The New Standards: The Case for Intellectual Discipline in the Classroom
A critical review of editorial appearing at by Linda Elder.
Sample critical review by Paul Dickey (8/5/2014)
In this editorial, Linda Elder emphasizes to us that the keyword often in discussions of education is “standards.” It seems rightly so, for it is fairly clear that an acceptable academic environment requires “standards” to evaluate the performance of students. She goes on to say that the standards typically developed and used are those particular to specific course content. Ms. Elder suggests however that such a view of standards, though necessary, is not adequate to address the issues students have in everyday life. According to Ms. Elder, we should generally consider the issue of standards more broadly and focus on what is “durable, testable, and, if possible, universal.” Community college students require reasoning skills and abilities which will be usefulto them to solve problems which may not even be recognized today. Such standards actually are quite intuitive, she asserts. They emphasize clarity, accuracy, relevance, appropriate depth, open-mindedness, and consistency. (Indeed, these are the very elements of what we refer to as “critical thinking.”) These are all necessary for sound thinking in any discipline a student might study. Without such standards, our society and our educational system will not provide students with the opportunity they deserve to succeed in the world they live in.
Ms. Elder is mostly concerned with the issue of what standards should be emphasized in schools, although she also is concerned with some similar and perhaps related issues, such as (to mention the more obvious ones): 1) how can the standards she is proposing actually be implemented by various faculty unaccustomed to teaching them, 2) what is the “right thing” to do for students to succeed who are faced with a difficult world to live in, or even 3) what is the general effect on our society today where too few citizens have the skills she regards as necessary? For the sake of this analysis however, we will focus on the issue first mentioned since that is the one in which she addresses in the most thorough and broad manner throughout the article.
The author addresses her issue with the claim that we should define educational standards based on the fundamental skills of critical thinking. She is making an inductive argument for which she attempts to provide premises that present evidence that will make it more likely that her opinion is right if her premises are true and right. She is not proposing a deductive argument by which a proof by logical form would be offered. Her argument is normative, not factual. That is, she is saying what is the right thing to do, not what is factually true. There is much general vagueness in her claim, of course. She is not proposing specific details about how to implement her suggestions. However, such a vagueness is not a fault of the argument, but is intentional and directed appropriately to the appropriate level of the issue as we stated it. She is also giving us few details in regard to how specific class content is used as standards today. And so on. Such details however do not appear to be pertinent to our evaluation of her argument and thus are not a fault of the argument. Thus, we judge that the claim is sufficiently clear to proceed to try to assess her argument.
However, there are some serious questions still we must ask and be careful as we proceed. Even if we agree that Ms. Elder is correct on what the necessary elements of critical thinking are, e.g. clarity, relevance, precision, etc., what is it Ms. Elder understands each of the various elements of critical thinking to be? For example, what does it mean to be “clear?” What does it mean to be “relevant?” To us in this class, “a premise being relevant to a claim” meant that it would change the probability that the claim was true or right if the premise itself was true or right. Without such a precise definition of it, how is itreasonable to demand that it be a key ingredient to a standard of academic achievement? Without such clarity on what it means to be “relevant,” the author’s own argument could be faulted on the same grounds she faults others whom she says are “muddled.”
This analysis suggests that Ms. Elder proposes four possible premises for her normative claim:
1)Students will not be able to solve new problemsas they encounter them without the discipline that the skills she notes (clarity, accuracy, etc.) provide. (Factual premise)
2)These skills can be used frequently in everyday life. (Factual premise.)
