Education isn't only about informing students, it's about convincing them to care and motivating them to action. But how best to do that? This article reporting on the results of a contest might offer some insight. The idea was to create and test the most compelling argument convincing a person to donate to charity. The author hypothesized that emotional appeals, rather than dry philosophical arguments based on good and duty, would carry the day. The winning argument was submitted by Peter Singer and Matthew Lindauer; you can read it in the article, as well as four other finalists. The hypothesis remains unproven, if only (in my view) because it's hard to separate the emotional from the dry components of an argument.
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