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[Note: The listening/mirroring technique here is adapted from approaches outlined in How to Have Impossible Conversations.]
Most arguments don’t fail because one side is wrong.
They fail because neither side is actually listening.
What passes for debate is often parallel monologue: each person waiting for their turn to correct, reframe, or condemn. The collapse happens early—sometimes before the first real claim is even made. A label is applied, a motive is assigned, a conclusion is declared. The exchange ends before it begins.
If you can get past that—and sometimes you can—there is a simple discipline that changes the quality of the conversation.
It feels slow.
It feels like you’re giving something up.
It works.
The Three-Step Method
1. Listen Without Drafting Your Rebuttal
This is the constraint.
When you disagree, your mind races ahead. You start assembling the counter while the other person is still speaking. You catch fragments, miss structure, and fill the gaps with what you expect them to say.
That is how you end up arguing with a version of their position that exists mostly in your own head.
If you want a real exchange, you have to let the argument land in full before you touch it.
2. Mirror the Argument Back
Once they’ve finished, restate their position in your own words:
“If I’ve got you right, you’re saying…”
This is not a rhetorical move. It is a calibration step.
You’re trying to capture the claim, the mechanism, and the stakes as you understand them—not a weaker version, not a cleaner version, but the version you think they actually mean.
3. Ask for Confirmation
Then check it:
“Is that a fair representation?”
If they say yes, you now share a starting point.
If they say no, you’ve just prevented a wasted argument.
Either way, you’ve improved the conversation.
Why This Works
Most arguments fail at the level of misunderstanding, not disagreement.
People talk past each other, attack softened targets, and leave thinking they’ve won. What they’ve done is avoid contact.
Mirroring forces contact.
It aligns the map before you start fighting over the territory.
The Cost
It is slower than trading blows.
It feels like conceding ground.
And it requires a small act of restraint: you prioritize their clarity before your correction.
That runs against instinct, especially when you’re confident they’re wrong.
The Payoff
When you mirror someone accurately, two things happen:
- Their defensiveness drops because they’ve been understood
- Your criticism lands because it targets their actual position
Now the disagreement can do useful work.
Not louder. Not sharper.
Just accurate.
Verdict
Arguing is an art.
But listening—disciplined, deliberate, and verified—is the condition that makes the art possible.
Without it, you’re not debating.
You’re performing.
The attack on Bill 25 has settled into a familiar script. Critics say it will make schools less welcoming, by which they mean that restricting ideological flag displays, limiting board activism, and requiring neutrality in certain forms of programming will make some students feel unseen or unwanted. It is an effective line because it hides a political claim inside the language of care. Nobody wants an unwelcoming school. The trick is that welcoming is being made to mean more than safety, decency, and respect.
A school should be safe, orderly, and humane. It should protect students from bullying, enforce standards of conduct, and make it possible for children to learn without fear or humiliation. What does not follow is the larger claim now being pushed by Bill 25’s opponents: that a public school must also visibly signal allegiance to a particular moral framework, and that if it stops doing so it has somehow become hostile.
“Protection is not the same as endorsement.”
That is the switch.
On the actual text, Bill 25 does not erase students, ban disagreement, or outlaw difficult topics. What it does is narrower, and more defensible, than its critics pretend. It pushes Alberta’s education law back toward institutional restraint. The bill revises parts of the Education Act’s language around school climate, requires courses and instructional materials to encourage a wide range of perspectives and foster critical thinking, says boards must refrain from taking political, social, or ideological positions unrelated to their duties, and requires certain non-approved programming to be impartial, fair, neutral, and free of personal bias. It also restricts school flags by default to the Canadian and Alberta flags, subject to later regulatory exceptions.
That is not a purge. It is a correction.
