Excerpts from reading and writing for civic literacy.

Preface to Teachers
(and Curious Students)

The humanities lead beyond "functional" literacy and basic skills to
critical judgment and discrimination, enabling citizens to view
political issues from an informed perspective....

Educational policy makers at all levels should define critical thinking
as a basic skill and recognize the value of the humanities for
developing it....

High schools should concentrate on an articulated sequence of courses in
English, history, and foreign languages. Courses in these disciplines
should not divorce skill and methods from knowledge of content and
cultural context.... English courses need to emphasize the connections
between expression, logic, and the critical use of textual and
historical evidence.

--The Rockefeller Foundation Commission on the Humanities,
The Humanities in American Life, 1980

THIS RHETORIC with readings addresses the need for college students to develop critical reading, writing, and thinking skills for self-defense amid the arguments that inundate them in American public discourse, especially as filtered through the mass media. Within the format of a textbook, mainly for the second term of first-year English or a more advanced composition course, it presents an original theory of argumentative rhetoric, an ideological framework for understanding public controversies, and a practical method for analyzing them.

The approach to argument here is based on the principles of "critical thinking"--a term that has all too often been used as a vague, catchall concept in textbooks but that I use with specific reference to the definitions developed by specialists in the discipline over the past two decades. In brief, this conception of critical thinking avoids technical terminology, complicated theoretical schemas such as "the Toulmin model" or "stasis theory," and elaborate classification of types of arguments, all of which have limited practical use outside of artificial classroom assignments. Instead, it emphasizes commonsense reasoning about familiar controversies in everyday life, along with analysis of cultural influences and psychological dispositions that lead to open-minded or closed-minded reasoning. To put it another way, what distinguishes this book from most other textbooks is that it asks, What do we need to know, in terms of both factual information and aspects of rhetoric, to understand the information and arguments we read or hear every day about current events and controversies, in news and entertainment media, political statements, the classroom, the local bar or beauty salon--and what skills do we need to apply to every particular case in critically evaluating it? So rather than focusing at the outset, deductively, on abstract principles and contriving examples to illustrate them, our approach is to begin inductively or empirically, with actual arguments in the public sphere--for example, those studied in chapter 1 about financial pressures on today's college students and the pros and cons of dissent by writers after September 11, 2001--and then to enable students to determine what rhetorical or critical thinking issues they pose and what measures we need to take in evaluating them. Thus this approach is based on the process through which we all have to deal with arguments as we encounter them in the public sphere every day.

My approach to critical thinking and argumentation incorporates principles from the philosophy of general semantics--emphasizing the role in argumentation of definition of terms, connotative language, and verbal slanting and the need to concretize verbal abstractions and to perceive the complexity of, and diversity of possible viewpoints on, controversial issues. The approach to diversity of viewpoints further draws from the ideas of psychologist Carl Rogers, who was allied with the International Society for General Semantics, emphasizing the needs to attempt to understand and empathize with views differing from our own and to establish good-faith dialogue between opponents. The book provides distinctively in-depth examination of stereotyping and prejudice, polemics and invective, rebuttal, conflicting causal analyses, the use and misuse of statistics and emotional appeal, and logical or rhetorical fallacies like special pleading, stacking the deck, double standards, plain folks, straw man, ad hominem, and ad populum in public controversies. An emphasis on developing extended lines of argument through recursiveness, cumulation, and levels of meaning in reading, writing, and reasoning is reinforced in the structure of the book itself, which develops cumulatively and contains many cross-references forward and back among text sections and readings, in order to highlight different rhetorical issues within each segment. Key terms are boldfaced on first occurrence in each chapter to indicate that they are defined in the glossary or in the list of logical fallacies in chapter 12.

