Assessing the Purpose of Argumentative Essays
An essay about argumentative essay instruction
Essays are often dreaded by students and undervalued — or misused — by educators. All essays are a form of participation in both science and philosophy. One branches out from the other, as well as the other founds its purpose in the one. There had to be a way to produce comparative data to support the idea of the urgency to evaluate the purpose and effectiveness of writing instruction in schools as way to open new paths of thought for its purpose. To learn about how to better teach through inspiration and wonder, and to continuously measure the way on which essays’ outcome in education could either be validated or put under revision with the sole purpose of increased literacy and producing better and prepared individuals for our cruelly competence-based formed society.
I compared successful non-technical publications in the form of argumentative essays and high school and undergraduate outcomes from essay assignments — not to mention those I produced in both programs — , and found an evident yet underlying trend that deserves being pointed out.
Let’s take Medium as an example of a pool of persuasive writers (some being more than others, as in any realistic setting). Usually, if not generally, people write about topics within their spectrum of interests or opinions. There are of course some factual stories, but these are generally not the main reason why readers come to Medium. Factual evidence can be — and should be — grounded on different sources.
Medium’s influential authors often write about what they think to be true, their ways of appreciating life, their understanding of any topic, their technical learnings through educational tutorials and many forms of literature, but always for the sake of sharing, which has, in some way, enough empathy to keep this beautiful place in motion. These are the people who are writing for the web, and who share strong beliefs on the possibility of an open, accessible web environment for everyone. These are the writers who are influencing those who will starve from human interaction unless we find a way to stop the sciences-humanities disconnection in writing instruction.
This new age of online sharing (being ideas, propositions, resources, tips, non-experience personal knowledge or content in general) is creating a whole new form of interaction and exchange, fastly leading onto blockchain technologies and decentralized networking. The instruction in technical skills that universities rigorously offers is slowly losing efficacy on the workforce — not value — as these are slowly taken over by artificial intelligence, mass automation in production and the starving users for intuitivity that the tech industry is fastly feeding.I could find a general, but intuitive structure that is self-learned through reading and with very basic training in argumentation. Yet I could not find a single essay that did not diverge in some way from what both requirements and outcomes outline in education. And every single one of them was written by someone who somehow either:
- holds a genuine interest, passion or concern about their topic, or
- is a form of experienced writer that produces a massive flow of visitors
What I am suggesting is that writers will write if they acknowledge their will to share what they intrinsically can and what epistemologically claim to know, as much as they will produce better and more persuasive writing upon the acceptance of reading as the way to writing. Critical thinking founds itself in philosophy, while any scientific knowledge was once a philosophical argument. Empathy lives within any philosophical thinking as much as skepticism, which many times take form of some form of apathy. Never have I heard about scientific imposition of others’ methods in the production of any new theory or explanation — quite the contrary, I shall point out — . I have, however, come to realize in studying theory of knowledge, that every progressive achievement in science has derived to some extent from some sort of influence, i.e., scientific knowledge is built upon the other scientists’ work: Thales, Aristotle, Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, Hopkins. Each has written the name preceding theirs (at least as a reference) in their work, and each had their own way of saying: I want to convince you of what I believe to be true also bringing increased evident sentiment on the necessity of empathy as technology from one to the other, probably due to the way in which such apathy bridges the science apart from its other-half: philosophy.
Technical education will continue to be a key player in our success to find for- humankind progress, there is no space for rational doubt on that. Nonetheless, the specialization required in any branch of science is raising the bar in an insanely say. I can’t help feeling worried when students diminish humanities over sciences, just like I can’t help feeling hopeless when I hear humanities’ inclined students reject any form of digital or computer science based technologies. It’s a big mistake to teach technical skills without having clear, explicitly outlined grounds in the humanities or the social sciences.
It is my personal belief that this trend will continue to open a gap between what we need as society and what we produce on the falsely-grounded idea of a intuitive tech-driven world.
To privilege rational thinking or any form of factual empiricism over empathy, or to demand isolated technical outcomes without foundations in humanities is contributing to both:
the seeding of a generally-perceived disgust at a primary level for writing
and
the feeding the predominant association of a boring scientific method (no genuine wonder) imposed to the deceiving idea we have generated about essays and what essays are for.
Today’s essays are not fulfilling the purpose of what our current societies need. It seems like academics have found the way to produce quality argumentative essay structures with their solid thesis, inference and conclusion, but I feel most of them still lack belief. In other words, essays in academia are an attempt to replicate a scientific method, which has already evolved to the point where we should assess whether their purpose is fulfilled, fixed, or unfit. Maybe its inspiration what students need to inquire, perceive and believe something they can later write about. If they will write, more than likely they will write for the web, and they will write about whatever is happening next, about the already evident urgency for new kinds of content, ideas, and ultimately, empathic exchange.
Of course there will always be brilliant students who excel in both science and humanities (this is just a semantic division of disciplines, to exemplify), and these students already reach their goals on their own and find their way to bring their message across to masses. But we are neglecting a sea of dynamic ideas and potentially developing minds in the lack of the understanding our urge for empathy and integration. The online era will make integration a possibility once we make the written expression a tool for giving, and not a task to critique upon implanted requirements that lead to stringed outcomes to assess a persuasive posture that did not emerge out of wonder, as both Plato and Aristotle claimed all sought of knowledge begins with.
Originally published at https://morales.pro on August 17, 2018.
