There’s an old concept from classical education: rhetoric. The art of persuading people with words, writing, speech, debate. A small corner of students today, law and politics, learn this.
In earlier times, we were sending a few people to college to be leaders, and thus all were expected and required to learn to persuade. The hoi polloi were not in college, and were to be convinced by said rhetorically trained leaders. There were many more hoi polloi, and democracy provided the check and balance between the educated and manipulative (in good and bad ways), and the unarmed masses.
Now we have many more topics to cover and many more students, thus the term Universe-ity. Few students learn rhetoric formally. Which is good in the sense that when there is an expectation of needing to argue, it descends into sophistry. Arguments about how many angels fit on the head of a pin, etc.
What all non-rhetoric students should learn is how not to be convinced, not to be persuaded. Something that has been called critical thinking. There have been a lot of writings in the past on how to train students in critical thinking. It was a hot topic in post-WWII education. When 60 million people die, arguably because of a lack of critical thinking, and those that survive go to college on the GI Bill, they start asking good questions. When hundreds of thousands of older students who lived through the horrors of modern war entered campus, they made it clear to the Academy that critical thinking was a priority. That sort of moral authority, gained at the end of a rifle barrel or in a cockpit facing life and death, is lacking now.
Expand that to persuaders in the visual arts, and it becomes media studies. Media studies as the transliterate counterpart of critical thinking and classical rhetoric in text. Logic falls under rhetoric. And, when you think about it, there is a broad overlap between statistics and media studies. I recommend the book, How To Lie With Statistics, published in 1954. Tufte wrote some good stuff too.
Not everybody needs to learn to be a persuader in college. That can be picked up later as needs arise or not. But everyone coming out of college needs to learn to be a critical thinker, an anti rhetorician. There are standard techniques, philosophies, ways of thinking, psychologies that could be bundled together in a Freshman course. I’m still a fan of General Semantics and cognitive bias research myself. Mixing humanities and STEM in a common cause. Fifty years ago as a high school senior, I developed a unit plan to do something similar for high school students.
In earlier times, we were sending a few people to college to be leaders, and thus all were expected and required to learn to persuade. The hoi polloi were not in college, and were to be convinced by said rhetorically trained leaders. There were many more hoi polloi, and democracy provided the check and balance between the educated and manipulative (in good and bad ways), and the unarmed masses.
Now we have many more topics to cover and many more students, thus the term Universe-ity. Few students learn rhetoric formally. Which is good in the sense that when there is an expectation of needing to argue, it descends into sophistry. Arguments about how many angels fit on the head of a pin, etc.
What all non-rhetoric students should learn is how not to be convinced, not to be persuaded. Something that has been called critical thinking. There have been a lot of writings in the past on how to train students in critical thinking. It was a hot topic in post-WWII education. When 60 million people die, arguably because of a lack of critical thinking, and those that survive go to college on the GI Bill, they start asking good questions. When hundreds of thousands of older students who lived through the horrors of modern war entered campus, they made it clear to the Academy that critical thinking was a priority. That sort of moral authority, gained at the end of a rifle barrel or in a cockpit facing life and death, is lacking now.
Expand that to persuaders in the visual arts, and it becomes media studies. Media studies as the transliterate counterpart of critical thinking and classical rhetoric in text. Logic falls under rhetoric. And, when you think about it, there is a broad overlap between statistics and media studies. I recommend the book, How To Lie With Statistics, published in 1954. Tufte wrote some good stuff too.
Not everybody needs to learn to be a persuader in college. That can be picked up later as needs arise or not. But everyone coming out of college needs to learn to be a critical thinker, an anti rhetorician. There are standard techniques, philosophies, ways of thinking, psychologies that could be bundled together in a Freshman course. I’m still a fan of General Semantics and cognitive bias research myself. Mixing humanities and STEM in a common cause. Fifty years ago as a high school senior, I developed a unit plan to do something similar for high school students.