speech writing on aim of education

How To Write A Speech On Education (With Sample Speech)

Hrideep barot.

• Speech Writing

“Education is the most powerful weapon that you can use to change the world.” 

These words by Nelson Mandela pretty much sum up the importance of education in the life of human beings. Without education, human beings wouldn’t have arrived at the stage they are right now, and it is unlikely that we will be able to continue our missions to space progressively without education. 

And yet the truth remains that many, many people across the world do not have the right or ability to receive an education. Many of these people might be able to do great things if only they had the means to do so.

In such a scenario, it becomes important to spread awareness about education. Delivering speeches is one of the best ways to do so, as through speeches one can make a more personal connection with the people attending & make it more likely that they will actually do something about it.

However, it’s also true that education is a topic that many, many people have spoken about. In such a scenario, you might find yourself wondering what you can do to make your speech stand apart from all the ones that came before. 

Don’t worry, that’s what we’re here to help you with.

By keeping in mind a few things like finding a unique angle, incorporating stories and props, making sure to include concrete elements, and making your audience go beyond listening to feel something, you can easily deliver an unforgettable speech on education.

Tips To Keep In Mind While Writing A Speech About Education 

1. Find A Unique Angle 

Education is a topic that people have spoken about time and again. What this means is that if you deliver a speech about education without adding a different point of view to it, then the chances are your audience is going to find your speech bland or boring and not pay attention.

So, find a unique angle for the speech. Draw on your personal experiences and ask yourself: is there anything about this topic that I can see but others can’t?

2. Include Concrete Elements 

Concrete details or elements include things like facts, statistics, etc. 

If you don’t include concrete elements in your speech, then chances are that your speech will become abstract and hard to believe really fast.

So, make sure to back up your arguments with relevant information. 

Wondering how to add facts to your speech without making it drab? Check out our article on 11 Steps To Add Facts To A Speech Without Making It Boring.

3. Use Language & Concepts Familiar To The Audience

Often, speakers have this misconception that the bigger or more difficult words they use, the better or smarter they’re going to sound. This cannot be further from the truth.

While using complicated words or concepts might make you sound smarter, they also increase the chances that you won’t be able to formulate a connection with the audience. 

After all, if they can’t understand what they’re saying, how will they connect with it?

4. Incorporate Storytelling & Props 

Stories are a GREAT way to make your speech more personal and engaging. And props, if used alongside your story, can take it to the next level. 

So, make sure to incorporate appropriate personal stories and props in your speech. Make sure that your prop is relevant to the speech, and not merely an accessory. 

5. Make Them Feel, Not Just Hear 

If you truly want your audience to be impacted by your speech, then you need to make them feel more deeply about it. You need to make them go beyond hearing and actually feel for you and the topic. 

This can be done by sprinkling throughout your speech elements like humor, stories, props, videos, real-life testimonials, interacting with them…

The list goes on. 

What matters is going above and beyond. You want to make your words mean more than their meaning. 

6. Use Humor

Humor is a great way to take any speech to the next level. Like stories, jokes are a great way to form a connection with the audience and make your speech more memorable.

However, one thing to keep in mind here is to make sure that your humor is relevant to the topic at hand. Don’t just add jokes for the sake of adding them: make sure that they relate to your speech in some way.

7. Don’t Have Too Many Points

While it’s important to make sure that your speech covers all aspects that it needs to cover, you don’t have to include too many points in your speech. This will make it difficult for the audience to figure out what, exactly, is the central theme or main message that you want them to take away.

You can have one or two key takeaways and divide those main points into multiple individual points. This will allow for better structure of your speech, whilst also making it easier to view it from multiple angles.

Ways To Begin Your Speech On Education 

1. Open With A Story 

This is a tried and tested way to open your speech. As mentioned before, it’s imperative you incorporate stories into your speech if you wish to make a personal connection with the audience and make them feel for your speech.

And what better place to add a story than right at the opening of your speech? 

For example:  My parents spent their entire savings on my brother’s education, but for me, they wouldn’t even spare a…

For more ideas on how to incorporate stories in your speech, check out our article on 9 Storytelling Approaches For Your Next Speech Or Presentation.

2. Make Them Go ‘A-Ha’ 

Another awesome way to open your speech is by surprising your audience. This will awaken them, and snap their attention to where it needs to be: on you. 

This adds doubly to your credit if your speech is on a seemingly monotonous topic like education where the audience enters with certain expectations about the speech already in place. 

There are many ways to do this. Stories with a twist are one. Another would be incorporating a joke. Yet another way would be to pull out a prop. Or you could even say a surprising statement that seems to go against the topic when you first hear it.

For example:  I don’t think education is important. Unless…

3. Common-Ground Open 

A common ground opening is imperative if there is a gap between you and your audience. If, for example, you’re an aged professor from a reputed university and the audience is teenagers from a local high school, then there are going to be gaps in how you and the audience perceive the world. 

You can bridge this gap in a couple of ways. One would be making a personal connection or making them see that you are similar in certain aspects. This can be done by using humor, incorporating stories, or even making a pop culture reference. You can also open with a shared goal or interest. 

For example:  When I was in high school, all I wanted to do was get out of it.

4. Open With A Show Of Hands 

Another great way to open your speech is by asking questions–particularly show of hands questions. 

This works in two ways: asking the question piques your audience’s attention and gets their thoughts rolling. On the other hand, show-of-hands provides them with a chance to move their body, which aids in making them more aware of their surroundings i.e you. 

For example:  How many of you wish you could get out of this classroom right now?

5. Open With An Image Or Prop 

Images tell stories. And stories, as mentioned above, are one of the best ways to open your speech. 

You can open your speech by showing the audience an image of something and then asking them a question about it or presenting a startling fact about it. Alternatively, you could also open your speech by employing a relevant prop. 

For example:  Start off with an image of a refugee in a school.

Need more inspiration for how to open your speech? Check out our article on 10 Of The Best Things To Say In Opening Remarks.

