10-minute review: How teach students to deal with controversial issues in writing? Motivate students to write by raising emotional, controversial issues, but show students how to control their emotions when discussing them and writing about them.
Source: J Lindquist. College English (November 2004), 187-209. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).
Comment: The key is to help students deal rationally with emotionally-charged issues. Here is an example that I used with my students, an essay dealing with teenagers, fabricated by a committee concerned with critical thinking and published in English Journal (copyright 1966 by the National Council of Teachers of English, Reprinted with Permission). The essay contains a number of propaganda techniques designed to enflame the audience, teenagers.
Teen-Age Corruption
by
One day as I was walking thorough the halls of our school, I saw a young girl standing at her locker swearing quite loudly because her lock was stuck. I walked over to her and asked her if she could refrain from using foul language in the halls. Just as I made my statement, two other students approached and came to the defense of the girl. All three students were obnoxious in their attitude and were in every way disrespectful. It is this kind of disrespect, foul language, and cliquishness that typifies the low moral tone of the teen-agers of today.
Teen-agers are probably the most corrupt segment existing in our society. Most of this corruption is due to the fact that spineless, ill-informed, and irresponsible adults who pretend to be educated coddle those sickening children. In our schools, churches, homes, courts and businesses, so-called well-meaning idiots say that teen-agers must have a chance at free expression and must be dealt with kindly because they are going through a difficult period of life. They say teen-agers are socially maladjusted because of problems that disturbed these children when they were infants and because our world is insecure. These statements are rubbish.
Teen-agers must be dealt with in the same fashion as any other criminal or immoral group in our society. They must be shown firmness and must be shown that our democratic society will not tolerate their corruption. We must not try simply to understand them, but must deal with them swiftly and efficiently. Psychologists, such as E. P. Thompson of the Committee for Teen-Age Guidance, state that teenagers are basically moral and that the crime and immorality that they demonstrate is but an expression of their insecurity. Mr. Thompson had better wake up. His statement is completely false because he follows the policies of a misguided left-wing organization. He is so worried about keeping his job as a psychologist that he cannot face the question directly. He is a poor authority because he has no children who are teen-agers and he lives in the ivory tower of the academic world. If he would ever leave the confines of his library and walk out into the truth of day, he could see the evil that spreads over our country.
Any human being who loves mankind and dignity, and is able to think objectively or for that matter, anyone who is able to think at all, can see that teen-agers have reached the lowest ebb of human existence. They are human only in name; they are surely not human in the sense that the great Greek philosophers conceived it.
Teen-agers are like movie sets which look appealing at first glance, but on closer inspection are shallow. Movie sets are highly painted flimsy paper and canvas that change according to the requirements of the show. They are simply trash that have no real value but impress many by their glitter. It is only when we see the real thing that we are disgusted with movie sets. With these things in mind we can see what teen-agers really are like.
The real shame is that the violence exhibited by teen-agers turns our streets into a paradise for evil. Our older citizens are afraid to walk the streets at night. Our highways have become the slaughterhouse of the world. We citizens who really care about goodness and love must band together as an immovable unit to force teenagers back into the mold that their Creator established for them. We must move before it is too late. We cannot stand by while our world falls into oblivion.
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Of course this essay was written before Columbine and any number of teen-age crimes that have been committed in cities and schools and spread across newspapers throughout the country. Which gives even more reason to find a way to “sell” the good that teen-agers produce.
In my classes, the students usually vented after reading the essay. Then I set them looking for the propaganda techniques that were purposely designed to enflame emotions and, finally, we discussed how to respond to the writer in a way that would be persuasive to such a biased person without using the writer’s kinds of techniques to enflame emotion. The students set up a list of guidelines for responding to controversial issues. They then tried dealing with other controversial issues. RayS.
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