You can ask students, what if all you can say about life is what you do?
What if all of life is like that?
— Myrna Harrienger and Nan Uber-Kellogg
Last summer, while waiting at the counter in the gift shop of one of our ubiquitous midwestern tribal casinos, I glanced at a stack of Des Moines Registers. The headlines were “Clinton Accused of Spying for Peking” and “Mad Cows Seek Protection under Title XIX.” Nothing big, but for some reason I was riveted. A man looking like Willie Nelson after his last meeting with the IRS stumbled into line behind me, so I added the paper to my pile, paid, and moved along.
Seated on a stool at “Go Fish!” I eventually discovered what was bothering me — a small photograph on the front page of the paper, in the right-hand column, under “Financier Disappears with Millions.” My schema were in disarray: I hadn’t known the man in the photograph was a financier; he’d been my Quaker minister. What’s more, I recalled Rev. Hinckley as definitely over the hill, trailing clouds of mousy female relations, Holy Writ, and the latest Guideposts. There he was, though, smiling suavely into the camera, squinting a bit, platinum white hair glistening in the sun.
Over the coming months, I learned that Rev. Hinckley had been asked to leave his collar at the door not long after I stopped making the commute to his church. Thereafter, and before disappearing aboard his $1.4 million love boat, he began buying up and reselling real estate in small towns. I guess Iowa is teeming with folks eager to believe that land around here has the potential to triple in value within the month, so long as cable will arrive within the century. Either that, or Rev. Hinckley was a much better rhetor than I remembered.
***
This paper will critique Quintilian’s claims that (1) good rhetors must be good people and, therefore, (2) teachers must teach their students to be good. I will identify a philosophical tradition from which these claims likely emerged, as well a countervailing tradition. I will argue for a definition of ethics focusing on action before character, and as I do I will take into account studies in the ethics of rhetoric and composition. I will point out the difficulties of approaching a U.S. university-level composition course from Quintilian’s position, by suggesting that (1) teachers may be ethically compromised and (2) the ethical positions of teacher and students may be irreconcilable. Finally, I will offer recommendations for enlivening an ethic of social action, or praxis, in the classroom.
According to Quintilian, the rhetor should be “blameless in point of character” (cited in Nan Johnson, 1984, 103). Living when freedom of speech had been extinguished by “the long exercise of pure political power” (James Murphy and Richard Katula, 1994, 205), when a citizen could be put to death for defacing the emperor’s image, and when secret police had secure job prospects (206), Quintillian trained upper-class boys to become pillars of morality and eloquence, for the purpose of hallowing Roman private life. Given his context — that is, at the head of a classroom of young people and far removed from most occasions for compromise, Quintilian’s insistence on “steadfast integrity” (Bizzell and Herzberg, 1990, 296) may not seem surprising.
Regarding Quintilian’s claim that the rhetor’s eloquence depends on goodness, Johnson (105) writes that composition theory today contains two strands: one neo-Platonic and one neo-Aristotelian . Johnson traces Quintilian’s concern for the rhetor’s goodness to Plato (See De Oratorio, Chapter XV), who is deeply suspicious of democratic ideals and who holds that Truth, though knowable, is in effect accessible to an elite few. Dedicating his life to seeking Truth, “Plato’s philosopher-orator reveals the absolute and universal through his intrinsic state” (103). According to Plato’s vision, only the philosopher, the person who has dedicated his life to the pursuit of Truth, can be a good rhetor (99–100).
Regarding Quintilian’s claim that the good rhetor must teach his students to be good, the Platonic tradition is, of course, dominated by the life and death of Socrates, who, to complete the proof of his goodness, dedicates himself to teaching/preaching the Truth. Despite the emphasis on dialectic, Socrates is rarely if ever learning from it. In Gorgias, he ultimately abandons the pretence.
This view of the teacher’s comparative goodness and wisdom makes me uncomfortable in practice. For many reasons, I lack Socrates’s confidence! I often teach international graduate students who know more than I do not only about the world but also about topics such as the mechanics of article usage or conditional tenses. My Iowa freshmen usually know more about their own fields and about science, technology, and popular culture than I do. Add to this a long-standing ambivalence towards my own education, and I have what my teen-age daughter calls “serious issues” to confront whenever I assume the teaching role.
For a complex of reasons, then, and not entirely out of moral delicacy, I resist what Paulo Freire calls the “banking model of education” (1970, 56). In the extreme instance, the student in the banking model is not considered “a conscious being (corpo consciente); he or she is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty ‘mind’ passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside” (56). As repugnant as the model is, Porter and others note that “the study of ethics has historically centered on the construction and application of static universal principles” (549; emphasis his). How these are constructed and how applied strike me as crucial questions.