Sample Speech On Education

Title: The Missing Ramp

On a school field trip in grade 3, I met my long lost twin. Or so I thought, anyway. The boy I met wasn’t actually my twin by blood. But he was my exact replica in every other aspect: from the color of our hair and eyes to the kind of jokes we liked to make and the cartoons we loved to watch and the fact that we both felt a little out of place in the big strange world. We were similar in more aspects than we could count, more than I can remember now. However, we were significantly different in one important aspect: While I was a ten year old, happy-go-lucky kid that hated going to school, he was a ten year old, happy go-lucky kid for whom school was a distant dream. You see, Andrew–the boy I thought was my twin–had a locomotor disability. He had to use a weelchair to be able to move around. However, there was only one school in our little town, and the school had no ramps or elevators, making it impossible for him to navigate by himself the five floors that it comprised. Not only this, but there were no washrooms available for him, either. His mother could not afford to lose her job in town, not with the already soaring cost of his treatement. Her meagre salary meant that a private tutor was out of question. Besides, she thought, what was the point of uprooting her entire life to move to another town or city when–according to her–there was no point in educating her child when he could not do anything with it? And so, despite the fact that he was perfectly capable of learning at par with the rest of us, Andrew never got an education. Imagine that. Imagine being unable to go to school when all the other kids around you are doing so because the school does not have a ramp. It sounds absurd, right? However strange or unreal it may sound, it’s the reality of the lives of many, many children with disabilities. It’s not that they’re unwilling to learn or their parents are unwilling to send them to school. It’s the lack of facilities–many of which the rest of us take for granted–which make it impossible for them to attend school. And even when the facilities are available. Even then, many, many children with disabilites are unable to achieve the education that is their basic right. An estimated one in three out-of-school children have a disability. There are between 93 million and 150 million children with disabilities worldwide. And yet, WHO estimates that in many, many countries across the world, having a disability more than doubles the chances of a child never attending school. While accessibility remains the key factor that inhibits children with disabilities from attending school, there are many, many other factors that come into play. Inflexible teacher training & support is another factor that comes into play. As does inflexible curriculum and poor structure and plan. However, another key factor that prevents children with disabilites from attending school has less to do with the physical elements of education, and more with the mindset and mentality of other people. That is, it has to do with the attitude of children and teachers in school towards children with disabilites. Often, children with disabilites are scorned and made fun of by their peers. And this is not limited to students alone. The teachers, too, might share a callous attitiude and be inflexible in their approach. I had a teacher in my school who refused to change her ‘ alphabetical seating plan’ to allow a deaf girl sit in the first bench so that she could lip-read her instructions. What this means is that many times, the children themseleves might not be willing to go to school from the fear of how their peers and teachers might react to or treat them. While delivering speeches about making education accessible to all or how it is the fundamental right of every person, we tend to make grand statements and all the big steps that we need to–or should–take in order to actually make education more accessible to people. And yet, while making all those grandoise proclamations, we often overlook the little steps that each and every single one of us needs to take. In seeing the ‘big picture’, we ignore the all the little snapshots that go into making it. And yet, it is this little things that make the most difference. A missing ramp–that’s all it took to make a child miss out on his dream of going to school. I don’t think any words sum up my words better than something Annie Campbell said: “We can teach our children to flap their wings, but conditions have to be just right for them to fly.” Our children are ready to take the leap and fly. Now it is upon us to determine what the sky will be like: full or rain or brimming with sunshine.

Different Angles To Cover Your Speech From

There are many different angles to cover your speech from. Some of them have been mentioned below.

• Accessibility Of Education
• The Digital Divide
• Peer Pressure
• Online Education vs. Offline Education
• Education Of Girl Child
• Education Schemes
• Mental Health Of Students
• Effectiveness Of Curriculum
• Classroom Learning vs. Real Life Experiences
• Teaching Strategies
• Education For People With Disabilities
• Bullying In Schools
• Importance Of Physical Education For Students
• Vocational Studies & Their Importance
• Rising Cost Of Education
• Privatization Of Education
• Factors Affecting Student Performance
• Importance Of Arts & Language Education
• Importance Of Field Trips
• Technology In The Classroom
• Importance Of Public Speaking For Students
• Different Learning Styles
• Impact Of Social Media On Learning

Sample Speech Topics On Education

Here are some examples of topics for your speech on education.

1 What affects the performance of kids in school? 2. Significance of compulsory attendance 3. Homeschooling: Benefits and drawbacks 4. How is literacy different from education? 5. What does the future of the education industry look like? 6. How does Switzerland have the best education system? 7. How to ace college application essays? 8. Guide to optimize daily planner: Your guiding light to lead a productive life 9. Use the power of storytelling to make history lessons ‘fun’ 10. How to unlock the potential of your subconscious mind to memorize things better? 11. Beating distractions: How to make the most of online classes? 12. Sleep deprivation is not ‘cool’: How to improve your grades through proper sleep? 13. A Step-by-Step Guide to writing a stellar research paper 14. Why periodic assessment of teachers is necessary 15. The need for psychologists and therapists in school 16. Why positive peer pressure can be a game-changer 17. Why sports should be a graded component in schools 18. The need for adequate sleep 19. Why application-based learning is necessary 20. Shorter school days for the win 21. Why recreational reading is also important 22. The need for sex education in school

To conclude, while writing a speech on education, you need to make sure that your speech isn’t bland or overused. By keeping in mind a few things like finding a unique angle, incorporating stories and props, making sure to include concrete elements, and making your audience go beyond listening to feel something, you can easily deliver an unforgettable speech on education.

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"The Purpose of Education"

Author:  King, Martin Luther, Jr. (Morehouse College)

Date:  January 1, 1947 to February 28, 1947

Location:  Atlanta, Ga.

Genre:  Published Article

Topic:  Martin Luther King, Jr. - Political and Social Views

Writing in the campus newspaper, the  Maroon Tiger , King argues that education has both a utilitarian and a moral function. 1  Citing the example of Georgia’s former governor Eugene Talmadge, he asserts that reasoning ability is not enough. He insists that character and moral development are necessary to give the critical intellect humane purposes. King, Sr., later recalled that his son told him, “Talmadge has a Phi Beta Kappa key, can you believe that? What did he use all that precious knowledge for? To accomplish what?” 2

As I engage in the so-called “bull sessions” around and about the school, I too often find that most college men have a misconception of the purpose of education. Most of the “brethren” think that education should equip them with the proper instruments of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses. Still others think that education should furnish them with noble ends rather than means to an end.

It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the ligitimate goals of his life.

Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one’s self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.

The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

The late Eugene Talmadge, in my opinion, possessed one of the better minds of Georgia, or even America. Moreover, he wore the Phi Beta Kappa key. By all measuring rods, Mr. Talmadge could think critically and intensively; yet he contends that I am an inferior being. Are those the types of men we call educated?

We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.

If we are not careful, our colleges will produce a group of close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts. Be careful, “brethren!” Be careful, teachers!

1.  In 1925, the  Maroon Tiger  succeeded the  Athenaeum  as the campus literary journal at Morehouse. In the first semester of the 1947–1948 academic year, it won a First Class Honor Rating from the Associated Collegiate Press at the University of Minnesota. The faculty adviser to the  Maroon Tiger  was King’s English professor, Gladstone Lewis Chandler. King’s “The Purpose of Education” was published with a companion piece, “English Majors All?” by a fellow student, William G. Pickens. Among the many prominent black academicians and journalists who served an apprenticeship on the  Maroon Tiger  staff were Lerone Bennett, Jr., editor of  Ebony ; Brailsford R. Brazeal, dean of Morehouse College; S. W. Garlington, city editor of New York’s  Amsterdam News ; Hugh Gloster, president of Morehouse College; Emory O. Jackson, editor of the  Birmingham World ; Robert E. Johnson, editor of  Jet ; King D. Reddick of the  New York Age ; Ira De A. Reid, chair of the Sociology Department at Atlanta University; and C. A. Scott, editor and general manager of the  Atlanta Daily World . See  The Morehouse Alumnus , July 1948, pp. 15–16; and Edward A. Jones,  A Candle in the Dark: A History of Morehouse College  (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1967), pp. 174, 260, 289–292.

