The Rhetoric of Principle: Rights, Conscience, and Civil Disobedience: Reading Unit 5, Grade 12 (Letters & Devotion)

Description

The Rhetoric of Principle: Rights, Conscience, and Civil Disobedience is Unit 5 of Literature, Rhetoric, and the Examined Life (Part 2) (Grade 12), the Letters & Devotion Reading course, complete in one printable PDF: 9 lessons, the unit check-up and the answer key, 84 pages.

• The premise-evidence-conclusion structure of the Declaration of Independence’s argument
• Ethos-building strategies specific to a text arguing for the legitimacy of collective political action rather than personal credibility
• The distinction between conscience-based and higher-law-based justifications for civil disobedience
• The specific historical counterarguments ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ answers
• The adequacy of King’s rebuttal to the gradualism objection in ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’
• Premise identification and counterargument evaluation applied to a novel argumentative text
• An original argument justifying or opposing a named contemporary act of civil disobedience
• The relationship between rebuttal strategy and underlying theory of legal legitimacy across two foundational texts
• Thesis selection in comparative rhetorical analysis, arrived at after weighing textual evidence rather than before

Every lesson is written for a parent with no teaching background: it opens with a short script to read aloud, names the specific wrong idea a student is likely to reach for and how to correct it, and closes with a practice sheet you may copy for your household. Scripture references are King James Version throughout. Black-and-white, 8.5 x 11 in. The whole year of this course is also in this store as a single book.

AI note: The written content of this resource was drafted with AI tools, then reviewed and edited by the author.