Rhetoric and Teaching

Rhetoric is a dead art. Only elite academics study it and comment on it in a journal which only they read. In Ancient Greece and Rome rhetoric was considered as important a subject as STEM subjects in our society. Rhetoric was the need of the society, because without rhetoric no one got his way around in the assembly. For a politician it was even more necessary to have a good grasp over rhetoric, otherwise the public would lean towards a competitor who had a better command over language. Rhetoric, essentially, is the art of convincing. Since politicians today have outsourced the convincing part of their agenda to a “campaign-marketing” team, which consists of a mélange of promotions on social media, website, twitter handles and the likes, the importance of spoken words in politics seems to be on the decline. Is rhetoric now inutile for good? Is there any profession that depends upon narratives today, which can help itself through the art of rhetoric? Surprisingly there does exist a profession that still depends upon the spoken word, and in it a lot of convincing takes place: Teaching.

Today, more than ever, we need to understand the importance of rhetoric for teachers. Teaching is the transfer of knowledge from one mind to the other through words; and knowledge faces a stern opposition in the mind of the student unless she is convinced that the presented knowledge seems acceptable. Teaching is still an art heavily based on rhetoric. One can argue that in the teaching of mathematics, sciences and other “objective’ subjects, basically all subjects except for humanities, rhetoric does not seem to play an important role. Teaching someone what is Pythagoras’ theorem does not require the teacher to convince the student of its veracity, hence there is no need to be a good speaker to teach it.

We should distinguish between higher order and lower order subjects. Higher order subjects like Philosophy, Literature, History, and other humanities related subject do not have one answer, sometimes they do not have any answer, they usually provoke questions, curiosity; whereas lower order subjects, even though they are sometimes harder than historical and philosophical questions, have only one correct answer, like Mathematics, Physics, and other numerical and applied sciences. Therefore there is no need to convince the student why two plus two is four, but it takes a lot more than a mere presentation of facts to convince a student that the Industrial Revolution made the Holocaust possible. Given all these reservations about “objective” subjects, if the teacher of mathematics ends the class of logarithms with the remark: “We have covered the whole topic of introductory logarithm in the class within 25 minutes, which took Napier 25 years to formalize”. This sentence will not be the possession of the mind for the student, it will become the seed of curiosity in her heart. In sum, a good rhetorician can make as boring a subject as mathematics enticing.

We should first give teaching a rhetorical definition. When a teacher enters the class he has the whole plan in his head, he knows where he wants to lead the student in the end, he knows how he will lead them towards that conclusion, he knows the facts, details and every twist and turn that he would be required to take when presenting the arguments; all these factors constitute the teaching narrative. Every teacher presents a narrative in the class to the students. In rhetorical terms, teaching is the mapping of a narrative in the student’s mind. This definition also allows us to understand the claim that teaching is the best tool for propaganda. Yes, it is! In fact all teaching is an invitation by the teacher to the student that the latter should accept the former’s narrative, and if it is done successfully and convincingly the money starts pouring in for the teacher.

There is a very thick scholarly literature that claims our personal identities are narrative identities. When someone asks us who are we? Our response is a narrative of our lives from the birth till the time of the question. We adopt narratives, we claim the truth of narratives, we fight for narratives, we think narratively. We get our narratives from three sources: parents, teachers, and society; and this is precisely the reason why it is usually said that we have three teachers in our lives. The narratives of our parents shape our early lives especially, but it is a very noisy period, we do not care about what our mother said when we were two, we do not even remember it. The narrative from the society is even more uneven and problematic, it is adopted blindly and left behind as soon as the fad goes away. The only narrative that we really deliberate upon, forcefully, is the narrative of our classroom teachers. We stay quiet and listen attentively to what the teacher has to say, because we know that our future depends upon his words (achieving good final marks, basically).

A teacher of history weaves together a web of facts with his own experience and knowledge, adorns it with praiseworthy one-liners, betrays his admiration for his heroes of history, grounds his arguments in the most subtle language, knowing that he is now treading a dangerous path, this is where rhetoric helps him. The true teacher presents every argument as if he is its most adamant advocate. If students cannot discern in the class if a teacher is a capitalist or a communist while teaching capitalism and communism, then he has achieved the unachievable: he has convinced the students that both are true narratives. Students listen to him attentively, they weigh their own experiences against the presented story of facts, peep outside the window to confirm if the world is still revolving the way it was revolving before they got to know the secrets of the ways of the world, they consider the laws of history, they consider the absurdity of life in the face of the orderly narrative, they try to impose an order in their minds, faced with the brutal indifference of the historical process they feel helpless, they feel frustrated, they want to change the system, they get lost in the moment of revolutionary spirit and then come back to the narrative. They have lost a bit of the story, but they pick up, they catch up after inquiring their colleagues, where they left off and are back in the world-view presented in the class.

It is indeed very important for teachers to comprehend how much rhetoric is crucial in the classroom. As presented above that a big part of our personal identity is narrative identity, therefore teachers, while teaching, are also betraying their way of life, their prejudices, their way of thinking. The students are mapping all of this in their minds attentively, drowning in the prose as much as the attention allows them. Usually, the exact crucial details are lost in the student’s mind, and a rhetorician knows this perfectly well, therefore he will not overload his narrative with the vomit of facts, but a serene velvety fabric of arguments where the student’s mind will remember the way took by the teacher when the class is over. The feelings generated by correct choice of words, presented with care, matter more in teaching than the remembrance of the independence date of a certain country, or the exact categories of Kantian mind.

Narratives also have one very effective function; it invites and motivates the listener to imitate itself. If the teacher is really the embodiment of a good narrative, then the student will also want to join the journey and personify the narrative, because after all to know is to be. Convincing students is a very difficult task indeed but convincing someone that they should become like a certain thing, in this case a particular narrative, that is an impossible task. Great teachers do not teach good things, they teach how to become good.

Every one of us went through the education system, and there is a lot of us, but how many of us are good? If the gravity of this question is understood properly, then rhetoric will be the primary and necessary requirement for becoming a teacher.