Deborah Tannen The Argument Culture Summary

In 2012, a study was conducted by Universitas 21, the leading global network of research-intensive universities, in which the number of citizens with college degrees was calculated out of 26 developed countries. The United States, a nation which used to lead the world, "... ranked 16th in the number of 25-34 year-olds with college degrees" (Huffington Post). The same research also concluded that workers without a degree are twice as likely to be unemployed in the United States. This statistic directly correlates with the number of high school graduates who "are not adequately prepared for the courseload that awaits them, and are thus forced into remedial classes when they start college. This fact contributes to a staggering number of students
When such schools exist where funding is nowhere adequate and sufficient enough to prepare a child for college and beyond, we should ask ourselves, “have we given up on public schools?” Have we given up on the kids because we have given up on the future? Benjamin Barber stresses this thought-provoking idea because there is, without a doubt, a need for a change. In a book written by Deborah Tannen called The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue, she expresses the idea that when two parties have a debate over an issue then usually there can only be two sides to a solution; no more no less. The more one side gets into conflict with another, the more it is willing to take outrageous action to not be proven wrong. Could it be that the United States, a nation regarded as the hegemon of the Earth, must now consider reform and learn from the education structure of smaller countries? Maybe this thought process is what prompts America to be stubborn about changing its own educational system and sticks to its own material hoping that one day everything will work itself out. Well, with the number of unemployment rates still relatively high and those will college degrees relatively low compared to other nations, it seems as though we need a
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Tannen, Deborah. The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue. New York: Random House, 1998. N. pag. Print.
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