2.  Martin Luther King, Sr., with Clayton Riley,  Daddy King: An Autobiography  (New York: William Morrow, 1980), p. 143. In an unpublished autobiographical statement, King, Sr., remembered a meeting between Governor Eugene Talmadge and a committee of blacks concerning the imposition of the death penalty on a young black man for making improper remarks to a white woman. King, Sr., reported that Talmadge “sent us away humiliated, frustrated, insulted, and without hope of redress” (“The Autobiography of Daddy King as Told to Edward A. Jones” [n.d.], p. 40; copy in CKFC). Six months before the publication of King’s article, Georgia’s race-baiting former governor Eugene Talmadge had declared in the midst of his campaign for a new term as governor that “the only issue in this race is White Supremacy.” On 12 November, the black General Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia designated his inauguration date, 9 January 1947, as a day of prayer. Talmadge died three weeks before his inauguration. See William Anderson,  The Wild Man from Sugar Creek: The Political Career of Eugene Talmadge  (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), pp. 226–237; Joseph L. Bernd, “White Supremacy and the Disfranchisement of Blacks in Georgia, 1946,”  Georgia Historical Quarterly  66 (Winter 1982): 492–501; Clarence M. Wagner,  Profiles of Black Georgia Baptists  (Atlanta: Bennett Brothers, 1980), p. 104; and Benjamin E. Mays,  Born to Rebel: An Autobiography  (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), pp. 221–223.

Source:   Maroon Tiger  (January-February 1947): 10.  

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• Speech on Education in English

Why is education important? How can an educated person change the world? Speech on education should aim to provide answers to the above questions. It should also provide insight into how education can change a person’s life. Education is one of the necessities required to survive in today’s world. It helps in giving a perspective to a person where he or she can think and provide solutions to different social issues. There are many ways to deliver a speech on education but the most important and effective one is that which allows the audience to think and question the various points discussed in the speech. If you want to get the answer to why education is important, read on to discover how to deliver an effective and engaging speech on education.

Here we have provided a long and short speech about education along with that we have also given 10 line pointers about the best speech on education in English.

Long Speech about Education

Good morning to everyone present here today. I feel honored and blessed to be given this opportunity to give a speech on education. I hope everyone learns something from this speech. 

Education has been with us for ages and it has transformed the world around us. It was because of educating ourselves, humans have invented technologies that have changed the world.

When it comes to an individual, education plays an important role throughout life. Getting proper education is necessary as it is the deciding factor for our status in society nowadays. Education is required to get a good high-paying job, to be successful, and even to start a family. Education also helps us by providing success that would eventually lead us to live a happy and luxurious life. Education helps in developing the personality of a person both in a physical and mental standard and helps in transforming a person’s living standard. It helps in promoting the feeling of the mental, social, and physical well-being of a person by providing a better living life. A good education is always constructive, a person who is educated well is respected by society and even has a role that would help in the development of society. Let us take an example of the teachers sitting here in the audience, their role of teaching and sharing knowledge with the students will help in making a future that will work for the betterment of the country. It is said that knowledge is the greatest weapon in the world and I believe it is true, education provides a lot of confidence by giving us vast knowledge in various fields. It helps in personal growth and the most important way to be successful in life. As we all know, the more knowledge we get, the more we grow and develop in life. Knowledge gives us recognition and respect in the world. There is a difference between the knowledge we learn in school and colleges and the knowledge required to live in a society. Being well educated does not only mean having fancy degrees from reputed colleges and a high-paying job but it also means being kind towards everyone around. Many people in social work in a multinational company but they lack the basic knowledge required to talk to people. Some people are arrogant and consider themselves above because of their education and jobs. Remember my friend, being educated is important but it is also very important to be kind to everyone around you and treat them with respect. The sole purpose of getting an education is to be a good citizen towards everyone and then being successful in personal and professional life. Everyone is incomplete without a good education as it helps us to make the right decisions in life. In this competitive world, everybody is fighting for survival, education could be considered as an advantage to be successful in life and it has become a necessity after food, shelter, and clothes. 

The next point I would like to highlight is the lack of financial education that is taught at school. In many schools and colleges, the only thing everyone is teaching the students is how to score well in exams by memorizing a few textbooks but sadly they are not teaching students the knowledge required to excel in life. Financial education is a very important part of life, it is required to survive in society. Concepts like how to save money, how to invest money in different assets such as gold, silver, and real estate are not being taught in educational institutions. Students must also learn the practical application of learning a subject. We often hear that many graduates are unemployed and the reason being that they do not have enough practical knowledge about the concepts that they learned in educational institutions. Students must learn this knowledge and excel in their careers. 

To conclude this speech, I want to say that education is the most important tool one can have to survive in this world and it is a necessity as it provides solutions to all the problems. If a person is educated, he or she will be aware of different concerns such as corruption, terrorism, and other social issues. It is the most important tool which provides inner and outer strength to a person. Treat everyone with respect, even if you have the most valuable degree or are working in a great company, and always have financial knowledge as it will help you to grow in society. Thank you. 

 A Short Speech about Education

Good morning to one and all present here. Today I have been given an opportunity to give a small speech on education. I hope everyone here learns something from it. 

Education could be defined as the process of gaining knowledge, skill, beliefs, and values that help in the growth and development of a person. Education is the most important asset, it is as important as food, shelter, and clothes. While the school and college education programs are relatively modern, the learning process has persisted for a long time. Humans have developed by learning themselves, and society must evolve. We can take the example of hunter-gatherers, they used to pass down their knowledge of hunting and harvesting food during different seasons. 

Today, education is the most important aspect of society as it helps in providing a job and starting a family. Educating helps in understanding the world in a better way. Let us take an example to understand that, a person who knows about corruption and other social issues will play an important role in fighting it rather than a person who is unaware of anything. Education provides an individual with opportunities to prove themselves in society and be successful in the future. Education also provides an employment opportunity and if a person is employed and is working, the poverty of the country will exponentially decrease which will help in the development of the country. 

In India, many educational institutes provide only theoretical knowledge that helps the student to get good grades in exams which will increase his or her employment opportunities but many educational institutes in India fail to teach students the financial and practical knowledge that is required to excel in the real world. Financial education is important as it helps a person to understand the concept of how the world really works. 

I would like to end this speech by saying education is very important as it helps in bringing economic progress and social change to the country. People who are educated will help in inventing and bringing new ideas, which will help in the development of the country. Thank you. 

10 Lines about the Speech on Education in English

Speech on education should provide an insight on education is important in this world.

Education could be considered as an asset that could help in surviving in the world and make an impact on society. 

If an education topic for speech is given it is very important that the definition of education is explained to the audience.

Education helps us in learning new things and develop a sense of innovation and creativity.

Education could be considered as the tool which will help in earning respect in society.

