Argumentation and Students...

Now, I understand that this is a bit off topic from my usual posts, but I am having some problems in my teaching. Since this blog is ostensibly about pedagogy and its relationship to teaching and intellectualism as it is expressed by teaching, I figure this is applicable.

For the composition class that I teach, my students are required to write three papers that take a stance within a particular topic and argue it using sources and argumentative organization that relates these sources to the writer's perspective and to one another.

However, despite my experience and training in teaching composition, I have reached something of an impasse. How does one tell another person how to argue a position? My students come to me with ideas that are almost entirely summaries of the information that they have read without any sort of comparative or imperative representations of opinion.

Now, being a graduate student for a few years now, I am well aware of the ways that one can argue for a definition to be reformed or reexamined. This, however, takes some knowledge and skill at formulating arguments and understanding of the context of the original definition.

So I am at a complete loss of how to get students that are primarily 18 to 19 years old to take a stand on anything. Is this a result of growing up in a PoMo world where students assume that either nothing really matters because it is all opinion or because they don't have any sort of authority to speak, so why bother?