One colleague who seems attracted to a static model of ethics is Sam Dragga (1997), who suggests that moral decisions are made “intuitively” in the field of technical communication. At first, “intuition” would seem to suggest a context-based approach, but in fact “intuition” refers here to participants’ straightforward application of rules or guidelines learned usually at a parent’s knee. Dragga also advocates codes of conduct in professional communication (See Mike Markel, 1994, 217 and Detweiler et al., 2000, 212–213 for a critique of codes). Although Brenton Faber (1999) deconstructs Dragga’s representation of intuition and is, I feel, understandably wary of his willingness to accept the claim of most participants — professional communicators all — that they had never experienced an ethical dilemma, it should be noted that Dragga does recommend the use of case studies, a type of assignment encouraging contextualized approaches to ethics.
As mentioned, neo-Aristotelianism is also seen as influencing the teaching of ethics in the composition classroom. Unlike Plato, Aristotle held that the appearance of goodness was sufficient in situations requiring eloquence (Johnson 103). Aristotle wrote and taught speechmaking when it was an integral part of the everyday life of citizens. In Aristotle’s view, the absolutely necessary thing was for the rhetor to be wise — goodness would get you only so far. The rhetor needed to size up the audience and then determine which pathetic and logical appeals would persuade. Always, he needed to exude an aura of trustworthiness. Lacking the skills to strategically argue one’s cause, no matter how just, could, as in the case of Socrates, end in disaster, for the Greeks were connoisseurs of the courtroom and notoriously litigious.
“Aristotle,” states Johnson, “defines rhetoric from a perspective that stresses the reality of particular human circumstances over the authority of ‘immutable’ truths and ascribes a much more strategic than moral function” (100). His good rhetor has a sense of the fluidity of time, place, reality. Echoing Aristotle, Freire describes the awakened student as perceiving “through their relations with reality that reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation” (56). “Problem solving students” in Freire’s account resemble Aristotle’s good rhetors in that both have developed “their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation” (64; emphasis his).
When the teacher shifts her focus from eternal principles to the here and now, from a truth-based ethic to a context-based one, issues of praxis are likely to arise. This is so because the here and now includes you, me, our irreconcilable beliefs, our wills to power. The here and now gives rise to solutions that we know must be imperfect. When we discover a real object wanting discussion or action, we approach that object as a mediator of our ethical stances. Entering the here and now, we expect to be mutually shaped: the rationale for transformation is an admission that we are still becoming. This is a model for praxis.
If praxis is neglected, if classroom ethics consists of teachers’ depositing ideologies into the minds of students, it will continue to be the case that notions “’intended to replace the privileged position of the author [and authority] actually seem to preserve that privilege and suppress the real meaning’ of those terms” (Michel Foucault, cited in Andrea Lunsford, 2000, 67). What will “enlightenment” signify to the student who accepts the teacher’s deposit? How will that student be led to enact ethics in her own life consequently? Whom will she attempt to redeposit the ideology with, and how will she react if rejected? In response to these dilemmas and others, Peter Mortensen and Gesa Kirsch (1993) advocate a “dialogic” ethic of care (557) by which “asymmetrical power relations” are subverted. Similarly, Freire advocates a classroom in which teacher and students learn from and teach each other.
In this process, arguments based on “authority” are no longer valid; in order to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it. Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self–taught. People teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are “owned” by the teacher. (61)
I will conclude this essay with reasons and methods for putting into practice Freire’s and others’ theorizations of an ethic of social action.
When Quintilian claims that the teacher should teach students to be good, this seems to be his reasoning:
|
Students are not good. |
I will respond to the second assumption directly, since if I am not morally superior to my students, then my efforts to educate them morally may be harmful. I will suggest that the assumption that I am morally superior to my students is a self-serving fantasy (Freire, passim; David Russell, 1993, 89; Christy Friend, 1994, 548–549; 559) and that I should therefore resist the desire to assume a position of moral leadership in the classroom.
Although I try to be ethical, imperfection interferes. Further, I am part of a system that daily undermines my best efforts at right action. The ways in which I engage in behavior potentially destructive to individual students or commit sins of omission against them can be traced in part to my (1) owning knowledge, (2) investing in the status quo, (3) gatekeeping and assessing, and (4) devaluing teaching.
Owning knowledge. I’m sitting here writing an article for an academic journal while an acquaintance barely has the wherewithal to make it working weekends as a watchman on the graveyard shift. Given a greater share of the common stock of intelligence, should I think of this as a lucky break or as an implied responsibility? Assuming it just might be the latter, I need to ask myself why I’ve done so little to help others who may not be so privileged and who could use my help. The issue of literacy is a troubling one. As Michael Williamson and Brian Huot (1993) remind me, it is a privilege and responsibility.