Now, the strongest version of the other side’s case is not hard to state. Some vulnerable students really do experience explicit symbols of affirmation as reassuring. Some will feel more at ease in an environment where support is made visible rather than merely promised in policy language. And because Bill 25 uses broad terms like “political, social or ideological” and refers to “common values and beliefs of Albertans,” it is fair to ask how those phrases will be applied in practice. A sloppy implementation could create confusion where schools need clarity.
Those are real concerns. They still do not settle the argument.
A public institution cannot make emotional reassurance the test for what it is allowed to endorse. The fact that some students feel comforted by visible institutional alignment does not mean the institution should align itself with a contested worldview. In a pluralistic public school, there will always be students who feel affirmed by one framework and alienated by another. The institution cannot solve that problem by choosing a side and calling the choice kindness. Its job is to protect students, maintain order, teach well, and show restraint in the use of its authority.
A public school is not a campaign office, a therapeutic identity space, or an activist workshop with a literacy block attached. It is a public institution. It belongs to families who do not agree with one another about politics, morality, religion, sex, identity, or the kind of society they want their children to inherit. Such an institution cannot remain trustworthy for long if it begins signaling that one contested framework has acquired official moral status.
This is why so much of the criticism of Bill 25 feels dishonest. It starts from a true premise and then quietly expands it. Some students are vulnerable. Fine. They deserve protection, dignity, and ordinary decency. But from that narrow duty of care, critics jump to a much broader demand: that the institution must visibly ratify a particular set of assumptions and display them as part of the school’s moral atmosphere. Protection becomes affirmation, affirmation becomes endorsement, and endorsement begins to drift into instruction.
“A school can protect a student without acting as a billboard for a worldview.”
That is the real dispute.
A teacher can treat every child with dignity without using classroom authority to suggest that contested beliefs about sex, identity, and society have already been settled beyond argument. A board can meet its legal obligations without issuing statements on every political controversy fashionable adults feel obliged to perform opinions about. Bill 25 does not solve all of this, but it does attempt to restore some institutional discipline where that discipline had plainly weakened.
As a teacher, that part is hard to ignore. I am not in the classroom to advertise my politics, recruit students into a moral sensibility, or drape school authority over my own preferred social vision and call the result compassion. I am there to teach. That means helping students read carefully, write clearly, listen seriously, and argue without slogans doing all the work for them. It also means knowing where my job ends.
That professional boundary now seems strangely difficult for some people to defend. They talk as though asking an institution to remain neutral is the same thing as demanding that individual students disappear. It is not. Bill 25 does not say students cannot exist as they are, think as they do, or discuss difficult questions. What it says, in substance, is that the institution itself should exercise more restraint in the positions it takes, the programming it allows outside the approved curriculum, and the symbolic alignment it displays as a public body.
That is a long way from the apocalyptic language being used against it.
None of this means the bill is perfect. It is not. The practical details will matter, and future regulations will matter even more. But arguing over those details is not the same as falsifying the centre.
And the centre is simple. A public school should not behave like an ideological camp that happens to issue report cards. It should teach students from many backgrounds under rules that are serious, fair, and publicly defensible. It should protect the vulnerable without demanding institutional allegiance to one faction’s beliefs. It should cultivate thought rather than posture, and trust rather than theatre.
The most dishonest move Bill 25’s opponents have made is to present neutrality as though it were hostility. That only works if one has already confused institutional discipline with emotional abandonment. Once every limit on symbolic activism is recast as an attack on children, no boundary remains. The institution becomes available for endless moral capture by whichever faction is best at translating its politics into therapeutic language.
That is not a school anyone should trust.
Bill 25 does not solve every problem in education. What it does do is move, however imperfectly, in the right direction. It treats the school as a public institution rather than a stage for institutional self-display. It reminds boards and educators that restraint is part of professionalism. It suggests, at long last, that children can be protected without making ideology the atmosphere everyone is expected to breathe.
That is not cruelty. It is maturity.
