Purpose: Persuade adults out of education that the system needs updating and how it will give people an incentive to stay in education. The system is derived from Victorian England; all other aspects of life have changed, why not education? Is education the most important thing in modern society? What alternatives are there to the formal, and 'assumed', educational system? Can anything be done to alleviate over-crowding in Universities? Is there too much pressure on students from an early age? Are students always treated fairly?
Target Audience: Adults out of Education
Conditions: Pauses for crowd's reaction. The pace of the speech. Not at the school itself, but to a board of governors who over-see the educational system, as well as any parents or teachers attending.
Rhetorical Devices:
- Extended Metaphor --> Rivers and seas; currents, ripples, the effect of the moon on the tide
- Triplet
- Anaphora
- Alliteration
- Antithesis
- Oxymoron
- Imagery
- Emotive Language
- Facts and Figures (Statistics)
- Rhetorical Questions
- Another side of the argument
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us here today. I am here on behalf of parents, guardians and students themselves to raise concerns which have been present for a number of years now; the education system. It is out of date. It is stressful. It is unjust. From the age of four, children are cast off among the reeds of Education systems, and expected to be able to keep their head afloat with little input from external sources.Even if the child feels as if they are drowning, they are seen as a delinquent, a rebel and a 'lost cause', instead of getting the attention they need and deserve. This stigma will stay with them for the rest of their education dominated lives, and dictate their future potential in terms of wages, career progress and job satisfaction. Unless we do something. Everyone here in this room has the power to change this child's future, and every child after them. So why aren't we? Because we have been conditioned from our own experiences of education to believe this is the only possible, the only logical solution, whereas deep in the creeks of our minds, we want to believe there is a different way. I stand here today, appealing to you to embrace this belief you have been trying to suppress, and ultimately appealing to you to change the system for the better.
Secondary education brings a whole new torrent of problems with it, one of the most predominant is stress. People tend to use the term 'stress' as a scapegoat, rather than putting any real meaning behind it, but I have seen the effects of it first-hand, and it is not some superstitious senselessness . It leads people towards depression, anxiety and panic attacks. Supposedly, your adolescent years are meant to be some of the best in your life. Instead, they are a time which is rife with absurd amounts of pressure from society and peers, as well as school. This stress flows past Secondary Education, through College years only to settle into University, which is where the system really fails us. Statistics show that you are most likely to commit Suicide during these years trying to earn a degree. What does this amount to? A piece of paper. A piece of paper which will determine whether your efforts have been worth-while or not. A piece of paper which will determine how others view you. A piece of paper which will determine if any of it has come to anything, or if you should be stuck in a job you resent, which will, eventually, make you resent yourself. As human beings, we are worth more than this. And we should all be striving to achieve the best we possibly can, instead of settling for what we are told is good enough. Because we do deserve better. And we should be able to recognise this for ourselves, without the need for me or anyone else to stand up here and alert you to this fact.
And finally, one of the main issues surrounding education is punishment. If a student is seen to have a good-nature, be well mannered and polite, any form of rebellion will see to be unacceptable. On the other hand, a student who is prone to emotional, and sometimes violent, outbursts, as well as being rude to teachers and fellow students, may not be punished as severely for the same wrong-doing. Something seems amiss here. Of course, different students react to different forms of punishment more effectively, but that does not mean leniency should be allocated to certain people, simply because it is expected of them. In fact, I believe students who repeatedly act out against the school system should have punishments increasing in severity every time. A student who is the antitheses to this who suddenly displays extreme emotion is likely to be suffering from some external cause, meaning they are in need of help. A member of staff should be able to recognise this, and offer help to the student before they allocate a punishment. This is not to say the student does not deserve a punishment; a wrong-doing is just that, and there are no excuses. But we need to be taking extra care in preventing further inappropriate acts from surfacing, rather than letting them fester and bubble. This means more time can be spent focusing on the young persons education, rather than dealing with events which could have been prevented. I am certain that I am not the only one in the room who feels like this, which brings me back to my initial point; why has it stayed this way for so long? Because we have allowed it to. But we don't have to. Throwing a pebble into a pond may only evoke small ripples, but the waves these ripples will eventually produce are powerful enough to incur great changes to the surrounding area, and this may in turn inspire other areas to incur the same changes.