The Indian education system is divided into four stages of education such as preschool, primary, middle and secondary school. 

Education will help in providing knowledge, enhancing the capability of the reader to think logically on various subjects.

Education plays an important role in the development of the country as educated citizens will choose a leader who will work for the development of the country. 

If an education topic for speech is given try to explain to the audience why education is important and how it can impact the lives around you. 

Education helps in bringing equality in society and eradicating poverty.

Education is not a destination; it is a journey. It is a path paved with challenges and triumphs, with moments of frustration and epiphany. But with each step we take, with each page we turn, we become more than just ourselves. We become citizens of a global community, stewards of our planet, and the authors of our own destinies. So, go forth, students, and let your words paint a picture of a future where knowledge is accessible, minds are empowered, and the possibilities of education are endless. Remember, the pen is mightier than the sword, and in this case, the pen holds the power to unlock the potential of generations to come.

FAQs on Speech on Education in English

1. What is the importance of education?

Education is fundamental for individual and societal development. It equips individuals with the knowledge, skills, and values necessary to lead fulfilling lives and contribute meaningfully to their communities.

2. What are the benefits of education?

Here are some of the key benefits of education:

Personal growth: Education fosters intellectual, emotional, and social development. It helps individuals to understand themselves and the world around them, and to develop critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills.

Economic opportunities: Education is essential for securing good jobs and achieving financial security. It opens doors to a wider range of career options and increases earning potential.

Civic engagement: Education empowers individuals to be active and informed citizens. It teaches them about their rights and responsibilities, and how to participate in the democratic process.

Social well-being: Education can help to reduce poverty, inequality, and discrimination. It promotes tolerance, understanding, and cooperation between different groups of people.

3. What are the different types of education?

There are many different types of education, each with its own focus and goals. Some of the most common types include:

Formal education: This type of education takes place in schools, colleges, and universities. It is typically structured and follows a set curriculum.

Informal education: This type of education takes place outside of formal institutions. It can include learning from experience, from mentors, or from everyday life.

Vocational education: This type of education is designed to prepare individuals for specific jobs or careers. It often includes hands-on training and experience.

Adult education: This type of education is for adults who want to continue learning after they have left school. It can be used to improve job skills, learn new hobbies, or simply for personal enrichment.

4. What are some tips for writing a speech on education?

Choose a clear topic: What specific aspect of education do you want to focus on?

Do your research: Gather information from a variety of sources to support your points.

Organize your thoughts: Use an outline to structure your speech and ensure that your ideas flow logically.

Write in a clear and concise style: Avoid using jargon or technical terms that your audience may not understand.

Practice your delivery: Speak slowly and clearly, and use gestures and facial expressions to make your speech more engaging.

5. How can I make my speech on education interesting and engaging?

Use personal stories and anecdotes to illustrate your points.

Incorporate humor and wit to keep your audience entertained.

Ask rhetorical questions to spark thought and discussion.

Use vivid language and imagery to paint a picture in your audience's mind.

Vary your vocal tone and pace to add emphasis and avoid monotony.

Connect with your audience on an emotional level by sharing your own passion for education.

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• Speech On Education

Speech on Education

Being educated is one of the most crucial things in every individual’s life. Education is not just accumulating information but gaining knowledge that would help you to think logically and make the right decisions at a time when they should be made. This article provides you with a gist of the importance of education and sample speeches on education that would guide you to write one on your own.

Table of Contents

Education – how important is it, 1-minute speech on education, 2-minute speech on education and its importance, faqs on education.

‘A little learning is a dangerous thing’. These words by Alexander Pope are so meaningful. Learning should always be complete. No matter what your line of interest might be, knowing just a tad will not help one in any way. The modern age is an age of specialisation. In every field, we need specialists to point us in the right direction. Here, you will learn a lot more about education and how to make a speech on education as appealing and interesting as possible.

According to Horace Mann, ‘A human being is not in any proper sense a human being till he is educated’. An educated individual always knows his manners and behaves gently in public as well as in private scenarios. Education does not just mean learning about all the different subjects and knowing everything up to date. An individual is said to be educated when they are able to apply all that they have learnt in their personal and professional lives effectively and in the best interest of everyone around. So try not to overload yourself with information but try to comprehend what you learn well and put it to great use.

Man has made remarkable progress in the field of science and technology. We have huge industrial units, and we manufacture ships, aeroplanes, trains and even rockets – all evidence of how far we have grown as an educated nation. However, it is not just scientific knowledge that gives manpower. There is spiritual knowledge and the knowledge about oneself, which is also equally important to make oneself a complete human being.

What is as vital as gaining knowledge is that the knowledge you possess should be used only for constructive purposes and for the welfare of one’s fellow human beings and in no way to harm anyone, no matter what. Never use knowledge to one’s advantage. For instance, there is this growing buzz to master the art of ethical hacking. Anything has a good and bad side. An individual who learns hacking can use it for right and wrong purposes. It is up to the individual to decide which side one wants to choose. I would say that even this choice that one has to make is part of one’s education. It shows one’s ability to think rationally and consciously before making a choice.

Education is not whole until the individual learns to respect oneself and others, and value every opinion. Nothing or no one is as attractive and enduring as a clever, focused and compassionate individual. In this world where people use education or educated people to their own advantage, let us try to be unassuming individuals who would put our education to good use, for the welfare of oneself and the whole humankind.

How do you start a speech on education?

Generally, a speech on any topic can be started with a quote related to the topic or with the history or an introduction to the topic. When you draft a speech on education, you can do the same. Starting with a story or even a joke would help get the attention of your audience.

How is education important in our life?

Education has always been mandatory for the intellectual survival of human beings. It is more so in the current scenario where the competition is huge in every field. An individual who does not choose to get himself/herself educated is definitely losing on what is most important to live his/her life happily and peacefully.

How can education change your life?

‘Knowledge is power’, so goes the saying. That is exactly what education gives you. Being educated will give you access to the intellectual world. Be it self learning or supervised learning, you would possess a lot more than you think you do. Every experience would teach you something that would change your life forever.

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What this handout is about

This handout will help you create an effective speech by establishing the purpose of your speech and making it easily understandable. It will also help you to analyze your audience and keep the audience interested.

What’s different about a speech?

Writing for public speaking isn’t so different from other types of writing. You want to engage your audience’s attention, convey your ideas in a logical manner and use reliable evidence to support your point. But the conditions for public speaking favor some writing qualities over others. When you write a speech, your audience is made up of listeners. They have only one chance to comprehend the information as you read it, so your speech must be well-organized and easily understood. In addition, the content of the speech and your delivery must fit the audience.

What’s your purpose?

People have gathered to hear you speak on a specific issue, and they expect to get something out of it immediately. And you, the speaker, hope to have an immediate effect on your audience. The purpose of your speech is to get the response you want. Most speeches invite audiences to react in one of three ways: feeling, thinking, or acting. For example, eulogies encourage emotional response from the audience; college lectures stimulate listeners to think about a topic from a different perspective; protest speeches in the Pit recommend actions the audience can take.