References
Bill 25 (official PDF):
Click to access 20251023_bill-025.pdf
Government of Alberta overview:
https://www.alberta.ca/removing-politics-and-ideology-from-alberta-classrooms
Just because I can never remember”Post hoc ergo propter hoc” when I need it.
This is a critical thinking exercise. It exists to help people understand why they say and support the things they say and support. It fails utterly for the activist students who take up the camp on the ‘strongly agree’ side.
What is most telling is when Dr. Boghossian asks them what evidence or what information would make them change their mind to move one step toward being neutral on the topic. Neither of the women say their are any arguments or information that would persuade them. And that folks, is the sole domain of the ‘true believer’ and/or ideologue – a blessed state where no fact, no amount of reason or evidence will change your mind.
It is a dangerous position to hold for the individual and society. Do not miss the irony of the true believers calling other ‘bigoted’, it is truly something to behold.
Watch the video, grit your teeth if you have to, but know that much of the activist Left simply do not have arguments they can defend in a conversation. What they do have is social shaming and name calling, and let me assure you, they have that in abundance. Do not give into their coercion, not standing up for yourself reflects poorly on you, not them. Do not let their lies come through you at the very least.
Sometimes a concept is so good one must ruthlessly crib from another source – So here ya be, the notion of Chesterson’s Fence and how important it is to understand the reasons why something was done in the first place.
“Second-order thinking will get you extraordinary results, and so will learning to recognize when other people are using second-order thinking. To understand exactly why this is the case, let’s consider Chesterton’s Fence, described by G. K. Chesterton himself as follows:
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
***
Chesterton’s Fence is a heuristic inspired by a quote from the writer and polymath G. K. Chesterton’s 1929 book, The Thing. It’s best known as being one of John F. Kennedy’s favored sayings, as well as a principle Wikipedia encourages its editors to follow. In the book, Chesterton describes the classic case of the reformer who notices something, such as a fence, and fails to see the reason for its existence. However, before they decide to remove it, they must figure out why it exists in the first place. If they do not do this, they are likely to do more harm than good with its removal. In its most concise version, Chesterton’s Fence states the following:
Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.
Chesterton went on to explain why this principle holds true, writing that fences don’t grow out of the ground, nor do people build them in their sleep or during a fit of madness. He explained that fences are built by people who carefully planned them out and “had some reason for thinking [the fence] would be a good thing for somebody.” Until we establish that reason, we have no business taking an ax to it. The reason might not be a good or relevant one; we just need to be aware of what the reason is. Otherwise, we may end up with unintended consequences: second- and third-order effects we don’t want, spreading like ripples on a pond and causing damage for years.”
But the kit, Sagan argues, isn’t merely a tool of science — rather, it contains invaluable tools of healthy skepticism that apply just as elegantly, and just as necessarily, to everyday life. By adopting the kit, we can all shield ourselves against clueless guile and deliberate manipulation. Sagan shares nine of these tools:
- Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
- Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
- Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
- Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
- Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
- Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.
- If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
- Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
- Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.
The answer for many people, including myself would be: Not Soon Enough!
The usual regrets aside, my descent into critical thinking, strangely enough, started after University as it was only then that I had enough time to really start powering through the books that I had been accumulating while working on my degree. All that stuff that I was ‘responsible’ for learning was still there, but my curiosity led me down the path toward a greater understanding of the mechanics of how our society works. I owe a great deal to Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Ronald Wright for fuelling my intellectual growth and move toward a more nuanced understanding of how history and society works and access to a larger context background that helped(s) make sense of world events as they unfolded.
The difference in taking courses before and after my degree was quite startling as learning because you ‘have to’ versus because you ‘want to’.
The challenge now is to continue the journey and start reading again seriously. With the rise of the siren song of social media and video games maintaining an intellectual focus is quite challenging. Getting back into the reading for comprehension and understanding groove is quite difficult. I’m thinking that hitting the University for some courses may be the tonic to this particular problem.
We’ll have to see what’s in the cards and hope to heck there is something interesting to take this upcoming spring/summer. :)
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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