Rhetoric and Civic Life | Jacob Glenister

After CAS on Tuesday, I was walking back to my dorm with one of my friends from the class and discussing the subject of other English classes. As we were doing so, I came to the realization that he had not had to memorize and recite poems in his English classes as I once had (One common poem choice for recitation, Joyce Kilmer's "Trees", was the basis of the title of this blog post). This in turn led me to realize that memorization in schools in general seemed to no longer be in vogue and, as such, that a paradigm shift had occurred. As a result of this realization, and the realization that finding sources for my other topic ideas was near impossible, I decided to choose as my topic the shift from memorization to critical thinking and analysis as the focus of education (especially in the humanities) in the past few decades, driven in part by the rise of the Internet. My thesis, in turn, will be that between 1960 and the present education has followed a general trend of ...

Usually, when we talk about paradigm shifts, we talk about changes within large, complex societies. There was, however, one major paradigm shift that occurred before large, complex societies and made all later paradigm shifts possible: the development of agriculture. Before the development of agriculture, humans lived in small societies (capped at around 150-250, based on a psychological constant known as Dunbar's Number , which determines how many people we can form relationships with) that relied on hunting, foraging, and fishing for food. They generally were nomadic to some degree, moving seasonally in search of optimal food sources. The development of agriculture around 12000 years ago changed this permanently in societies that developed non-pastoral agriculture; they became settled and tied to a single homeland as opposed to migrating frequently. Villages developed, oftentimes with populations far higher than those of hunter-gatherer bands. This in turn set the stage for t...

Margaret Thatcher, also known as the Iron Lady, is remembered as one of Britain's greatest prime ministers. She led Great Britain in the early 1980s, passionately opposed communism, and led a revival of conservatism after the famously liberal 60s and 70s. She could have done none of this, however, had she not been a master of manipulating audience attention. Gaining and maintaining audience attention is perhaps one of the greatest challenges in speaking and is certainly one of the most important goals for any speaker. An audience that does not listen may well miss the speaker's message and as such will not be convinced by it. As such we can say that one of the marks of a great speaker is the ability to keep audience attention. By this metric, we can easily say that Thatcher was an excellent speaker. For an example, look at Thatcher speaking in opposition to the Labor Party's push for greater unity with Europe here . This is, of course, a rather dry topic, and therefor...