As you establish your purpose, ask yourself these questions:

• What do you want the audience to learn or do?
• If you are making an argument, why do you want them to agree with you?
• If they already agree with you, why are you giving the speech?
• How can your audience benefit from what you have to say?

Audience analysis

If your purpose is to get a certain response from your audience, you must consider who they are (or who you’re pretending they are). If you can identify ways to connect with your listeners, you can make your speech interesting and useful.

As you think of ways to appeal to your audience, ask yourself:

• What do they have in common? Age? Interests? Ethnicity? Gender?
• Do they know as much about your topic as you, or will you be introducing them to new ideas?
• Why are these people listening to you? What are they looking for?
• What level of detail will be effective for them?
• What tone will be most effective in conveying your message?
• What might offend or alienate them?

For more help, see our handout on audience .

Creating an effective introduction

Get their attention, otherwise known as “the hook”.

Think about how you can relate to these listeners and get them to relate to you or your topic. Appealing to your audience on a personal level captures their attention and concern, increasing the chances of a successful speech. Speakers often begin with anecdotes to hook their audience’s attention. Other methods include presenting shocking statistics, asking direct questions of the audience, or enlisting audience participation.

Establish context and/or motive

Explain why your topic is important. Consider your purpose and how you came to speak to this audience. You may also want to connect the material to related or larger issues as well, especially those that may be important to your audience.

Get to the point

Tell your listeners your thesis right away and explain how you will support it. Don’t spend as much time developing your introductory paragraph and leading up to the thesis statement as you would in a research paper for a course. Moving from the intro into the body of the speech quickly will help keep your audience interested. You may be tempted to create suspense by keeping the audience guessing about your thesis until the end, then springing the implications of your discussion on them. But if you do so, they will most likely become bored or confused.

For more help, see our handout on introductions .

Making your speech easy to understand

Repeat crucial points and buzzwords.

Especially in longer speeches, it’s a good idea to keep reminding your audience of the main points you’ve made. For example, you could link an earlier main point or key term as you transition into or wrap up a new point. You could also address the relationship between earlier points and new points through discussion within a body paragraph. Using buzzwords or key terms throughout your paper is also a good idea. If your thesis says you’re going to expose unethical behavior of medical insurance companies, make sure the use of “ethics” recurs instead of switching to “immoral” or simply “wrong.” Repetition of key terms makes it easier for your audience to take in and connect information.

Incorporate previews and summaries into the speech

For example:

“I’m here today to talk to you about three issues that threaten our educational system: First, … Second, … Third,”

“I’ve talked to you today about such and such.”

These kinds of verbal cues permit the people in the audience to put together the pieces of your speech without thinking too hard, so they can spend more time paying attention to its content.

Use especially strong transitions

This will help your listeners see how new information relates to what they’ve heard so far. If you set up a counterargument in one paragraph so you can demolish it in the next, begin the demolition by saying something like,

“But this argument makes no sense when you consider that . . . .”

If you’re providing additional information to support your main point, you could say,

“Another fact that supports my main point is . . . .”

Helping your audience listen

Rely on shorter, simpler sentence structures.

Don’t get too complicated when you’re asking an audience to remember everything you say. Avoid using too many subordinate clauses, and place subjects and verbs close together.

Too complicated:

The product, which was invented in 1908 by Orville Z. McGillicuddy in Des Moines, Iowa, and which was on store shelves approximately one year later, still sells well.

Easier to understand:

Orville Z. McGillicuddy invented the product in 1908 and introduced it into stores shortly afterward. Almost a century later, the product still sells well.

Limit pronoun use

Listeners may have a hard time remembering or figuring out what “it,” “they,” or “this” refers to. Be specific by using a key noun instead of unclear pronouns.

Pronoun problem:

The U.S. government has failed to protect us from the scourge of so-called reality television, which exploits sex, violence, and petty conflict, and calls it human nature. This cannot continue.

Why the last sentence is unclear: “This” what? The government’s failure? Reality TV? Human nature?

More specific:

The U.S. government has failed to protect us from the scourge of so-called reality television, which exploits sex, violence, and petty conflict, and calls it human nature. This failure cannot continue.

Keeping audience interest

Incorporate the rhetorical strategies of ethos, pathos, and logos.

When arguing a point, using ethos, pathos, and logos can help convince your audience to believe you and make your argument stronger. Ethos refers to an appeal to your audience by establishing your authenticity and trustworthiness as a speaker. If you employ pathos, you appeal to your audience’s emotions. Using logos includes the support of hard facts, statistics, and logical argumentation. The most effective speeches usually present a combination these rhetorical strategies.

Use statistics and quotations sparingly

Include only the most striking factual material to support your perspective, things that would likely stick in the listeners’ minds long after you’ve finished speaking. Otherwise, you run the risk of overwhelming your listeners with too much information.

Watch your tone

Be careful not to talk over the heads of your audience. On the other hand, don’t be condescending either. And as for grabbing their attention, yelling, cursing, using inappropriate humor, or brandishing a potentially offensive prop (say, autopsy photos) will only make the audience tune you out.

Creating an effective conclusion

Restate your main points, but don’t repeat them.

“I asked earlier why we should care about the rain forest. Now I hope it’s clear that . . .” “Remember how Mrs. Smith couldn’t afford her prescriptions? Under our plan, . . .”

Call to action

Speeches often close with an appeal to the audience to take action based on their new knowledge or understanding. If you do this, be sure the action you recommend is specific and realistic. For example, although your audience may not be able to affect foreign policy directly, they can vote or work for candidates whose foreign policy views they support. Relating the purpose of your speech to their lives not only creates a connection with your audience, but also reiterates the importance of your topic to them in particular or “the bigger picture.”

Practicing for effective presentation

Once you’ve completed a draft, read your speech to a friend or in front of a mirror. When you’ve finished reading, ask the following questions:

• Which pieces of information are clearest?
• Where did I connect with the audience?
• Where might listeners lose the thread of my argument or description?
• Where might listeners become bored?
• Where did I have trouble speaking clearly and/or emphatically?
• Did I stay within my time limit?

Other resources

• Toastmasters International is a nonprofit group that provides communication and leadership training.
• Allyn & Bacon Publishing’s Essence of Public Speaking Series is an extensive treatment of speech writing and delivery, including books on using humor, motivating your audience, word choice and presentation.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Boone, Louis E., David L. Kurtz, and Judy R. Block. 1997. Contemporary Business Communication . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Ehrlich, Henry. 1994. Writing Effective Speeches . New York: Marlowe.

Lamb, Sandra E. 1998. How to Write It: A Complete Guide to Everything You’ll Ever Write . Berkeley: Ten Speed Press.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Aims of Education Address 2002—Andrew Abbott

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• Aims of Education Overview and Archive

“Welcome to the University of Chicago.” Of the dozens of persons who will say that to you during this orientation week, I am the only one who will keep on talking for another sixty minutes after saying it. I imagine that you have heard few such orations before and that will you will hear few hereafter. A full-length, formal talk on a set topic is a rather nineteenth-century kind of thing to do. Even at the University of Chicago, this is the only such oration you will get. You will be glad to know that when you graduate four years hence, the speaker is asked to speak for exactly thirteen and one-half minutes.

