Actual video I’m analyzing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
Transcript: http://dotsub.com/view/58707cf2-f861-46dd-95c3-62020b4ec8c8/viewTranscript/eng
Sir Ken Robinson is an expert on education and creativity. In 2010 he gave a talk to the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) titled “Changing Education Paradigms.” The video used in this essay is a cut version of this talk created by RSA. While the speech is cut, it contains the same gist of the original, and in the video is paired with animation and cartoons. This essay will analyze both the talk and the video, and how both work together to create a rhetorical piece. While the video contains some valid points, there are general flaws in its proofs that make degrade its quality.
In his talk, Sir Ken Robinson explains that the current education system isn’t helping students. The economy is tougher now and globalization is affecting cultures, making knowledge imperative for survival and success. It is based on a system started during the Enlightenment, and therefore isn’t relevant to children today and alienates them. He states that the school system is draining children’s creativity, replacing creativity with facts they say is correct. Schools create a narrow window in which they define smart students, excluding others with different skills just as important. He believes that in our efforts to education our children, we are leading them far away from true education that causes innovation and original solutions. He says that people need to accept and understand how different students learn in order to truly raise education standards and prepare children for the future.
Sir Ken Robinson gave this talk to the RSA, which calls itself “an enlightenment organisation committed to finding innovative practical solutions to today’s social challenges” and that it “…seeks to understand and enhance human capabilities so we can close the gap between today’s reality and people’s hope for a better world” (http://www.thersa.org/about-us). It is a charity organization that funds different grants and programs for enlightenment purposes. It follows that the people he was giving the talk to were people looking for brilliant and unconventional ideas that will shape society. They were open to creativity, not needing a formal speech to grab their attention. They were looking for unheard of viewpoints and ideas. This characterizes the audience in the first section of this essay analyzing the talk.
In the context of the talk itself, Sir Ken Robinson appropriately used his ethical proof. While in the video he doesn’t give any information about himself, in the talk, people already knew who he was. Typically in talks like these, either someone from the organization introduces the speaker, citing his or her credentials and possibly published works, or the audience already knows who the speaker is and what he or she has accomplished. He probably would have been introduced as a world-renown expert in education and creativity, which gives ethos to his talk since that is what he is speaking about. He is an expert in this field and therefore well-versed in the rhetoric and research in that area. Sir Ken Robinson also creates ethos during his speech. During a segment in which he questions whether ADHD is an epidemic, he admits that he isn’t an expert on the subject of ADHD and that he isn’t qualified to make conclusions about it. While this may sound like it hurts his argument, it actually helps his ethos because he is admitting he doesn’t know everything and that he isn’t stating a fact. This makes the audience trust him more since the audience feels like they can rely on him to tell them the truth. Finally, Sir Ken Robinson also creates ethos by using the phrase “our children.” This creates a connection between him and his audience through his use of the word “our”. It means that he cares about the children as much as the audience does and vice versa. This helps the audience connect with Sir Ken by showing that they have the same values.
In his talk, Sir Ken Robinson uses mediocre logos. He is an educated man and does say educated things. For example, he points out that the current educational system is flawed by stating “The problem is that the current system of education was designed and conceived and structured for a different age. It was conceived in the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment, and in the economic circumstances of the Industrial Revolution.” This statement shows that he has done research on the current education system and its origins. However, all the audiences has to trust this point is Sir Kin Robinson’s word. Throughout the speech, Sir Ken Robinson fails to provide sources that could add credibility to his speech, instead relying on his own name and reputation to supply reliability.
In “Changing Education Paradigms”, Sir Ken Robinson’s talk provides adequate pathos. With his use of phrases like “our children”, he creates a sense of unity and community among the audience members. Through this sense of community, he makes all of them feel as if they have a joint responsibility to take care and help prepare the younger generation. He also uses colloquial language and filler words and phrase such as “you know”. Through this, he creates a relaxed atmosphere in which the audience can be engaged. In a more formal setting, it is difficult to actively process and analyze what a speaker is saying because one has to shift through language and technical terms. However, Sir Ken Robinson gives a straight-forward talk with common language that anyone can understand, engaging the audience.
In the RSA-created Youtube video for this talk, the audience is more diverse. Since Youtube is a free resource, anyone can access and watch this video. The people most likely to see it are “common” people, that is to say, people who aren’t necessarily experts on education or other fields, but are interested in the education, how we can improve it and Sir Ken Robinson’s talks. The audience demographic can also include viewers who are curious about new and original ideas, and want to explore the new thoughts that are relevant to current society. With this perspective, this essay now moves into an analyses of the rhetorical proofs of the RSA video.
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I think that this is a well-written essay so far and I am very interested to see how it is completed. It is a very unique speech to analyze and one that most people are very unfamiliar with. You do a fantastic job at providing a background on the speaker and the context of the speech itself. That said, it seems like you use this informational first paragraph as your introduction. The listing of the facts for the context of the speech is great, however it does not provide for a very interesting hook for your intro. I would suggest either adding a small intro paragraph or add a hook sentence or two onto your current first paragraph that sets the education reform scene and gets your reader hooked. The first paragraph otherwise is great at establishing your ethos on the topic.
You organize this essay so far very well. It seems to me that you almost have two distinct essays: one about the speech’s rhetorical techniques and one about the video’s. I love this idea and would like to see how it ends up. You present your first argument well and clearly hit ethos, pathos and logos on the speech. I would suggest expanding on the pathos, however. You do a great job at explaining how the speech includes all three parts, but you don’t elaborate as much on how his rhetorical techniques affect the audience in the pathos section. For logos, you point out that he uses words like “you know” and your evaluation of that is fantastic. I would like to see more of an evaluation like this on if his pathos techniques were either effective or not in persuading the audience.
At the end of this draft, you set up the next part of your essay that will analyze the video. I would just make sure that you somewhere add another thesis statement that is separate from your “speech” thesis that explicitly addresses the “video” portion of the analysis. I am very interested to see how it all turns out. Good luck!