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When Education Becomes an Empowering Act: Learning Fallacies Analysis

Brahim Hiba

English Department, Faculty of Arts & Humanities, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco

Abstract: In this paper the author argues that education in the Moroccan context, either in high schools or in universities, is rarely used to empower students by arming them with the basic critical-thinking skills to cope with the challenges of the modern world. Many researchers and teachers complain that schools are becoming like "exam factories" and that the prevailing model of education in schools, especially in the developing world, is banking education. In banking education, the teacher is a bank of knowledge and their role consists in filling their students’ heads with information. Students are rarely given the chance to question the input they receive from their teacher. Thus, in this paper the author calls for an alternative mode of education. This mode of education is problem-posing education [1]. By problem-posing education the author means education which makes students think critically about the knowledge and the discourses they receive from school and from society as a whole [1]. As Freire [1] suggests, problem-posing education is an alternative to the banking model of education; it is an empowering education which can lead students to acquire critical consciousness. In this paper, the author will depict how problem-posing education can be carried out through teaching Argumentation Theory, especially the teaching of fallacies analysis. In a study conducted in a Moroccan university, 25 students in an English master's class were given a course of critical reading which lasted for one semester. A pre- and a post-test were conducted before and after the intervention took place. Results suggest that students' critical-thinking abilities have developed at two levels. The first level is students' ability to detect fallacies in discourses and the second level is students' acquisition of a new meta-language to describe the argumentative structure of discourses.

Keywords: banking education, critical consciousness, critical pedagogy, empowerment, fallacies analysis

Received August 25, 2020; Revised September 27, 2020; Accepted October 07, 2020

Citation: Brahim Hiba, When Education Becomes an Empowering Act: Learning Fallacies Analysis. American Journal of Educational Research, 8 (9). 731-738. January 2020. doi:10.12691/education-8-9-16

1. Theoretical Background

1.1. Critical Pedagogy

In the Moroccan context, education is rarely used as an act of empowerment. The prevalent model of education in most Moroccan high schools and universities is the banking model of education [1]. In this model, the teacher owns knowledge and students act as vessels to be filled by that knowledge. Teachers are seen as banks of knowledge; they know everything and their role consists in filling their students’ heads with knowledge. The teacher deposits knowledge, the students, who barely know anything, receives it. The teacher thinks but the students do not.

In this banking model of education, the teacher plays an authoritarian role and students do nothing more than adopting a parrot-learning style: they receive knowledge, memorize it and repeat it. Students are not asked to establish links between the discourses they study in the classroom and the social world they live in. So, learning in this model is transmissional learning [2]; knowledge is vertically transmitted from teacher to students.

The main drawback of this type of learning is that students become dependent on the teacher and never learn to be autonomous: “The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world” ([1], p. 60). Another problem with this knowledge is that within its framework learning is an anti-dialogical and unidirectional; the teacher deposits knowledge and the students receive it. Knowledge is never negotiated or questioned by students.

Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education and a social movement which integrates education with critical social theory ([3], P 24). Paulo Freire [1] was the first man to lay the philosophical and theoretical foundations of the movement, but it has been developed since then by Giroux [4] and others as a praxis-oriented "educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action" [4].

Freire ([5], pp. 72-73) distinguishes between two models of education: banking education and problem-posing education. In the former, teachers are seen as banks of knowledge; they know everything and their role consists in filling their students’ heads with knowledge.

For this reason, a lot of critical pedagogists and philosophers of education such as Freire [1], Apple [6], Shor [7], Giroux [8] and Wallace [9] suggest that education should make students think critically about the knowledge and the discourses they receive at school. As an alternative to the banking model of education, Freire [5] suggests a problem posing education which can lead to critical consciousness. Problem-posing education, or what Freire [1] calls Critical Pedagogy, involves uncovering of reality, striving for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality. In this view, students develop power to critically reflect on the way they exist in the world and they “come to see the world not as a static reality, but as reality in process, in transformation” ([5], p. 83). Critical pedagogy, which considers education systems to be politically oriented, enables students to construct a counter hegemony in opposition to the oppressive hegemonies in society.

