President Obama's Speech

I personally stayed away from all of the controversy involved in President Obama’s previous drafts of his speech, and the criticisms of the one he actually gave.

In Obama’s speech, he not only stressed the importance of doing well in school, but its role in our society. He pushed the view that when they fail, they’re not just failing themselves—they’re failing their country. His powerful, yet encouraging speech, in my opinion, did an excellent job at imparting a sense of responsibility into each child’s academic life, and also at highlighting education and its integral role in enabling students. Though I don’t agree with the President’s need for involvement in our school system, I do believe it was a speech that needed to be heard by the children of our generation. The responsibility to be educated, the importance of an education, and an education's role in society—these are all aspects of Obama’s speech which I completely understand and agree with.

As for the rhetorical strategy President Obama used in his speech, I think he did a skillful job of weaving in pathos and logos. His use of pathos was definitely the most powerful part of his speech: growing up in Indonesia, too poor to go to a good school, suffering through additional schooling from his mother at 4:30 in the morning. And all of this just so he could have the same education that the average American kid takes for granted. He was also very logical in his section about the correlation between education and jobs. “You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.” Overall, I think it was a very inspirational speech, but most importantly, it was a very necessary speech.