In contrast to the many textbooks whose primary aim is for students to generate papers based on their own ideas and arguments, the main focus here is on writing papers that demonstrate understanding and critical evaluation of arguments in sources from books, newspapers, magazines, speeches, student writings, and elsewhere. The justification for this is that in my own and many other teachers' experience, most college students can only begin to express themselves effectively about public controversies after they have acquired a base of factual, historical, and current knowledge about them (what E.D. Hirsch calls "cultural literacy"). They further need to have studied a diversity of sources on them, learning to analyze the ideological positions and rhetorical patterns of opposing sources. These processes are so extensive in themselves as to warrant an entire textbook.

Moreover, the concept of civic literacy mentioned in the title involves mainly the application of more or less traditional elements of academic discourse toward the development of critical citizenship. That is to say, the book is not primarily a guide for argumentation in the arena of service learning or community activism, which presents quite a different set of rhetorical challenges. Currently available textbooks for this purpose are themselves valuable supplements to this one, which nevertheless includes exercises encouraging students to apply the studies here to various forms of activism.

Many of the examples presented for analysis in the text and readings focus on issues in current political economy that impinge directly on students' present and future lives, such as the growing gap between the wealthy and the middle class and poor; concentration of corporate ownership and corporate political influence; the global economy and sweatshop labor; the decline in recent decades of job prospects and real income for most workers; the escalating cost of college education and reduction of financial aid; inequities in tax and wage policy; crime and welfare among the poor versus the rich. These issues are presented through opposing viewpoints in readings from conservative, liberal, libertarian, and leftist authors, with glosses analyzing rhetorical aspects of the points of opposition and prompting student debates on them. A culminating, extended section of readings and analyses on these topics forms a casebook, within the context of a guide to writing documented argumentative papers. The opposing viewpoints in the readings and citations serve as a who's who of current commentators on the American right, including William J. Bennett, Rush Limbaugh, Christina HoffSommers, Thomas Sowell, Bernard Goldberg, Jeff Jacoby, Lynne Cheney, David Horowitz, Diane Ravitch, James Pinkerton, Charles Krauthammer, Fred Barnes, George Will, Deroy Murdock, P.J. O'Rourke, and the Young America's Foundation, and on the left, including Jonathan Kozol, Katha Pollitt, Bob Herbert, Naomi Wolf, Michael Kinsley, Martha Nussbaum, Henry Giroux, Holly Sklar, June Jordan, Edward Herman, Jim Hightower, Adolph Reed, David Brock, Joel Bleifuss, Susan Douglas, David Moberg, and Steve Brouwer.

In contrast to the common textbook approach to logical fallacies that assumes they result only from unintentional lapses in reasoning, the book confronts the hard truth that real-life arguments frequently are tainted by deliberate deception, political partisanship and polemics, special pleading, double standards, conflicts of interest, "hype," and other forms of propaganda or outright lying. Moreover, it alerts students to sources of biased arguments including political "spin doctors," public relations agencies, lobbies, and partisan foundations and think tanks that sponsor journalism or research.

Thus the book assumes that college students are capable of dealing with public disputes in which the truth is often fiendishly difficult to determine, even for the most knowledgeable analysts. However, political and economic issues are not addressed at the same level or in the same manner as they would be in social science courses. They are addressed, rather, at the level of campaign speeches, news and entertainment media, op-ed columns, general-circulation journals of opinion, and other realms of public discourse to which everyone is exposed every day. The political vocabulary and information covered here are no more specialized than what every citizen in a democracy should he expected to know, even before taking a college argumentative and research writing course--although definitions and explanations of political concepts are provided for those students who need them. Chapter 15, 'Thinking Critically about Political Rhetoric,' provides a basic glossary and extended explanation of political terms and ideological positions. "A Semantic Calculator for Bias in Rhetoric," "Predictable Patterns of Political Rhetoric," and "The American Political Spectrum: Media and Commentators from Left to Right" provide heuristics for identifying the viewpoints of the authors of readings in the book and elsewhere.

