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Fateful Reasons

8.6.02 @ 12:02AM

Last week I turned in the final grades for a course I teach once a year to college juniors and seniors. As in all other summer courses, the students are mainly of two types: the scatterbrained and the compulsive -- i.e., those who have fouled up their schedules in some way that forces them to make up lost credit hours, and those who want to get ahead to graduate early.

The pace of the course is tight, squeezing the usual eleven weeks of material into five weeks of lengthy class meetings and chunky readings. Worse, each student must turn in six 1,000-word essays at a frantic rate slightly in excess of once per week. Much worse, I have to read the essays.

The course -- which fulfills a university core writing requirement for upperdivision students and therefore draws a broad stream of takers from many different major fields -- is titled Argumentation. The summer catalogue bills it as "ideal for students planning careers in business, law, or politics." It might better be advertised as ideal for teachers who want to know what's really going on in their students' heads.

Here are some representative topics in my students' attempts at argument this summer:

• Corporate corruption: it's something Republicans do, which Democrats must take a stronger stand against.

• Vouchers: they are bad, threatening the integrity of the public school system.

• Euthanasia: it's good, often the only compassionate choice for the terminally ill, whose choices need legal support in the manner of Oregon.

• Evolution: it's a proven scientific fact under fire from religious fanatics.

• Embryonic stem-cell research: it's a hopeful scientific breakthrough under fire from religious fanatics.

And while I'm still in the mood during my first week of summer break, here's a quiz. What position do you think was taken on the following issues -- and (bonus question) which ones included a denunciation of religious fanatics?

Gay marriage. Gay adoption. U.S. hostility against Iraq. Partial-birth abortion. Regulation of pornography. Homeland security. Affirmative action and diversity . . .

The burden of reading all this, week after week, was lightened by a series of personal conferences, in which I discovered yet again that most of my students are a lot more likable than their thoughts -- not least because, in most cases, the thoughts aren't really theirs.

Gingerly, in conversation with each student, I asked about some of their balder assertions. Without exception, none of them had any notion of any serious counterpoint to their predictable positions on predictably framed issues. The student who argued for the exclusive place of evolutionary theory in the science curriculum, for instance, had no idea that the theory is under serious dispute by reputable scientists and philosophers, nor had it ever occurred to her that the primacy she assigned to "science" over "faith" was itself a matter of faith on her part.

Chesterton remarks somewhere that we are bound in this life to be influenced either by thoughts we have thought through or by thoughts we have not thought through; the latter (thought not thought about) is what we call a culture. In The Clash of Orthodoxies (ISI Books, 387 pages, $24.95; click here to order), Robert P. George exposes the culture inhabited by my students -- and by all of us, apparently, whenever we stop thinking.

George is a professor of law at Princeton who has thought with uncommon depth about his own and others' thinking. The essays that make up this collection range over several public policy issues connected by George's analysis of fundamental premises.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Education, Business, Abortion, Books, Law, Iraq