It’s no easier for me. This is only the third or fourth such oration that I’ve given in my life. And you’re not an easy audience. You’re preoccupied with new roommates, placement tests, and “Chicago Life meetings” numbers one through five. Your minds are weary with the endless junk we’ve given you to read. Your bodies are aglow with adrenaline, serotonin, and the various endorphins, not to mention the more urgent excitements of estrogen and testosterone. And you are in a very diverse set of moods. Some of you are eager to hear what I have to say. Some of you can’t wait till it’s over. Some of you are watching the noisy dude whisper loudly two rows in front of you. Some of you are sensing the aspiration and grandeur expressed by this Gothic building. Some of you are thinking that I, the speaker, have a very big nose. In short, you’re a diverse lot and I’m a beginning orator and we have an hour together to think about the aims of education. Let’s do it.

It is important that you develop some personal aims of education because there is quite a strong case to be made that, given who you are and where you are, there is no particular necessity for you to study anything for the next four years. There are three basic reasons for that. They are reasons that I think a growing number of students at elite American colleges suspect, at least from what I am seeing in my own classroom. So let’s be frank about them.

First, as far as worldly success is concerned, you’ve already got it. That your future income will be huge and your future work prestigious and honored can easily be predicted from the simple fact that you got into an elite college. About 2.8 million people graduate from high school every year; 1.8 million of them start college; forty to sixty thousand of them will go to elite colleges and universities like this one. So, basically, you and your peers at similar places represent the top two percent of an eighteen-year- old cohort. Obviously you’re going to do very well indeed.

Now of course the real work predicting your future success is done not by prestige of college but by other factors—mainly the things for which you were admitted to that selective college in the first place—personal talents, past work, and parental resources both social and intellectual. The estimate of your future worldly success that we can make on the basis of knowing those things already will not be improved much by knowing what you actually do here. Moreover, admission itself sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy; since you got in here, people in the future will assume you’re good, no matter what you do or how you do while you are here. And of course we know, pretty certainly, that having gotten in you will graduate. Colleges compete in part by having high retention rates, and so it is in the college’s very strong interest to make sure you graduate, whether you learn anything or not.

All of this tells me that nearly everyone in this room will end up, twenty years from now, in the top quarter of the American income distribution. I have surveyed those who graduated from this school in 1975— a group considerably less privileged by ancestry than yourselves—and can tell you that their median personal income is about five times the national median, and their median household income is at about the ninety-third percentile of the nation’s income distribution. That’s where you are headed. And let me tell you that in the eyes of the students starting college this fall at Chicago State University five miles south of here or in the eyes of the adults going to endless night classes at DePaul University downtown, that expectation is an expectation of extravagant success. As far as the nationwide success game is concerned, there’s no reason for you to study here. The game is already over. You’ve already won.

Now many of you, of course, don’t give a damn about those other students—young people and adults struggling to move up a few notches in the middle class. You’re interested in living in Winnetka rather than Downers Grove. You may want to summer in the Hamptons rather than on Fire Island. Your idea of a good vacation may be a hotel in Paris and visits to the Musée d’Orsay instead of a resort in Orlando and visits to Disney World. “Surely,” you tell me, “my studies at the University of Chicago will have a big impact on those kinds of things. Surely they will determine whether I’m in the ninety-fourth or the ninety-ninth percentile of income. Getting a fine higher education may not affect my gross chances of worldly success, but surely it affects my detailed ones.”

On the contrary. I have to tell you that there’s no real evidence in favor of this second reason to get an education, and there’s a good deal of evidence against it. In the first place, all serious studies show that while college-level factors like prestige and selectivity have some independent effect on people’s later incomes, most variation in income happens within colleges—that is, between the graduates of a given college. That internal variation is produced by individual factors like talent, resources, performance, and major rather than by college-level factors like prestige and selectivity. But even those individual factors do not in fact determine much about your future income. For example, the best nationwide figures I have seen suggest that a one-full-point increment in college GPA—from 2.8 to 3.8, for example—is worth about an additional nine percent in income four years after college. Now that’s not much result for a huge amount of work.

I’m sorry to bore you with this income story but I want to kill the idea that hard work in higher education produces worldly success. The one college experience variable that actually does have some connection with later worldly success is major. But in the big nationwide studies, most of that effect comes through the connection between major and occupation. For the real variable driving worldly success—as all of you know perfectly well—the one that shapes income more than anything else, is occupation. Occupation and major are fairly strongly associated within the broad categories of nationwide data. But within the narrow range of occupation and achievement that we have at the University of Chicago, there is really no strong relation between what you study and your occupation in later life.

Here is some data on a 10 percent random sample of Chicago alumni from the last twenty years. Take the mathematics concentrators: 20 percent software development and support, 14 percent college professors, 10 percent in banking and finance, 7 percent secondary or elementary teachers, and seven percent in nonacademic research; the rest are scattered. Physics concentrators are similar, but more of them are engineers and fewer are bankers. Biology produces 40 percent doctors, 16 percent professors, 11 percent nonacademic researchers, and the other third scattered. Obviously, there are a number of seeming pathways here. All the science concentrations lead to professorships and nonacademic research. And biology and chemistry often lead to medicine. But there are also many diversions from those pathways. We’ve got a biology concentrator who is now a writer, another who is now a musician. We’ve got two mathematicians who are now lawyers, and a physics concentrator who is now a psychotherapist.

Take the social sciences. Economics concentrators—this is today identified as overwhelmingly the most careerist major—are 24 percent in banking and finance, 15 percent in business consulting, 14 percent lawyers, 10 percent in business administration or sales, 7 percent in computers, and the other 30 percent scattered. Historians are often lawyers (24 percent) and secondary teachers (15 percent), but the other 60 percent are all over the map. Political scientists have 24 percent lawyers, 7 percent each professors and government administrators, and perhaps 20 percent in the various business occupations; the rest are scattered. Psychologists, surprisingly, are also about 20 percent in the various business occupations, 11 percent lawyers, and 10 percent professors; the rest are scattered. Thus in the social sciences, the news is that there are lots of ways to go to law school and to get into business. And there are the usual unusuals: the sociology major who is an actuary, the two psychologists in government administration, the political science concentrator now in computers.

As for the humanities, the English majors have scattered to the four winds: 11 percent of them to elementary and secondary teaching, 10 percent to various business occupations, 9 percent to communications, 9 percent to lawyering, 5 percent to advertising; the rest scattered. Of the philosophers, 30 percent are lawyers and 18 percent are software people. I defy anybody to make sense out of that. Again, the connections include some obvious things and some non-obvious things. We have two English majors who are now artists and one who is an architect. We have a philosophy major who is a farmer and two who are doctors.