Lewison, Flint, and Van Sluys [10] reviewed the last 30 years of critical pedagogy literature and came to the conclusion that critical pedagogy practice has four major dimensions: (1) disrupting the commonplace, (2) considering multiple viewpoints, (3) focusing on the socio-political, and (4) taking action to promote social justice. The first dimension is about problematizing all subjects of study and understanding existing knowledge as a historical product. The second dimension is about reading a text not from one's perspective and personal experience, but reading it from the perspectives of people from cultures and realities different from one's culture. The third dimension is about encouraging students to challenge the legitimacy of asymmetrical power relationships, questioning existing hierarchies, and examining social structures as they are reflected in texts and in the real world. The fourth and last dimension is about encouraging students to see themselves as actors in the world rather than spectators. For instance, students can use language to exercise power to enhance everyday life and to question practices of privilege and injustice.

1.2. Argumentation Theory

Another element that seems to be under-investigated in the literature of critical pedagogy is Argumentation Theory. According to my best knowledge, there are not any studies which have dealt with the teaching of the Argumentation Theory in critical pedagogy classes. For this reason, one of the gaps that this study will try to fill in is bringing in the Argumentation Theory to a critical pedagogy class and investigating its impact on students' reading and thinking skills. The Argumentation Theory is a field of research which covers the study of argumentation in all its manifestations and varieties ([11], p. 7). Thus, argumentation theorists study how premises in discourse are constructed, how conclusions are reached and how inferences are made. Also, they investigate if these inferences and conclusions abide by the rules of logic or not. Van Eemeren et al., [11] claim that the ultimate goal of Argumentation Theory is to "provide adequate instruments for analyzing, evaluating, and producing argumentative discourse" ([11]: 12). However, because the scope of the Argumentation theory is very wide, I have limited its use in this research to the study of fallacies, which is just one branch among many branches of the Argumentation Theory.

A fallacy can be defined as a particular kind of "egregious error, one that seriously undermines the power of reason in an argument by diverting it or screening it in some way" ([12], pp.1-2). Fallacies are usually viewed as "deficient moves in argumentative discourse" ([13], p.135). However, the most popular definition of the term "fallacy" is that of Hamblin [14] who claims that a fallacy is an argument "that seems to be valid but is not so" ([14], p.12).

To give a concrete specimen of what a fallacy and its fallacious side may look like, here is one example:

"What Sarah says about Darwin's Theory of Evolution must be just so much garbage. Do you realize that she's only eighteen years old?"

In the quotation above, the speaker makes an attack on Sarah's claims about Darwin's theory and bases his/her attack on Sarah's young age. This attack may destroy Sarah's credibility as a scientific authority, but it does not destroy her reasoning itself because her age is irrelevant to the quality of her reasoning. Accepting or refuting Sarah's claims should be based on scientific evidence, not on her age or anything else about her personally. So, the fallacious side of the argument above lies in the fact that the speaker attacks the person and not her claims. For this reason, this fallacy is called an ad hominem.

Studying fallacies is very important for understanding the manipulative and ideological intentions of some discourses. Van Eemeren et al. [11] consider fallacies as "contaminators of argumentative discourse." Van Eemeren et al. [11] argue that if these contaminators go unnoticed in argumentative exchange, they may be dangerous because the difference in opinions within a discourse or verbal exchange may not be resolved ([11]: 24-5).

Table 1. The Most Frequently Discussed Fallacies During The Course

There are hundreds of fallacies types that have been explained and analyzed by Argumentation Theory experts. Dowden [15] made a list of the names of the most common fallacies; this list contains 219 fallacies. However, for pedagogical reasons and in order to ease introducing fallacies to students, two strategies have been adopted for teaching fallacies. The first strategy consisted in teaching fallacies that are closely linked to some logic notions that form the basis of human reasoning such as the notions of causation, correlation, and relevance. The second strategy was to teach students only the fallacies that frequently happen in media discourses and everyday-life talk. These fallacies are called cognitive and emotional fallacies (“Fallacies,” 2017) and people commit them because of the limitations of how our brains process logical statements and evidence. The following table (see Table 1) shows some of these fallacies that were introduced to my students:

2. Methodology

2.1. Research Questions and Hypotheses

As far as research hypotheses are concerned, this research has been conducted to test the validity of two hypotheses: a null hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis. Here are the two hypotheses of the research:

Null Hypothesis:

H₀: Moroccan university students have no problems with detecting fallacious arguments and teaching these students fallacies analysis will not have any significant effect on their reading competence.

