The Argument Classroom: What Happens When Disagreement Becomes the Curriculum?

Walk into most classrooms and you'll find a familiar scene: a teacher explains, students listen, questions are asked and answered, understanding is checked. Disagreement, when it appears, is often something to be managed; a sign that clarity hasn't yet been achieved, that someone needs correction or the discussion needs refocusing.

But what if we've misunderstood disagreement's role in learning? What if, rather than being a problem to solve, argument could be the very engine of understanding?

Two unlikely sources suggest this possibility. One is a 1,500-year-old educational tradition that has barely changed its methods. The other is contemporary cognitive science. Together, they point towards a radically different way of organising learning—one where disagreement isn't incidental but central, and where thinking aloud with another mind becomes the primary pedagogical act.

An ancient practice in structured disagreement

In the Yeshiva study hall, learning happens in pairs. Two students; a practice called chavruta; sit together over a dense Talmudic text and argue. Not argue in the sense of conflict, but in the older sense: they reason together, out loud, testing interpretations against each other.

One student proposes a reading. The other challenges it. They trace the logic, find contradictions, pull in supporting commentary from other sources, push back, refine. There's no teacher at the front synthesising their insights into a coherent lecture. The text doesn't come pre-explained. Meaning emerges through the friction of two minds working over the same material.

This can go on for hours. Days. Weeks on a single page. The goal isn't to reach consensus quickly but to think rigorously—to make reasoning visible, to test the grounds of interpretation, to learn to hold complexity without demanding immediate resolution (Holzer, 2006).

What makes this remarkable is not just its longevity but its underlying assumption: that knowledge is something you build through argumentation, not something transmitted intact from expert to novice. Authority resides less in the teacher than in the quality of reasoning itself.

What cognitive science reveals

Deanna Kuhn, a psychologist at Columbia, has spent decades studying how people develop as thinkers; not what they know, but how they understand knowledge itself. Her research reveals something striking: many people, even well into adulthood, treat knowledge as either absolute (there's one right answer) or relativistic (all opinions are equally valid). Neither stance equips them to navigate genuine intellectual complexity (Kuhn, 1991).

The more sophisticated position—what Kuhn calls "evaluativism"—recognises that while certainty may be elusive, interpretations can still be better or worse based on evidence and reasoning. Getting people to this stance isn't about teaching them facts; it's about changing how they engage with ideas (Kuhn & Weinstock, 2002). And the most effective way to do this is sustained, structured argumentation.

When learners argue; genuinely argue, not just discuss or debate to win; they're forced to externalise their reasoning, examine their assumptions, and encounter the limits of their initial thinking. They experience knowledge not as fixed content but as something that requires justification and can be refined through scrutiny (Kuhn, 2015). The argument becomes a form of thinking made visible.

This maps almost perfectly onto what happens in chavruta, though the Yeshiva arrived at this insight through centuries of practice rather than controlled studies.

Converging these ideas: argument as cognitive work

Both the Yeshiva tradition and Kuhn's research point to the same pedagogical principle: disagreement, properly structured, is how minds develop.

In chavruta, students don't just exchange views—they make claims, defend them, modify them under pressure. They learn that saying "I think X" isn't enough; you need to articulate why, trace the reasoning, show how it holds up against alternatives. The pairing ensures this thinking can't remain private or vague. Your study partner will press you, find gaps, demand clarity.

Kuhn's experiments demonstrate that this kind of dialogic engagement produces genuine epistemic growth. Students who engage in regular, structured argumentation don't just get better at arguing; they become more metacognitive, more aware of their own reasoning processes, more capable of evaluating claims across domains (Kuhn, Hemberger, & Khait, 2016).

The key is that the argument must be about ideas, not positions. The goal isn't persuasion but understanding. Both participants need to care more about getting it right rather than being right.

What this demands of a learning environment

Here's where it gets difficult. You can't simply tell students to "argue more" and expect transformation. The Yeshiva works because it's built on cultural and structural foundations that make this possible.

Chavruta unfolds over extended periods; hours at a stretch, weeks on difficult material. This isn't inefficiency; it's the necessary condition for deep engagement. Kuhn's research confirms this: epistemic development requires sustained, repeated practice, not one-off exercises (Kuhn & Crowell, 2011). Yet most classrooms fragment time into units too brief for genuine intellectual struggle.