So overall there is some slight evidence of tracks towards particular occupations from particular concentrations, but really the news is the reverse. The glass is not so much one-third full as two-thirds empty. Remember that only 40 percent of the biology majors became doctors. And, more important, remember that our alumni’s experience shows very plainly that no pathway from major to occupation is ruled out.

The looseness of the connection between curriculum and career is even more obvious when seen the other way, from the point of view of the occupations. Our largest group was lawyers—12 percent of my survey respondents. Of the lawyers, 16 percent came from economics; 15 percent from political science; 12 percent from history; 7 percent each from philosophy, English, and psychology; and 5 percent from public policy. There was at least one lawyer from each of the following: anthropology, art and design, art history, biology, chemistry, East Asian languages and civilizations, fundamentals, general studies in the humanities, geography, geophysical sciences, Germanic languages and literatures, mathematics, physics, religion and humanities, Romance languages and literatures, Russian and other Slavic languages and literatures, and sociology. You get the point. There is absolutely no concentration from which you cannot become a lawyer.

What about doctors, 9 percent of the sample? These are much more concentrated, because of the prerequisites of medical schools. Sixty percent of the doctors came from the biology concentration and 17 percent from chemistry. However, there was at least one doctor each from anthropology, classics, English (four of them, in fact), history and philosophy of science, ideas and methods, mathematics, music, philosophy, psychology, public policy, and Romance languages and literatures. While the main pathway to medicine is obvious, it is by no means the only way in.

The other large group among alumni is in banking and finance (also about 10 percent). Of these, 40 percent came from economics, 8 percent from psychology, 7 percent from political science, 7 percent from English, 6 percent from mathematics, 5 percent from public policy, and 4 percent from history. Again there is a dominant route in, but there are many routes beside the dominant one.

I am sorry to list all these things for you, but I want to eradicate in your minds the notion that there is much of a connection between your college curriculum and your eventual career. There is, to be sure, what social scientists are fond of calling an elective affinity; there are concentrations whose graduates are slightly more likely to end up in certain careers than others. But there are no concentration/career connections that are ruled out, and there are no obligatory tracks of any kind.

So the second basic reason for working hard in some particular form of study is wrong as well, at least in this college. With the exception of those planning to become professors in the natural sciences, there is absolutely no career that is ruled out for any undergraduate major at the University of Chicago. What you do here does not determine your occupation in any way. You are free to make whatever worldly or otherworldly occupational choice you want once you leave, and you do not sacrifice any possibilities because you majored in something that seems irrelevant to that choice.

As far as performance in college is concerned, there is not, as I said, any national evidence that level of performance in college has more than a minor effect on later things like income. And in my alumni data, there is absolutely no correlation whatever between GPA at the University of Chicago and current income. Get it straight. Whether you end up on Fire Island or in the Hamptons depends largely on things that are unrelated to what you do as an undergraduate at Chicago.

I hope then to have disposed of the notion that what you do here or how well you do it has any connection with your worldly success either in general or in detail. The general level of that worldly success is already guaranteed by your admission here and by the factors that made it happen. The detailed level of your worldly success depends largely on occupational choices that are unrelated to what or how you do here.

Now the third reason for getting a college education is that it will give you foundational cognitive skills for later life. Since this is the argument I have myself made most strongly in the past, I shall take special care to demolish it.

The argument is that college teaches you not so much particular subject matters as it does general skills that can be applied throughout your future life—in graduate training, at work, and in recreation. That the actual material learned in college doesn’t matter much is well known. Everyone over thirty knows that, as far as content is concerned, you forget the vast majority of what you learned in college in five years or so. But, so the argument goes, the skills endure. They may be difficult to measure and their effect hard to demonstrate. But they are the core of what you take from college.

Now what people have in mind here in the first instance are simple verbal and quantitative skills: things like advanced reading and speaking abilities that will help you deal with a knowledge economy, and quantitative training that will enable you to make reasonable financial choices and that will prove useful in area after area of professional endeavor. Beyond these lie more advanced skills: critical reading ability to see through the lies of newspapers and stock prospectuses, analytic ability to formulate complex programs of action at work, writing ability to make your ideas clear to your peers, independence of mind to free you from others’ views, and capacity for lifelong learning to enable you to deal with the changing needs of work and enjoyment over the years.

There is much evidence that our own alumni, alumni of equivalent schools, and national alumni samples all believe deeply that such general skills constitute the crucial learning in their college experience. Alumni always note the loss of detailed knowledge from college, while they always emphasize their retention of general skills that they use in all walks of life.

But the evidence that college learning per se actually produced these skills is pretty flimsy. While we do know that people acquire these skills over the four years they are in college, we are not at all clear that it is the experience of college instruction that produces them. First, the kinds of young people who go on to college, and certainly to elite colleges like this one, are quite different from those who do not. If in our analyses we do not have perfect statistical control for all those differences, college may appear to have effects that in fact really originate in the differences between those who go to college and those who don’t.

To this selection bias effect (as it is called), we can add the equally difficult problem of unmeasured variables. Changes that we might attribute to college instruction could actually derive from other things. College students are likely to have more challenging jobs, for example, than students who don’t go to college. They spend more time hanging out with smart people. They live in an environment where cognitive skills are explicitly valued. The differences of skill could be produced by these things rather than by the actual educational experience of the college classroom. Moreover, since many cognitive skills cannot be shown to differ seriously between those who have experienced college and those who have not, much of the skill increase could come from simple maturation. You could get more skilled just because you’ve lived a few more years.

Our belief that college education has cognitive importance rests pretty completely on our belief that we can statistically solve these problems of selection bias and unmeasured variables, because the only nonstatistical way of handling them is controlled experiment. And no one has ever taken a thousand bright, ambitious young people like yourselves and sent them not to college but instead to some other, equally challenging, intellectual environment that did not involve classroom instruction, courses, curricula, and so on. Suppose you could spend the next four years going through a structured rotation of working internships in businesses, not-for-profits, and government agencies, where you would not be instructed in classrooms but would simply be left to pick up skills the same way everybody else there does: by asking friends and coworkers what to do, by reading a manual here and there, or by going to some organizationally sponsored classes on particular necessary techniques. You might still live in dormitories of some type. You might still have an extracurricular life. But there would be no classroom instruction. Now I submit to you that in all but a few areas—the hard sciences and perhaps engineering—you would be every bit as ready for law school or business school or management consultancy or social work training as you will be after your four years in classrooms here.

That this is likely to be true seems pretty clear from the statistical evidence that we do have about the net effects of college study. Let me summarize it as follows. First, there is no consistent evidence for a substantial net effect (say a 20 percent or more positive effect) of college instruction on oral communication skills, written communication skills, general reflective judgment, or intellectual flexibility, although there is moderate evidence for some kind of minor effect in all these areas. Second, there does seem to be consistent evidence that college instruction has a medium-sized effect (a difference of about 10 to 15 percentage points) on general verbal skills and general quantitative skills. But this seems to be a matter of “use it or lose it” rather than of learning new skills. College simply makes you keep using the skills you learned in high school, whereas many forms of employment don’t. So people who go to college maintain their skills, while those who do not go to college regress. Finally, college does seem to have a substantial net effect in the area of critical thinking. However, the research on that topic has often not controlled for age, which makes it difficult to separate out the effect of college attendance from that of sheer maturation.

