By Richard Erlich
Guest columnist

The beginning of academic year 2003-04 is fast approaching for a teacher, and that got me looking back - with some regret - at my career.

I began teaching Rhetoric 101 in 1967 at the University of Illinois. Rhet 101 was "College Composition," but we were old-fashioned and called it rhetoric, in the tradition of Aristotle's "art of ethical persuasion."

Almost every year since, I've taught rhetoric in some sense: College Composition, plus, in all my courses, writing and critical reading and critical thinking.

Many of my students seemed merely to tolerate my work with them on rhetoric, apparently finding both critique and "the art of ethical persuasion" pretty irrelevant for the lives they'd lived or could foresee for themselves. I thought them unintellectual if not anti-intellectual, and still think them "philistines."

Increasingly, these philistines are right: they won't use critique or rhetoric.

When I was growing up in Chicago, children organized most of our play, and so did teenagers; there was a teen subculture with fraternities and sororities, social/athletic clubs and year-clubs and gangs and traditions - a small world relatively free from adults. We dealt a lot with peers, and persuasion was a useful art. We also B.S.'ed a lot, and some philosophical talent was useful for status in bull sessions.

The gangs for underclass kids are rigorously suppressed nowadays and hardly worth kids' trouble unless the gangs are money-making operations run by young adults. Middle-class kids and richer have most of their non-electronic play organized by parents and adult professionals; kids today play better ball than we did, but they have few occasions to persuade peers. They'll do what the grown-ups tell them to do. Or not. Either way, there may be whining and griping, but little meaningful persuasion.

And "bull session" Michael Moffatt found in the 1970s is rare in student vocabularies. Indeed, there aren't even many stupid bar-arguments nowadays: fashionable bars are too noisy and TV-dominated for conversation.

Kids today are groomed to be good little worker-bees in bureaucratic hives. They take orders and some eventually give orders, but neither in most young Americans' immediate pasts nor foreseeable futures is there much need for critical thinking or persuasion as practical activities. Nor is arguing a game most kids enjoy or one in which they can gain status among kids.

Politics has become at most a spectator sport for most Americans, and the level of debate among even the participants is usually poor.

Soundbites don't persuade - not in the sense of "ethical persuasion."

In the middle of the last century, C. S. Lewis noted that he lived already in the era of administrative bureaucracy. About the same time, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth prophesized with grim humor in The Space Merchants the triumph of advertising. Rhetoric and critique are for free people in a polis: a social-political community. In an administered state, where candidates and policies and wars are sold like cars, there is little need for most of what I try to teach.

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Richard D. Erlich is a professor in English at Miami University and has taught on the Oxford campus since 1971.