At the same time, much collaborative learning defaults to division of labor; you research this, I'll research that, we'll combine our findings. Chavruta insists both students wrestle with the same material simultaneously. This shared cognitive load is essential. The argument only works if both minds are genuinely engaged with the same question at the same time.

In the Yeshiva, disagreement is understood as care; you argue with your chavruta because you're both committed to understanding. There's no social penalty for being wrong, only for being intellectually lazy. Building this culture in contexts where disagreement typically signals conflict or hostility requires deliberate norm-setting and modeling.

The practical challenge: can this travel?

The Yeshiva operates within a bounded tradition. Its texts are sacred, its interpretive methods are defined, its participants share commitments that extend beyond the classroom. These bounds aren't incidental; it’s part of what makes the practice so powerful.

So can you extract the method and apply it elsewhere? The honest answer is: partially, and with care. You can create structures for paired argumentation. You can allocate extended time for working through difficult material. You can teach students to make their reasoning explicit and to challenge each other productively. These elements are portable.

What's harder to transplant is the cultural surrounding the education. The deep internalisation that argument is how care manifests, that staying with difficulty is virtuous, that resolution isn't always the goal. This can't be copied and has to be grown.

Kuhn's work offers some guidance here. Her interventions show that students can learn to argue productively across diverse content areas—science, history, social issues—when given explicit instruction in argumentative moves and regular practice in dialogic engagement (Kuhn & Moore, 2015). The skills do transfer, but only when the practice is sustained and the norms are clear.

Redesigning around argument

If we take this seriously, it implies restructuring some fundamental assumptions about how learning happens.

Instead of coverage—moving through material unit by unit—education would organise around sustained inquiry into fewer, denser questions. Instead of individual accountability, it would centre paired intellectual work as the primary mode of engagement. Instead of treating disagreement as a derailment, it would position argument as the core activity from which understanding emerges.

This doesn't mean abandoning expertise or direct instruction. Teachers would still frame problems, offer tools, clarify confusions. But the locus of cognitive work would shift: away from listening and reproducing, toward reasoning with another mind.

It also doesn't mean every subject or every learning goal fits this model. Some knowledge is foundational and needs direct teaching. Some skills require individual practice. But for the kind of understanding that involves interpretation, judgment, and epistemic development—which is much of what we claim to value—the argument classroom offers a compelling alternative.

What we might learn by trying

The Yeshiva and Kuhn's research converge on an insight that challenges conventional practice: thinking isn't something that happens privately and then gets shared; it's something that happens through dialogue, and some forms of understanding are only accessible in that mode.

For educators, this suggests a provocative idea. What would change if we designed learning environments where disagreement wasn't something to minimise, but the structure within which growth occurs?

The answer isn't to replicate the Yeshiva; its potency is inseparable from the culture which surrounds it. But we can take seriously its central claim that argument, conducted with rigour and care, over an extended time between committed partners, isn't just one pedagogical technique among many. It may be one of the most powerful tools we have for developing minds capable of handling genuine complexity.

The evidence, both ancient and modern, is compelling. However, is contemporary education willing to reorganise itself around practices that don't optimise for efficiency, coverage, or easy measurement, but for the slow and difficult work of learning to think?

Reference List

Holzer, E. (2006). Reflective practices in teacher education: Havruta in teacher education. In E. Holzer & O. Kent (Eds.), A philosophy of havruta: Understanding and teaching the art of text study in pairs (pp. 111-130). Academic Studies Press.

Kuhn, D. (1991). The skills of argument. Cambridge University Press.

Kuhn, D. (2015). Thinking together and alone. Educational Researcher, 44(1), 46-53. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X15569530

Kuhn, D., & Crowell, A. (2011). Dialogic argumentation as a vehicle for developing young adolescents' thinking. Psychological Science, 22(4), 545-552. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611402512

Kuhn, D., Hemberger, L., & Khait, V. (2016). Argue with me: Developing thinking and writing through dialog. Bronx, NY: Franklinton Educational.

Kuhn, D., & Moore, W. (2015). Argument as core curriculum. Learning: Research and Practice, 1(1), 66-78. https://doi.org/10.1080/23735082.2015.994254

Kuhn, D., & Weinstock, M. (2002). What is epistemological thinking and why does it matter? In B. K. Hofer & P. R. Pintrich (Eds.), Personal epistemology: The psychology of beliefs about knowledge and knowing (pp. 121-144). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.