Shaded by Labels

In today’s society, labels are everywhere. At times, a person feels as if he or she cannot even turn a corner without being bombarded with labels. Labels are encouraged by society and people strictly adhere to those labels in order to live their lives. Labels place people of similar situations or backgrounds into a box and this collective box group than performs according to the box’s specification. One place in particular that thrives on labels is that of academic settings. Everyone knows that students are labeled and placed into certain appropriate class groups based on their intellectual similarities. We have the AP level students, the Honor students, the Academic students and the General students. Most teachers, students and even parents are content with following the specific course that each labeled group is given. This idea of scholastic labeling derives from the nineteenth-century and the dreaded Harvard Influence, which devalued both writing and “rhetoric” (A Brief History of Rhetoric and Composition 4). After reading this week’s assignment, I was amazed to discover the larger role that labels (bias) play in rhetoric and how various labels affect rhetoric. In this blog, I will try to examine this thought.

The one major example of labeling is that of one person belonging to this group or that group. In chapter one, Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee talk about this first instance. They write that “Americans tend to link a person’s opinion to her [his] identity. We assume that someone’s opinions result form her personal experience, and hence that those opinions are somehow ‘hers’- that she alone ‘owns’ them” (Crowley and Hawhee 5). In this common example, both educators point out that people are quick to label a person based on their assumed or known association with a particular (religious, political, educational, socioeconomic, etc) group. In the text, both authors mention that “too often opinion-as-identity stands in the way of rhetoric exchange…this habit of tying beliefs to an identity also has the unfortunate effect of allowing people who hold a distinctive set of beliefs to belittle or mistreat people who do not share those beliefs” (5). This negative label is able to stop communication and the expression of another perspective from occurring. We all have different feelings, thoughts and life lessons that have fashioned our perspective and yet, often times, people are unable to join in mainline discussions because they have been mislabeled and branded incompetent in certain matters. When I taught high school, I was given mostly the general and academic students. All summer long, I heard about how I was going to be teaching all the “monsters” and “dumb apples” and many hoped that after my first year, I would be able to balance my life with more “advanced, sincere and intelligent” students and classes. I decided to let my students tell me who they were and not their label. Some of my colleagues were amazed that the students were improving academically and many marveled that I dare assign homework, essay midterms and finals and a variety of projects and papers. All of my students were capable, they were just looking for someone to allow them to ditch their labels and see them for the scholars and thinkers they were. Just like the football analogy, in which “instant replay” is just as faulty as referees, so too are class labels and teachers comment reports which seem to cause one student to be judged a scholar and another a “waste of time” (11). After all, “there is [never] only one way to read or interpret a discourse” (25).

In closing, I want to focus briefly on how kairos is affected by labels. In the second chapter, both authors state that “kairos requires that rhetors view writing and speaking as opportunities for exploring issues and making knowledge” (48). As teachers, we are called to invite our students into the academic dialogue which empowers them to discover their own voice, perspectives and ideals on various situations. Thanks in part to the Harvard Influence, which belittled the student’s mind, and forced only one perspective into the classroom, many students are fearful or anxious to express their voice, perspective or argument. I really like this book, because it is calling for a broader American classroom that does not inhibit its students’ growth but nurtures it. Watched a great movie last weekend, The Great Debaters and I thought it was dynamic. It really showed how the students were taught to look at a topic and to clearly see all the viewpoints associated with it.

Questions:
1.)My undergraduate background is history and literature. Every semester, we had to discuss the reasons why Ancient civilizations (Greece, Rome) fell. We always talked about the historical and economic reasons but we never discussed any of the social or educational aspects of those civilizations and how they impacted the gradual decline of those civilizations. After reading this week’s assignment, my thoughts were centered on this one question: Was rhetoric oppressed and neglected in these earlier societies and did it attribute to their decline?

2.)What does the term “civilization” really mean? Is there any real example of it? Is civilization supposed to encourage rhetoric or not? Does civilization aid in the production of labels and/or do those labels negatively or positively affect rhetoric?