Post by Lene Mahler Jaqua on May 18, 2009 18:01:40 GMT -5
This fall, we release our 10th grade book Herodotus. It is about refutation, confirmation, and commonoplace, three progymnasmata, all related to court room rhetoric.
Refuting and confirming accounts was taught using basic narratives for the literary models on which the kids used the skills they had learned. They would refute Aesop's story of the Crab and His Mother as perhaps simplistic or unrealistic (crabs don't talk), or they might confirm the story of Daedalus and Icharus as a wonderful tale of the follies of youth, and the pains of being a parent when the kid forgets to listen to instructions.
The bigger aim is to take the skills of confirmation and refutation to the level of the court room where a witness tells a story, and then the defense lawyer confirms the narrative, and the prosecutor refutes the narrative.
This is done in terms of clarity (the witness’s story hung together well and made sense), credibility (the account itself is believable), possibility (the events reported could physically have happened as told), plausibility (the events may be physically possible, but is it LIKELY that they would have happened as told), expediency (calling into question how the witness may benefit from your believing this story, and propriety (calling into question the character of the witness)… and then finally Commonplace, which is a speech given after the felon is convicted, a speech by the prosecuting attourney telling the judge or jury what sort of sentence this criminal deserves.
What we do in our new book Herodotus is tie these rhetorical skills in with a study of the Greek and the British and the American systems of justice. We read, f.ex. the ancient play the Oresteia, which Aeschylus retold the legends of that trilogy to show how the Ancient Greeks went from the barbaric methods of revenge to an objective third party mitigation system, which the modern west inherited from the Greeks. It’s a fascinating subject and I think a good preparation for US Government and general high school studies to deal with politics and law.
Lene
Refuting and confirming accounts was taught using basic narratives for the literary models on which the kids used the skills they had learned. They would refute Aesop's story of the Crab and His Mother as perhaps simplistic or unrealistic (crabs don't talk), or they might confirm the story of Daedalus and Icharus as a wonderful tale of the follies of youth, and the pains of being a parent when the kid forgets to listen to instructions.
The bigger aim is to take the skills of confirmation and refutation to the level of the court room where a witness tells a story, and then the defense lawyer confirms the narrative, and the prosecutor refutes the narrative.
This is done in terms of clarity (the witness’s story hung together well and made sense), credibility (the account itself is believable), possibility (the events reported could physically have happened as told), plausibility (the events may be physically possible, but is it LIKELY that they would have happened as told), expediency (calling into question how the witness may benefit from your believing this story, and propriety (calling into question the character of the witness)… and then finally Commonplace, which is a speech given after the felon is convicted, a speech by the prosecuting attourney telling the judge or jury what sort of sentence this criminal deserves.
What we do in our new book Herodotus is tie these rhetorical skills in with a study of the Greek and the British and the American systems of justice. We read, f.ex. the ancient play the Oresteia, which Aeschylus retold the legends of that trilogy to show how the Ancient Greeks went from the barbaric methods of revenge to an objective third party mitigation system, which the modern west inherited from the Greeks. It’s a fascinating subject and I think a good preparation for US Government and general high school studies to deal with politics and law.
Lene