Since I own knowledge that my students need, I have an opportunity to exercise power over them in the classroom. It’s all too easy for me to use that power as a platform for ideological domination (See Friend 2000, 552; Lisa Toner, 2000, 7; and John Ruszkiewicz, 2000, 23).
Investing in the status quo. As a graduate student, I’ve entered a “managerial training ground for cultural elites” (Friend 554). Reductivist as this may sound, it’s true I’ve entered graduate school in part because I want to make more money in my chosen field than I believe I could without the degree. In fact, I want to participate more fully in an economic system fueled by exploitation of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable.
Having spent exhausting years of back-bending labor towards earning this degree, I’ve reached a point where part of me, the greater part, is resistant to the thought of reforming the system much, or of engaging in serious self-reflection about my part in it. The thought of changing things in a big way is unappealing because I’ve invested too much of myself in the status quo, it looks like I’m about to get a pay off, and I’m too exhausted to start over.
Assessing/Gatekeeping. At this point, I’m probably struggling against the consciousnesseses of more self-reflexive, independent minded students. I may well have a need to dominate them and to believe in their need to be dominated if I am to have any peace with my own situation (Freire 56). Perhaps I will break their spirits by terrifying them with threats of exams that may grind their educational plans to dust. Perhaps I will grade in the name of rigor and preserving standards, though I know that these are institutional and not humane values. Perhaps I will come to use assessment as a means of self-preservation, like Toner’s colleague who “did not want to share [grading] criteria with students precisely because doing so would give them means to challenge his evaluation of their texts” (18).
Jonathan Kozol (1991, 1995) and Mike Rose (1990) present heart-rending research demonstrating that elementary and secondary education in the United States is characterized by gross inequalities. If students from the backgrounds described in these exposés are fortunate enough to be admitted to ISU and to my class, their skills are likely to be basic compared to those of the rest of my students. Among these “underprivileged” students, I will not easily “recognize a colleague” (Kenneth Bruffee, 1984, 643). If they cannot successfully complete the assignments I have created for a different group of students from a different background, I will fail these less privileged students because I am employed as a teacher within a culture and institution that needs to know whether students can do “the” work. I must accept the custom of grading students Prime, Grade A, Choice, or offal. As an educator, I am part of the machinery involved in expelling students into the streets, away from education.
Devaluing teaching. Ultimately, I may find that teaching is the greatest burden of all.
I have tried to show with this parable that within an exploitive, un-self-conscious system well-intentioned people like me are likely to become exploitive and un-self-conscious. I suggest that modern-day teachers in U.S. higher education should think very carefully before assuming that they are in a privileged ethical position vis à vis their students and, as Quintilian believed of himself (perhaps rightly), qualified to instruct them in ethical matters.
I also need to mention the obvious point that student and teacher worldviews are much less likely to be compatible in the U.S. classroom than they were in Quintilian’s. For that reason, too, it makes sense for me to emphasize ethical behavior in specific contexts instead of ethical principles.
Like Quintilian, I wish that orators (indeed everyone) were good. Recognizing that eloquence could be put to good or to evil ends, he taught morality lest he be “furnishing arms not for soldiers, but for robbers” (Bizzell and Herzberg, 347). For reasons I have already explained, however, I do my best to resist the impulse to hold myself up as an ethical model in the classroom. Instead, I try to help students discover situations in which they can inductively and communally arrive at ways of ethical action. I am content, finally, with defining the good rhetor as an effective one, by whatever means, including the ethical, and with crafting discursive solutions to real life dilemmas. If through this crafting my students and I recognize behaviors or attitudes that have been constructive, I am very pleased.
For those interested in enhancing the role of social action in their classrooms, I include a list of suggestions culled from recent research in composition:
In the Praxis-Oriented Classroom, Students May
In the Praxis-Oriented Classroom, Teachers May
***
When a minister, the nefarious Hinckley cheered prisoners and dying people, organized food drives, gathered clothes for the poor, ran anti–death penalty campaigns, and was always loving to my family and to his congregation.
To my mind, Hinckley was good when he helped the community and bad when he hurt it. Whether he was, ultimately, a good person or a bad one didn’t matter to the community in the slightest as he preached against racism or smooth-talked widows out of their last two mites. As for the outworking of justice in regard to Hinckley’s body and soul, I leave that to God and to the Feds.
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Bushnell, Jack. 1999. A Contrary View of the Technical Writing Classroom: Notes Toward Future Discussions. TCQ:175–188.
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