Project Proposal

Question: Why is it that rhetoric is not introduced to students until they have entered the university setting? Why is rhetoric excluded from the curriculum dictated by current secondary school pedagogy?

Interest: Pedagogy, as it is today, doesn't introduce the idea of rhetoric until students have begun taking their first writing class at the university level. Even for those students who are enrolled in their high school A.P. or I.B. programs, there is no introduction of rhetoric into the curriculum. To me, it seems odd that something as huge and fundamental to human thought as rhetoric is not something that is brought to the attention of students until they enter the university setting. I wonder why, as an A.P. English student who was supposedly doing college-level work, I had never heard the word rhetoric before I walked into one of my writing classes at MSU.

I am curious what would happen if we tried to introduce rhetoric earlier? Could students, at ages younger than 18 comprehend rhetoric? At what point do we suppose adolescent brains have developed to a point where they can wrap their minds around something so theoretical? (That's not the word I want to use right now but it's the only one I can come up with . . . Words are hard.) And if they're brain development suggests that students younger than 18 can understand things that are metaphysical, then what is holding us back from including rhetoric in the high school classroom (or at the very least the A.P. and I.B. high school classrooms). Would we have to reconsider the way in which we teach English? Would we have to stop taking the "classical" approach to teaching writing and literature in favor of a "rhetorical" approach? What has driven us to the point where we don't value rhetoric in primary and secondary public education? Ideally, I'd like to take a look at the common cores and try and pinpoint the reasoning behind excluding rhetoric from them, as I feel it is fundamental to begin introducing such a topic earlier in education than college.

Method: Hmmmm. A whole lot of reading, I would say. This is probably going to be me reading mounds upon mounds of research on brain development, the common cores, classical and rhetorical approaches, and the value of rhetoric (do we really think it is nothing more than a load of persuasive tom-foolery?). Someone out there somewhere, I am sure has some insight that I can pull from and I am hoping that I will be lucky enough to stumble across that insight. I have yet to decide how exactly I intend to compile it and present it all, but I think the beauty of these projects is that they tend to take shape on their own once I've done enough research. So we shall see.