Alternative Hypothesis:

H₁: Moroccan university students do have problems with detecting fallacious arguments and teaching these students fallacies analysis will significantly improve their critical thinking and critical reading abilities.

Research Questions:

The research two questions that guided this study are as follows:

Ÿ What kind of knowledge do Moroccan university students have about fallacies-analysis before and after the intervention takes place?

Ÿ Will teaching fallacies-analysis have any discernible impact on students' analytical skills?

Testing these hypotheses and answering these research questions will be done in the light of data obtained from students' output in the fallacies pre-test-post-test, class observation, and from students' feedback.

2.2. The Study's Setting

The intervention in this research was carried out through the implementation of a critical reading program. This program was given in the form of a reading course called Critical Discourse Consciousness. The course was given to an English master's class in the English department of the Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences in Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakech, Morocco. The course was given on a time span of 19 weeks, 2 hours each week. This means that students were exposed to about 38 hours of learning critical-reading and practicing critical thinking.

2.3. Sampling

The sampling strategy used in this research was "accessibility sampling" ([16]: 31) or "convenience sampling" ([17], p. 142). I used convenience sampling in this research for many reasons. First, as the target population of this study, which is Moroccan English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) university students, is quantitatively and geographically large, and because Moroccan EFL university students are very busy with exams and do not have much free time, it was almost impossible to find any voluntary students to participate in my course. For this reason, it was not possible for me to adopt a more valid sampling strategy such as random sampling.

2.4. Fallacies Test

To gauge students' critical-thinking abilities, students were given a fallacies test (see appendix A) to work on before and after the intervention took place. Obviously, this pre-test-post-test design was used to measure the development of students reasoning skills before and after being exposed to the critical reading course. The test was composed of six fallacious arguments. Students were asked to look at each one of the 6 fallacious arguments and to analyze its fallacious side and if possible give each fallacy its proper name as it is known among logicians.

As far as grading students' performance in the test is concerned, the grade-scale of the test was between zero points and 12 points. More specifically, for identifying the fallacious side of each of the six arguments the student was given one point, and for identifying the fallacy's name the student was given one point. If a student succeeded in identifying the argument's fallacious side and identifying its proper name, he or she would have two points. The quality of the student's analysis of each one of the fallacies was also taken into consideration while grading the student's test. Moreover, students' grades were put in SPSS and central tendency was calculated.

The numbers of students who succeeded or failed in recognizing each of the fallacies in the test were counted and comparisons between students' performance in the pre-test and post-test were made. Interpretations for the difference between pre-test and post-test were also sought. To know the impact of the intervention on students' skill of fallacy-detection, a t-test was conducted. A t-test is a statistical test used to assess the statistical significance of the difference between the means of two sets of scores ([18], p. 133). In this study, the t-test was used for two reasons. First, the t-test was used to address the common research question of whether the average score of students' scores before the intervention differ significantly from the average score of students' scores after the intervention. Second, the t-test was used to know whether the null hypothesis is true or false.

All the fallacies in the pre-test were the kind of fallacies that are frequently committed by people in debates as well as day-to-day talk. As far as the time allotted to figure out the fallacies in the test is concerned, students were given 1 hour to work on the test and were asked to do it in class.

