An Education in Rhetoric

After a few classes in History of Rhetoric, I find myself questioning the validity and importance of classical rhetoric.  I read an essay last week which explained the history of the study of classical rhetoric in the academic curriculum and how it was disregarded for a long time.  Rhetoricians, professors and scholars had to fight to get classical rhetoric back into the curriculum and to be seen as important as Literature.  Now, luckily, rhetoric has had a revival back into the curriculum, but the essay made it quite clear that the people who are fighting to keep rhetoric into the academic realm must continue to fight.

This fight for classical rhetoric being taken seriously as both a theory and practice really struck a chord with me.  Although I haven’t had much schooling in rhetoric thus far, I do understand its importance in the curriculum.  So, I have to question, how key is introducing rhetoric into the curriculum for high school students?  In high school, we learned the fundamentals of writing and writing well, reading with comprehension, and being able to speak our minds about a certain literary text.  However, in my experience, I was not exposed to rhetoric or to the importance of debate and orality.  Having said that, I personally feel that as writers and fighters for communication and its validity, rhetoric is a key component in establishing oral skills. 

As much as I believe that literature and writing are crucial within the classroom, not focusing on speech/debate can be problematic in the future.  As we listen to the debates amongst the candidates, we must listen to their speeches rhetorically:  How are they addressing the audience?  What specific kinds of tactics are they using in order to “sway” voters?  These questions arise when I watch the debates and for the most part, it is the study of rhetoric that is aiding me into asking the right questions and answering them.  For this purpose, along with many others, we need to bring in more rhetoric (theory and practice) into the curriculum, especially, in my opinion, in high school.  I feel, along with many others that critical thinking and analytical thought has diminished partly due to standardized testing, and with that, our students are not given the proper tools to learn how to think for themselves (something much needed at the university level and in life, in general). 

So, I end with a question: what is the validity of rhetoric (especially classical) being taught in the classroom and how much of it should be a focus?