Adventures in Arguing Opposites

Strange things happen when students are forced to examine their opponents' arguments: sometimes they actually change their minds!

Not often, of course, but just often enough to keep you reasonably optimisitic.

I had required my students this last semester to submit a thesis statement--then flipped it on them, by announcing that their next essay would require them to argue the opposite.  "Those who do not understand their opponent's arguments don't fully understand their own," I quoted to them amidst their groans, promising them that this was resistance training, to make them stronger arguers for what they actually believed in.  If nothing else, this essay would really make them earn their own opinions, I said.

If they actually changed their minds too, that was just an added bonus.

And most didn't.  And that's fine.  I didn't even want most of them to change their opinions.

But a few did!  The next assignment, you see, was a class presentation on what they actually believed in--but with the twisty caveat that it had to be a topic upon which they had previously changed their mind, to keep them constantly interrogating why they believe what they believe.

And about a half-dozen students cited their last assignment as the mind-changing moment!

One student was initially going to argue for a ban on prescription drug TV ads; but after learning how ads help drive up the revenue that covers the astronomical development costs, as well as how many folks remember to take their pills in the first place thanks to 'em, he changed his mind.  Another, a film-major, actually decided that the Academy, for all of its glaring mistakes in the Best Picture category (e.g. awarding Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan, Dances With Wolves over Goodfellas, etc), actually gets it right more consistently than we realize.

Two different female Chinese students actually came out as anti-plastic surgery after their essay, citing how South Korean models and beauty pageant contestants all look uncannily the same nowadays (the ol' Twilight Zone episode "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" kept popping up in my notes).  Another female Chinese student determined that feminism is still necessary in the 21st century (apparently, in terms of gender roles, it's still the '50s in China?). 

Of course, it couldn't all be sunshine and rainbows: one Lebanese student in her presentation explained how she had finally lost faith in the peace process, cataloging the provocations of Israeli security forces in their abductions of Lebanese borderland civilians (including a childhood friend of hers), the seizure of Palestinian homes in '48, and the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war.  I'm sure there were students in my classroom who disagreed with her assessment, who felt her too obviously one-sided; but I think all of us instinctively felt that none of us had the moral authority to comment.

Not that she couldn't still later change her mind, I suppose.  Or even that the other students who changed their minds could still just as quickly change back.  But I need some slivers of light, something to hang my hat on, when I consider how rarely any of us in real life ever actually change our minds on anything.