In fact formal teaching of fallacies during the course was delayed until the 12 week. Between week 12 and week 18 students were encouraged to detect and analyze the fallacies in the texts and discourses they were asked to study. In week 12, for instance, the teacher gave a presentation about informal fallacies and gave students some exercises about fallacies. In the presentation, the teacher drew on ideas such as the structure of an argument (major premise, minor premise, conclusion, deductive and inductive reasoning). After that, the teacher presented some of the mistakes that can befall reason such as egocentrism, socio-centrism, and wishful thinking. As far as fallacies are concerned, the teacher focused on informal fallacies especially the most occurring ones such as Hasty Generalization, Ad Hominem, False Dilemma, False Analogy, Irrelevant Authority, Slippery Slope, Reductionism, Appeal to Emotions, Snow Job, Straw Man, Red Herring, Bandwagon, and Begging the Question.

The rationale behind focusing on such a limited number of the fallacies mentioned above was, firstly, not to make students lose their ways in the unlimited number of formal and informal fallacies. Secondly, students were given a limited number of fallacies to work on but they were given extensive drills to practice fallacies detection. Thus, mastering fallacies and being familiarized with them was almost guaranteed.

In week 13 the students were asked to discuss an assignment given the week before. The assignment consisted of a list of arguments and students were asked to reveal their fallacious sides and to give each fallacy its proper name. The rationale behind this activity was not only to strengthen students' practical knowledge of fallacies detection, but also to enable students to use a meta-language while talking about fallacies; that is enabling students not only to detect the fallacious side of an argument but also to describe it by using a savant language. In the other remaining weeks, that is to say week 14, 15, 16 and 17, students were encouraged to use fallacies analysis in every text they were given to read and fallacies analysis had already been established as a part of students' repertoire of discourse analysis tools.

3. Findings

3.1. Pre-test

Before the intervention, students were given a fallacy test (see appendix A). The test contains 6 arguments and students were asked to spot the fallacious reasoning in each argument. These false arguments or fallacies are (i) an ad hominem, (ii) a false dilemma, (iii) a false analogy, (iv) a slippery slope, (v) an irrelevant authority, and (vi) an overgeneralization. Although the fallacies that were given to students to analyze were not complicated and were the kind of fallacies that one may encounter them in day-to-day speech, the analysis of students' answers showed that most students failed to recognize the fallacies, describe them or even give them their proper names.

In this respect, 6 out of 25 students failed to recognize any fallacy in the test and 6 other students recognized no more than one mere fallacy. The term "fallacy" itself appeared only 3 times in the whole set of students' answers. The following bar chart (see Figure 1) presents students' performance in the fallacies pre-test.

Figure 1 shows that only 15 out of 25 students were able to recognize the first fallacy, which is the ad hominem fallacy, and see its fallacious side. However, no student could name it as an "ad hominem" except one student. These 15 students recognized the fallacious side of the fallacy, but they failed in recognizing the fallacy's proper name. The "overgeneralization" fallacy, though it was a very simple fallacy to analyze, was recognized by 16 students only. Again, only 4 out of these 16 students were able to name it as an "overgeneralization". The other fallacies such as "false dilemma", "false analogy", "slippery slope", and "irrelevant authority", were recognized by 8, 6, 6, and 12 students respectively. However, these students recognized only the fallacious side of these arguments, but they could not give these arguments their specific names as they are known among argumentation theorists.

3.2. Post-test

In the post-intervention phase, students were given the same fallacy test and the researcher obtained the following results (see Figure 2).

Figure 1. Students' consciousness of fallacies (before intervention)

Figure 2. Students' consciousness of fallacies (after intervention)

In post-phase intervention, and as Figure 2 shows, 19 out of 25 students proved to be able to recognize all the fallacies by describing them in much more details and giving them their proper names. The other 6 remaining students managed to recognize all the fallacies except one fallacy for each student. Thus, 3 out of these 6 students were not able to recognize the "slippery slope fallacy." The 2 other students failed to recognize the "overgeneralization fallacy", whereas the one remaining student did not succeed in spotting the "false analogy fallacy."