One danger in an approach like this is that it and courses in which it is applied can all too easily be turned into an indoctrination to the author's or instructor's personal political ideology, or into an excuse for teaching political science instead of critical thinking and writing. This concern has certainly been warranted by the tendency of some "politically correct" teachers to assume that all students and colleagues agree--or should agree--with their particular views. So one of my main concerns has been how to avoid turning this book and the kind of course for which it is intended into indoctrination into any particular ideological position. To be sure, this book's project of Socratic, critical questioning of the conventional assumptions of our society, including the ethnocentrism of American nationalism and its capitalistic economy, is bound to he predominantly liberal, by the dictionary definition of "free of or not bound by traditional or conventional ideas, values, etc.; open-minded" (Random House Webster's Collegiate Dictionary). Whether those Americans who are considered "liberal" act consistently in accord with these principles is, of course, a source of constant dispute between liberals and conservatives. This is one of many points on which the very definitions of these opposed terms are highly ambiguous--a problem highlighted throughout the book.

So while the authorial viewpoint is liberal to leftist, the book raises as an explicit topic for rhetorical study the issues of political subjectivity, partisanship, and bias in sources of information, including not only the media but also teachers and authors of textbooks--including this one. The principle is that any writer or reader addressing controversial issues will almost inevitably have a subjective, partisan viewpoint. There is nothing wrong with having such a viewpoint; indeed, a clear-cut expression of a particular partisan viewpoint can be a rhetorical virtue, particularly if the viewpoint is relatively unbiased, supported through sound argumentation, and explained in evenhanded contrast to opposing views. The book's aim is to enable students to identify and understand the full range of viable ideologies in today's world (including those mostly excluded from the American public agenda, like democratic socialism and libertarianism), so that they can then perceive the viewpoint of any given source and weigh its rhetorical quality against opposing points of view.

In the same way, the book stresses that we all can benefit from learning to identify our own ideological viewpoint, and possible biases, as readers and writers, and certainly as teachers. I believe that teachers or textbook writers should not coyly hide their viewpoint, as they often do, but that they should honestly identify it and present it, not as the assumed truth, but as one viewpoint among others, needing to he scrutinized for its own biases and fair-mindedly justified against opposing ones. Thus, because total objectivity may never be attainable, dealing honestly with our own subjectivity may be the best way to approximate objectivity. This principle obliges me to come out from the hiding place of authorial anonymity and pretended objectivity that is the convention in textbooks and to speak as "I" from time to time throughout the book, especially in addressing contentious issues where it is most difficult for anyone to present an objective, impartial analysis. In such sections, students are directed to sources whose viewpoint opposes mine. Likewise, more conservative teachers can readily engage the views in the book from their own critical viewpoint, thus advancing the open-ended dialogue called for.

The intention of this method, then, is to guarantee that students will not be indoctrinated into my ideology (or that of any other writer or teacher) but rather that the scope of students' own critical thinking, reading, and writing capacities will be broadened so as to empower them to make their own autonomous judgments on opposing ideological positions in general and on specific issues. It is exactly this intention, of encouraging students to view social issues from diverse perspectives and in their full complexity, that ultimately justifies the emphasis on political issues here, within a rhetorical framework quite different from anything students are apt to encounter in social science courses.

Finally, the book seeks to transcend arbitrary disciplinary divisions between the humanities and social sciences, as well as the divisions within English studies among composition, literature, and rhetoric. My view that literature and literary criticism provide perhaps the richest models for critical thinking about public discourse is supported in the many citations throughout the book of literary sources illustrating principles like questioning ethnocentrism, recursiveness, recognizing complexity, multiple perspectives and levels of meaning, irony and paradox, and drawing fine lines in ethical or aesthetic distinctions. These sources include Plato, William Shakespeare, Michel de Montaigne, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Albert Camus, Joseph Heller, James Baldwin, and Sylvia Plath, along with contemporary literary artists or critics including Alice Walker, Gloria Anzaldua, June Jordan, Susan Sontag, Barbara Kingsolver, Arundhati Roy, Adrienne Rich, and Edward Said.

The organization of the book is flexible enough to invite teachers to change the order of chapters to accord with their own preferred emphasis. Teachers who wish to concentrate on writing instruction from the outset might want to begin with chapter 4, "Writing Argumentative Papers," and to bring in chapter 21 early, "Collecting and Evaluating Opposing Sources: Writing the Research Paper," supplemented by the reference materials for documentation and using research resources in part V.

