayer, etc. Of course living in New York insulates me from the very worst of this, where it is not only being proposed but passed with large margins.

One theory behind these strange ideas is that school is a place where one forms the system of beliefs that will aid and support one through their life, both professional and as a citizen. As Tik Tok Millenials continuously remind us the personal is on you – school will not teach you how to balance a checkbook or budget. The public school is there for the public – do we have a shared set of texts, experiences, and the like to have a basic grounding from which we can do the democratic thing, talk about our desires, fears, problems, and hopes?

The investment in citizenry and career benefits the state and the state alone. The investment in practical skills for a consumer capitalist world will do nothing but sustain and advance the aims of a system designed to limit imagination and choices to that which can be consumed pleasurably. The resistance to such status quo, or conservative models of schooling must come from the instructors. The classroom is one of the only spaces left to imagine the tools and practices that are used to imagine alternative orderings of society.

For my class then, what should be taught starts with the distinctions that are known by the members of the class between debate and justice. Investigating these distinctions, as they are held in society, might reveal the need for deeper research method – after we move from the what debate and justice are we can then wonder about the why they are what they are. This might be a move into dialectical analysis, rhetorical analysis, historical investigation including the archive, and other such activities. From that we can model debate and justice in ways that are connected to that discourse but depart from it and, most importantly, can justify their departures.

Looking broadly, the question of what a course is supposed to do might be deeply rhetorical: How did these meanings come to be in the audience, and how can I use them to advance what is good, beneficial, or just for that audience? This question is one of the most basic in rhetoric, but it’s also one of the deepest and defining of what rhetoric might be as a subject. In the classroom we look out not to see what we should be teaching, what we lack, or what we need to be able to do, but instead we look out in order to ask “what is that and why did it get to be that way?” From there we can work on what Herbert Marcuse called the distinction between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is,’ or more broadly, dialectical analysis.