Furthermore, those 12 students who failed, in the pre-test, to recognize no more than one fallacy or no fallacy at all, 4 of them managed, in the post-intervention phase, to recognize all the fallacies and 8 of them succeeded in recognizing all the fallacies, except one fallacy. Another remark to put about students' output before and after the intervention is that if the term "fallacy" appeared only 3 times in students' analysis of the arguments in the pre-test, but it occurred no less than 40 times in the post-test.

3.3. Statistics

3.3.1. The Central Tendency Of Students' Grades

The grade-scale of the fallacies test was between zero and 12 points. After analyzing students' tests, the teacher or researcher gave a mark to each student according to the quality of his or her analysis of the fallacies. The following two tables (Table 2 and Table 3) show the central tendency of students' grades in the pre-test and post-test.

The statistics in the two tables above (Table 2 and Table 3) show that there is a quite interesting difference between students' marks before and after the intervention. Before the intervention, students' mean was 2.56. After intervention the mean rose to 10.64. This means that students' marks have developed for about 8 degrees. The striking difference between pre-test and post-test can be seen at the level of the mode of students' marks. Before intervention, the mode, that is the most frequently occurring mark in students' tests, was 00.00. After the intervention, the mode rose to 12.00. The lowest mark in the pre-test was 00.00, but in the post-test the maximum mark reached 12.00. As far as the standard deviation of students' marks is concerned, Table 2 shows that the standard deviation in the pre-test was 2.21. In the post-test, the standard deviation is 1.44. This is an advantage because the standard-deviation's figures before and after the intervention are not high and are not very different. In other words, and as I will show in the next section, the distribution of students' marks both before and after the intervention took the shape of a normal distribution.

Table 2. The Central Tendency of Students' Grades in The Fallacies Pre-test

Table 3. The Central Tendency of Students' Grades in The Fallacies Post-test

3.3.2. The Distribution of Students' Grades

The histogram below (see Figure 3) presents the distribution of students' grades in the fallacies pre-test. The distribution is a normal distribution since most marks or scores of students are in the middle of the curve and very few marks lie at the extreme ends of the curve. The bars, which stand for students' grades in the histogram, are numerous, short, and most of them lie before grade six. The author believes that students' grades had these features because before the intervention students were basing their analyses on common sense and intuition. In other words, students did not have any clear background knowledge which would enable them to analyze the analytical problems they were given.

As far as the post-test is concerned, and just as Figure 4 shows, the distribution of students' grades, just like in the pre-test, follows the pattern of a bell-shaped curve. In contrast to the pre-test, most grades in the post-test lie between 9 and 12 grades. However, the grades in the post-test are not very numerous. The histogram contains only 6 bars, whereas in the pre-test the histogram contains 11 bars. The researcher believes that this feature of the post-test can be explained by the fact that in the post-test students did base their analyses on structured knowledge of fallacies and not on common sense and intuition.

Figure 3. The distribution of students' marks in the fallacies pre-test

Figure 4. The distribution of students' marks in the fallacies post-test

Table 4. Paired Samples Statistics

Table 5. Paired Samples Test

3.3.3. The Paired Samples T-test

A paired-samples t-test was conducted to evaluate the impact of the intervention on students' scores in the fallacies test (see Table 4 and Table 5). There was a statistically significant increase in students' scores from pre-test (M = 2.56, SD = 2.21) to post-test (M = 10.64, SD = 1.44), t (24) = -16.14-, p< .001 (two-tailed). The mean increase in students' scores was -8.08 with a 95% confidence interval ranging from -9.11 to -7.04. The eta squared statistic (.91) indicated a large effect size.

The differences between the pre-test and the post-test might be as large as 9 points or as small as about 7 points with 95% confidence. The CI is large since it is much further from zero; we can conclude that the participants statistically improved in their performance. The null hypothesis that there is no difference in means could be rejected and the alternative hypothesis is true.

4. Comparison and Discussion

The analysis of students' performance in the fallacies pre-test showed that students' critical thinking abilities were weak. For instance, most fallacies that were given in the pre-test were very common fallacies that one can encounter in everyday-life speech. However, most students failed to recognize the fallacies. The "overgeneralization fallacy", though it was a very simple fallacy to detect, was recognized by only 16 students. Furthermore, only four students were able to name it as an "overgeneralization". The term "fallacy" itself appeared only 3 times in the whole set of students' answers. If these figures mean anything, then they mean that Moroccan students suffer from a serious deficit in argumentation and critical-thinking skills.

