Helle Hochscheid

Critical thinking pressure cooker

Two weeks ago was the annual teacher-student debate at University College Roosevelt, one of UU’s Liberal Arts and Sciences Colleges. Always an entertaining occasion, I had let myself be drafted for this year’s edition. After all, as my students put it when they somewhat gleefully came to watch, I make them go through it almost every course I teach. And mind you, I teach antiquity, not rhetoric or speaking skills. So our debates are about the question whether Rome actually declined and fell in the fifth century AD, or whether Oedipus could have avoided killing his father and marrying his mother.

My students fully deserved their ‘revenge’ – although I had loads of fun – but it did make me understand their fears a bit more. Because debates of this type are strict: three minutes speaking time, formal criteria for responding and furthering arguments, no arguments ad hominem, and heavily evidence-based reasoning. It requires debaters to have a grasp of the subject matter so thorough that any slip-up by an opponent can be pounced on like a tiger, and that sources can be produced at any time to prove whichever point the speaker decides to make, which has to be the best argument for that moment in the debate. It is like a critical thinking pressure cooker. Obviously, this is hard. And nerve-wracking, as I realised while waiting in the wings for the debate to start.

I can’t say I spoke expertly on the topic – it was about human rights for robots, a subject in which I am now surprisingly more at home than ever before in my life. But I went all out on the rhetoric, and since I was opening, I could get away (I thought) with attacking my student-opponents’ definitions, which were shaky enough to leave room for pouncing. I have to admit that this was cheating a little. My students, when they are debating whether the fourth-century Athenian who murdered his wife’s lover did or did not plan his revenge, need to know about contemporary Athenian law. In this case, that planning it would have made it criminal, while passion (much as today still) might have let him off the hook. That strong emotion, while officially considered inappropriate for public life, was forgivable if you found your wife in bed with another bloke. That the rhetorical tools applied in the judicial speeches of ancient Athens in practice point at everything but restraint in the use and abuse of emotions. In short, they not only have to know a lot, they have to critically apply the knowledge in split-second decisions. And what is so cool, is that they do this! Every time.

Coming to grips with the literally and metaphorically alien topic of robot rights I gained some more respect for my students. I gained even more respect for colleagues who teach them those debating skills. We do well.

They won.

Helle Hochscheid teaches Antiquitiy at the University College Roosevelt