For me the conceptual heart of the book is chapter 15, "Thinking Critically about Political Rhetoric." This discussion of denotation and connotation in political language, definitions of various party and ideological positions--along a worldwide and nationwide spectrum--and predictable patterns of political rhetoric is foreshadowed throughout much of the earlier sections. Some reviewers have suggested moving this chapter nearer the beginning. This would have obvious advantages, but I think it would have the disadvantage of suggesting that the book was entirely about political rhetoric. I do believe that it is essential to apply principles of rhetoric and critical thinking to politics, and that this application warrants much more emphasis than in most other textbooks, but I also believe that there are many other important dimensions and applications of rhetoric and critical thinking that precede and perhaps transcend politics; thus my decision, at least for this edition, to put that chapter about halfway through. Certainly, though, teachers whose courses focus centrally on politics might well assign that chapter, and perhaps the following one, "Thinking Critically about Mass Media," toward the beginning. In any case, I welcome suggestions from teachers and students about changing this and other organizational choices in future editions.

Definitions and Criteria of Critical Thinking (from Chapter 3)

This chapter will briefly explain the scholarly background for the content of subsequent chapters and the sequence in which they are organized. Around 1980 American educators began to identify critical thinking as a subject that needed increased, explicit emphasis in our high schools and colleges, and as an essential element in civic literacy. The Rockefeller Foundation's Commission on the Humanities reported in 1980, "The humanities lead beyond 'functional' literacy and basic skills to critical judgment and discrimination, enabling citizens to view political issues from an informed perspective.... Educational policy makers at all levels should define critical thinking as a basic skill and recognize the value of the humanities for developing it" (The Humanities in American Life, 12, 22).

Also in 1980, Chancellor Glenn Dumke announced the requirement of formal instruction in critical thinking throughout the nineteen California State University campuses, serving some three hundred thousand students. The announcement read:

  Instruction in critical thinking is to be designed to achieve an
  understanding of the relationship of language to logic, which should
  lead to the ability to analyze, criticize, and advocate ideas, to
  reason inductively and deductively, and to reach factual or judgmental
  conclusions based on sound inferences drawn from unambiguous
  statements of knowledge or belief. The minimal competence to be
  expected at the successful conclusion of instruction in critical
  thinking should be the ability to distinguish fact from judgment,
  belief from knowledge, and skills in elementary inductive and
  deductive processes, including an understanding of the formal and
  informal fallacies of language and thought.

Similar requirements were soon adopted by community colleges and secondary schools throughout California and elsewhere. Here is the list of "basic critical thinking skills" in the California State Department of Education's Model Curriculum for Grades 8-12 in 1984.

1. Compare similarities and differences. The ability to compare similarities and differences among two or more objects, living things, ideas, events, or situations at the same or different points in time. Implies the ability to organize information into defined categories.

2. Identify central issues or problems. The ability to identify the main idea or point of a passage, argument, or political cartoon, for example. At the higher levels, students are expected to identify central issues in complex political arguments. Implies ability to identify major components of an argument, such as reasons and conclusions.

3. Distinguish fact from opinion. The ability to determine the difference between observation and inference.

4. Recognize stereotypes and cliches. The ability to identify fixed or conventional notions about a person, group, or idea.

5. Recognize bias, emotional factors, propaganda, and semantic slanting. The ability to identify partialities and prejudices in written and graphic materials. Includes the ability to determine credibility of sources (gauge reliability, expertise, and objectivity).

6. Recognize different value orientations and different ideologies. The ability to recognize different value orientations and ideologies.

7. Determine which information is relevant. The ability to make distinctions between verifiable and unverifiable, relevant and non-relevant, and essential and incidental information.

8. Recognize the adequacy of data. The ability to decide whether the information provided is sufficient in terms of quality and quantity to justify a conclusion, decision, generalization, or plausible hypothesis.