Nevertheless a significant change was recorded in students' performance after the intervention. The term "fallacy", which appeared only three times in students' output in the pre-test, occurred no less than 40 times in the post-test. Moreover, in the post-test a changed was noticed at the level of the meta-language students used to describe the fallacies. Just as I said before, not only most of students were able to identify and discuss the fallacious side of each argument in the post-test, but they were also able to name fallacies with their proper names. This ability of naming things in an accurate language is what scholars call meta-language. When a student becomes able to name a fallacy, this will help the student to identify the fallacy in the future and will steer them away from using the fallacy in their own reasoning. As Pinker [19] puts it,

If a language provides a label for a complex concept, that could make it easier to think about the concept, because the mind can handle it as a single package when juggling a set of ideas, rather than having to keep each of its components in the air separately. It can also give a concept an additional label in long-term memory, making it more easily retrievable than ineffable concepts or those with more roundabout verbal descriptions. (p.129)

It is, now, clear that when you enable a student to give a discursive strategy or rhetorical device a special name, it becomes easy for the student to describe a given discourse in a language that is more subtle and more accurate than that of the average educated man. Moreover, it becomes easy for the student to store that discursive strategy or rhetorical device in his or her long term memory and retrieve it when needed.

On the first day students were given the fallacies pre-test to work on, some students did not know what to do; some were panicked, whereas others tried to work on the test in one way or another. However, as students get used to the intellectual atmosphere of the course, they started enjoying the study of fallacies analysis. Some students told me that this was the first time they studied fallacies analysis. In general, and according to my class-observation, most students found the experience of fallacies analysis interesting and enjoyable. It was interesting, because fallacies analysis has empowered them. By empowerment, the author means that students have filled some gaps in their critical-thinking abilities and felt that they probably would no longer get duped or manipulated by any kind of ideologically-driven discourses. Again, the empowering effect of this experience of studying fallacies goes hand in hand with what Freire [1] has been emphasizing in his philosophy of education. What Freire [1] has been emphasizing was that effective education should go beyond banking education, which is filling students' heads with information, to empowering education, which endows students with a critical awareness to perceive contradictions in the word and the world ([1], p.19). The experience of studying fallacies was enjoyable, too, because, as some students told me during class discussions, this was the first time they heard terms such as "straw man," "red herring," "ad hominem," "slippery slope," and "wishful thinking."

5. Conclusion

As far as argumentation skills are concerned, the analysis of students' performance in the fallacies pre-test showed that students' critical thinking abilities were weak. For instance, most of the fallacies that were given in the pre-test were very common fallacies that one can encounter in everyday life speech. However, most students failed to recognize the fallacies in the pre-test. The term "fallacy" itself appeared only three times in the whole set of students' answers. If these figures mean anything, then they mean that Moroccan students suffer from a serious deficit in argumentation and critical thinking skills. As the author argued in this paper, genuine education is not about making heads full information, but it is about making critical minds which are able to spot problems and solve them. Accordingly, educational authorities should include the critical element in school curricula and encourage students to analyze problems themselves rather than read about problems.

References

Appendix A:

Each one of these six statements contains an invalid or wrong argument. Read each statement and write down your analysis of the invalid or wrong argument.

1. What she says about Johannes Kepler's astronomy of the 1600s must be just so much garbage. Do you realize she's only fifteen years old?

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

2. Be my friend or be my enemy.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

3. To say humans are immortal is like saying a car can run forever.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

4. Today late for ten minutes, tomorrow late for an hour, and then someday you will simply cease to show up.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

5. Pacifism is a good idea because the brilliant scientist Einstein advocated it.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

6. I've had two maids of the Moroccan race. Both stole money from my drawer. Believe me; you can't trust a Moroccan maid.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

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