APPEALing To Logos: using REAson And EvidEnCE To FiT THE siTuATion 225Howard Gardner, these may be spatial, musical, or something else.
A lack of stimulation to a student’s own intelligence directly causes
a lack of identification with the intelligence of others. Instead of
becoming moderately interested in a subject by noticing the plea-
sure other people receive from it, the student will be bitter, jealous,
and without empathy. These are the common ingredients in many
types of tragedy, violent or benign. Schools must take responsibil-
ity for speaking in some way to each of the general types of intel-
ligences. Failure to do so will result in students who lack skills,
and also the inspiration to comfort, admire, emulate, and aid their
fellow humans.
“All tasks that really call upon the power of attention are inter-
esting for the same reason and to an almost equal degree,” wrote
Simone Weil in her Reflections on Love and Faith, her editor hav-
ing defined attention as “a suspension of one’s own self as a center
of the world and making oneself available to the reality of another
being.” In Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, modern scientific
theorist David Bohm describes “a holistic underlying implicate
order whose information unfolds into the explicate order of par-
ticular fields.” Rilke’s euphemism for this “holistic... implicate
order,” which Palmer borrows, is “the grace of great things.” Weil’s
term would be “God.” However, both agree that eventual percep-
tion of this singular grace, or God, is accessible through education
of a specific sort, and for both it is doubtless the most necessary
experience of a lifetime. Realizing that this contention is rain-
ing down from different theorists, and keeping in mind that the
most necessary experience of a lifetime should not be wholly irrel-
evant to the school system, educators should therefore reach the
conclusion that this is a matter worth looking into. I assert that
the most fruitful and practical results of their attention will be a
wider range of electives coupled with a new acknowledgment and
handling of them, one that treats each one seriously.
— erin meyers,
“The Educational Smorgasbord as Saving Grace”appealing to logos: using Reason and
eVidenCe to Fit the situation
To make an argument persuasive, you need to be in dialogue with your read-
ers, using your own character (ethos) to demonstrate that you are a reason-
able, credible, fair person and appealing to your readers’ emotions (pathos),
particularly their sense of right and wrong. Both types of appeal go hand
in hand with appeals to logos, using converging pieces of evidence — statis-
tics, facts, observations — to advance your claim. Remember that the type of08_GRE_5344_Ch8_211_256.indd 225 11/19/14 11:04 AM