9. Check consistency. The ability to determine whether given statements or symbols are consistent. For example, the ability to determine whether the different points or issues in a political argument have logical connections or agree with the central issue.

10. Formulate appropriate questions. The ability to formulate appropriate and thought-provoking questions that will lead to a deeper and clearer understanding of the issues at hand.

11. Predict probable consequences. The ability to predict probable consequences of an event or series of events.

12. Identify unstated assumptions. The ability to identify what is taken for granted, though not explicitly stated, in an argument.

Some scholars make a distinction between critical thinking skills, related formally or informally to traditional logic, and dispositions that foster or impede critical thinking within the broader context of psychological, cultural, social, and political influences. Dispositions that foster critical thinking, also studied throughout part 2 (partly from the perspective of semantics, especially in chapter 9), include the development of skepticism, open-mindedness, autonomous thought, and reciprocity (psychologist Jean Piaget's term for the ability to empathize with other individuals, social groups, nationalities, ideologies, etc.). Dispositions that act as impediments to critical thinking include culturally conditioned assumptions, egocentrism and ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, rationalization, compartmentalization, stereotyping, prejudice, and defense mechanisms. These positive and negative dispositions will he surveyed in the following chapters.

Semantics in Rhetoric and Critical Thinking (from Chapter 9)

Semantics is the field of linguistic studies that deals with language as meaning and communication. The International Society for General Semantics [now part of the Institute of General Semantics, or IGS], a scholarly organization that came to prominence in the 1940s, was devoted to a philosophy of semantics best known through a classic textbook, Language in Thought and Action, by S.I. Hayakawa. IGS is still active, publishing a quarterly magazine, ETC. The principles of general semantics encompass the complex relationships diagrammed in the figure below, between the external world, human thought, language, and communication.

External world [left and right arrow] Thought [left and right arrow] Language [left and right arrow] Communication

The common phrase "a semantic misunderstanding" refers to the breakdowns of understanding and expression that frequently occur at each stage of these relationships. Humans perceive the external world through sense impressions that, through a mysterious yet almost instinctive process, get translated into ideas and then into the vocabulary and syntax (order within and between sentences) of language. External reality, however, is infinitely complex, and the human mind and language are at best imperfect instruments, so there can never be a complete or precise correspondence between that reality and its transformation into the symbols of thought and language. Hence, one key slogan of general semantics is, "The map is not the territory"--that is, maps and other symbols, visual or linguistic, can only be partial replicas of the original.

This first stage of breakdown is compounded at each further stage: putting ideas into language presents a constant struggle to say exactly what we mean, as does communicating our ideas to other people. Such communication is impeded by the cultural, physical, psychological, and semantic filters through which each of us receives messages from others. So virtually every idea, every act of speaking or writing, every communication should be thought of as provisional, subject to revision and further development, possibly to be followed by "etc."--hence the title of IGS's magazine. The practical implication of these points for you a student is to suggest a tone of "thoughtful uncertainty" in whatever you say or write in academic studies and life in general.

The imperfection of the pictures of reality we carry in our thoughts and language has been infinitely compounded in our age of mass communication by the proliferation of images of the world conveyed in print media, films, radio, and above all television. "Reality is Silly Putty" was a facetious slogan in the 1960s, and the lines between news, drama, advertising, and publicity have been increasingly blurred by all-devouring media and their recombinations of an increasingly plastic reality: infotainment, infomercials, and docudramas in the style of Oliver Stone's JFK and Nixon, in which history is irresponsibly fictionalized to propagandize for the producers political line--in Stone's case, a liberal one.

DONALD LAZERE*

* Donald Lazere is a Professor Emeritus of English, from California State Polytechnic University, where he won the Exceptional Merit Teaching Award. Currently a Lecturer at the University of Tennessee, he is the author of numerous articles and the editor of American Media and Mass Culture: Left Perspectives (University of California Press, 1987). Excerpts from Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy by Donald Lazere are reprinted with permission of the author and publisher. Copyright [c] Paradigm Publishers 2005, paperback price $42.95.