Ledger 14 - Generational Blame Game & Why Kids Should Study Rhetoric

It's an ongoing joke in several of my core rhetoric classes that everything is a circle. Each time someone asks me a question about this or that, I struggle not answering with, "Well, it's an information system...a circle...again, which means it's both" Every time I bring up the circle we all laugh because it's truthful in part. 

Rhetoric has taught me to see nothing as dichotomous - it's impossible. It is never just one reason or another, its a compilation of problems. A timeline's worth of events that accumulate into tension. A good example are the dichotomous arguments we see regularly in American politics. You either take away the guns, or you amp them up. It's either the democrat's fault, or the republican's. It's either "handouts" or no support for the poor, etc. We know these, we've heard them for decades. 

Dichotomous logic leads audiences into very easy conclusions - it's them, not me. This encouraged Blame Game leads to a lack of critical thinking and a laziness that extends to the masses in which they do not see the value in small actions within their community and lives to affect the whole. By introducing rhetorical thinking, or even just the basic appeals and awareness of context at an earlier age than college, I really think we can move away from that kind of thinking. 

Kids already ask "why? Why? Why?" all the time! We are apt to shut it down most of the time, but don't always indulge their games. I believe - of course I am not the entire authority here being young, still in school and what not - that introducing rhetorical concepts at an early age would bring about an age of root reasoning and expansive perspective exploration. In teaching those concepts, it can be hard to logically move towards a one answer conclusion because one would have all the tools to think about the other factors in play. 

Dialogue can create reality - it can introduce perspective, widen one, and open the eyes to expansive possibilities in situations where it can be so easy to boil everything down. I hope in the future that my colleagues and I will work to create a curriculum that supports that kind of thinking and wonderlust into elementary schools and beyond. Even if it doesn't work in the way I suppose, students would still be learning advanced critical thinking that could lead them to more aware lives.