3)Content specific standards of educational performance are necessary but not sufficient to guarantee that students are successful. This appears to be mostly a factual premise, but upon analysis, we would argue actually contains multiple premises - some factual and some normative)
4)We ought to provide students with the best chance for success in the world they live in. (This is a normative premise)
These purported premises do seem intuitively relevant to the claim and seem thus to support it. Given them, a typical reader is likely to affirm the argument. Yet, this analysis finds the argument less than compelling, even if we grant all the premises to be true and/or right. (By the way, we would think that #1 and #3 could be reasonably questioned. We would be interested in what argument Ms. Elder might give for these statements as conclusions/claims in that argument, as she does not seem to try to argue for them in this essay but simply asserts them. Indeed, Ms. Edler seems to assume all her premises without trying to justify them. Given her intended audience, namely critical thinking instructors, she seems to be“singing to the choir.”) (WARNING: Rhetorical Analogy)
So be it. Our task in analyzing this argument is to determine if the argument is compelling assuming that the premises are true and right (i.e. we do share all the values necessary to make the argument reasonable.) And notably, there are fundamental difficulties here. First of all, the idea of “success” is fundamental to Premises #3, and #4, and, likely, even #1. The author however does little to clarify either the ambiguity or the vagueness in the concept of “success” she is relying upon. Without such a clarification, we cannot evaluate either: 1) whether the premises are true or right, or 2) whether the premises are, or to what extent they are, relevant to the claim. For example, say her definition of “success” is “getting a job after school” vs. “a long-term, personally satisfying career” vs “becoming rich and famous.” Now, the affected premises completely change their nature and character in regard to #1, #2, and #4 above, depending on which definition you are using. Just as one example, if her definition of “success” is the last one, I am not so sure we would all agree #4 then is right, although #4 seem right with other definitions. So without the clarification, we cannot determine whether these premises work to support the conclusion or not.
Thus, we must judge the argument as weak as it is. It would only be compelling to the extent that the premises would clarify what is meant by “success” and we could judge how that “success” is relevant to the claim that addresses the issue. A secondary problem is Premise #2. That the skills can be used in daily life is not all that supportive of her claim. For that premise to support her claim, this premise would need to be stronger, say, these skills are more useful in daily life than, for example, math or technical skills.
Rhetoric in the article is abundant. The most notable examples are:
1)A full paragraph of rhetorical questions with the paragraph beginning “How many of our students …..”
2)Several examples of hyperbole, including “‘everything goes’ culture”, “their way out of a paper bag,” “a garble of jargon, slang, and bastardized speech,” “human suffering.”
3)Many euphemisms and dysphemisms, including “mystical or highfalutin,’” “muddled,” “lock-stock-and-barrel,” “courageously seeking fresh ways to see things,” “troubled and troubling.”
4)Sarcasm/Satire, e.g. “knee-jerk consistency,” “lust is confused with love.”
5)Rhetorical analogies, e.g. “Band-aid approaches.”
Some examples of logical fallacies here are:
1)Argument from Outrage, e.g. “No wonder educators have followed suit.”
2)Argument from Shame, e.g. “If we are really concerned with educating our students”
3)Straw-man, e.g. “To simply modify task-specific ones in subject areas,” or the title itself, “The Case for Intellectual Discipline in the Classroom”
4)Argument from Tradition, e.g. “In fact, once made explicit, they (the proposed standards) are quite intuitive.”
Of course, the argument is weak not because of the abundance of rhetoric. It is weak because of the lack of the premises clearly supporting the claim. Still, the excessive use of rhetoric in this article is (WARNING: SARCASM) “troubled and troubling.” It tries to manipulate the reader into accepting the argument emotionally rather than objectively providing strong evidence.
Yet this argument is not hopeless. The essential issue to making this stronger is clarifying (or perhaps detailing) the notion of success so that the premises can support the claim as our intuition seems to want to jump in to try to help it do. Another important issue that must, I would suggest, be addressed here is how the author would actually use the standard elements of critical thinking to establish a workable “standard” for measuring academic performance. This is somewhat a different issue than what this paper is arguing and as we mentioned before does not in itself make the argument weak, we do suggest it may be incumbent upon the author, at least, to give the reader some feasibility to the claim she is making. Could we at least get some (even if vague) picture of what such an academic “standard” would look like in establishing a standard for, say, a high school algebra class or even a community college philosophy class? Without such a weight and anchor, the supposed argument here strikes this analyst as perhaps (WARNING: RHETORICAL ANALOGY), “cheerleading” for the home team.