Now these findings are not all from elite colleges but from various samples at various levels throughout higher education. But we can still infer from them that there is not much evidence for a large net effect of college on cognitive functioning. That boils down to saying that you were smart people when you got in here and you’re going to be smart people when you get out, as long as you use that intelligence for something— it doesn’t really matter what—while you are here.

All of these statistically observed effects are effects of college versus not attending college, which means effects of college versus low-level, unchallenging employment or even unemployment. There is, as I noted earlier, no explicit comparison whatever of college with some other intellectually challenging activity. Implicitly, of course, we have experiments going on about this all the time. Data on the forty or so elite colleges in the United States (the so-called COFHE schools) tell us that there is wide variation between those colleges in the amount of time typically devoted to studying. There are places like Brown where it is possible to be a fulltime newspaper writer for one’s entire undergraduate career—treating class work as a more or less irrelevant aside—and there are places like the University of Chicago where it is not possible to do that. And, of course, within a single school some will work extremely hard on studies while others may put equally huge amounts of intellectual effort into other things like orchestra or creative writing or comedy or whatever. But nobody has yet measured those alternative intellectual endeavors in a way that could test their net effect on cognitive development as opposed to that of classroom- related work. Nor has anybody tested the probably erroneous prediction that students at colleges where large amounts of class- and homework are done actually do better later on in some worldly sense or even in measures of cognitive achievement.

So the first pieces of evidence against the argument that “college education will teach you general skills that are centrally important in your later life” are (1) it isn’t really evident that these skills arrive independent of natural maturation; (2) if they do it is not clear that college education per se produces them; and (3) there is no evidence that there are not other kinds of intellectual challenges that would produce the same skills.

Now the second broad class of evidence on this “cognitive skills” argument has to do with whether these skills actually are of central importance in later life. You probably already suspect that you will learn most of what you need to know to be a lawyer, doctor, or businessperson in the professional schools for those occupations, not in college. And those of you who become doctors will find out soon enough that biochemistry and other such elaborate scientific prerequisites are of very little interest or use to practicing physicians. Indeed, it was not until well into the twentieth century that medical schools universally required heavy-science B.A.s of their matriculants. Moreover, elsewhere in the world, medicine, law, and business are quite commonly undergraduate, not graduate, degrees. So there is quite a variety of suggestive evidence implying that college-based skills are not crucial to later professional life, the opinion of alumni notwithstanding.

But let us push further. Take the standard list of undergraduate skills and run them by the occupations most of you are headed for, and let’s see whether the professions really employ those skills. Recall that the skills concerned are critical thinking, analytic reasoning, lifetime learning, independence of thought, and skill at writing; these are the big five that showed up in my alumni data, that were also dominant in the equivalent COFHE data, and that feature prominently in national studies—not to mention in college viewbooks. Are these things in fact necessary in law, medicine, business, and—let’s get to the real dirt—academics?

Lawyers. The real activity of elite lawyers is to find business, to make contacts, to lead legal teams, and to oversee young associates. The young associates need to know how to write and to have analytic skills. But too much critical thinking will get them in trouble, and independence is likewise problematic. As for nonelite lawyers, the vast majority of what they do is conveyancing, divorces, wills, companies, and the occasional personal injury case—virtually all of which they learn on the job after law school, taught in many cases by their clerical staff. That the tactics of great litigators are not learned in the classroom any one of those litigators can tell you; a background in drama is more useful than one in law. And having a deep and critical command of law itself is not useful to anybody but law professors and perhaps a few judges. So it is hard to make a case that the big five cognitive skills matter anywhere near as much for lawyers as do skills for getting along with people, for working in coordinated groups, and for clarifying and simplifying problems and selling those clear simplifications to various audiences.

In business, it is more or less the same. Those of you who go into business will never have to write well in the sense that I or some other professor uses the term. You will have to reduce things to bullets well; you too will be in the business of simplification and clarification. And you will have to work well with others and indeed will need to shelve a large part of your independence. You will have to put your critical thinking under very strict control, as Bob Jackall has so brilliantly shown. General analytic skills will be very important to you, but, again as Jackall and other students of management have shown, the crucial analytic skills for business managers lie mainly in interpreting people and in decoding the kaleidoscopically biased types of information that flow through large organizations. These are not things we teach you a damn thing about in college. Our texts are not written by people who are trying to deceive you into doing what they want.

What about medicine? The vast majority of medical work, like legal work, is in fact routine—everyday application of a standard repertoire. More than business people and lawyers, however, doctors do have to engage in lifelong learning. Senior lawyers can leave new law to the associates under them, but doctors have to keep up. Like businessmen, however, they have no need to write, unless they are academic physicians. Nor is really complex analytical thinking often necessary. The medical division of labor handles that need by concentrating those skills in a few places and referring perplexing patients to them. By contrast, critical listening skills—those are essential. Ability to understand what another person is trying to tell you is a foundational skill for a working physician. But we don’t give any formal instruction in it at all (and indeed there is little enough formal instruction in it in medical school).

Finally, what about professors? Do they need these skills? Well, by now you’ve probably seen that what’s really going on is that the list of “major cognitive skills” everyone talks about is in fact the stock in trade of elite academics themselves. (I should of course say “ourselves.”) Critique is rewarded, analytic skills prized, writing necessary, independence and self-learning essential. To a considerable extent it is indeed true that the famous skill list is really the academics’ list. Now I could make a case against the centrality of these values even in academia; most college professors work at nonelite universities with heavy teaching loads of unmotivated students and find little enough use for those skills. But even without this demonstration, it remains true that most of you will not in future occupational life need the specific kinds of cognitive skills that are emphasized in higher education. The most obvious example is writing. We at the University of Chicago will obsess about good writing. But the blunt fact is that most of you will do very little writing over the rest of your lives; the major reports and legal opinions and company prospectuses and so on that you do will all be produced by committee and will be designed to tell an audience what it wants to hear or what it will find persuasive, not what is analytically correct.

So we have good reason to doubt not only the first part of the statement “College education will teach you general cognitive skills that are centrally important in your later life,” but also the second. College instruction cannot be proved to be the source of the skills thought to be important, and, moreover, they probably aren’t that important.

Let me, finally, dispose of yet another variant of the cognitive argument for college education—the notion that there is a particular body of material that constitutes cultural literacy and that it is the duty of liberal education to teach you some large fraction of that material. I call this the lingua franca argument, for the canon so taught is meant to be a kind of lingua franca between “educated” people no matter what they currently do. The lingua franca argument goes back to the great elite institutions of Europe—nineteenth-century Oxford and Cambridge, the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and similar institutions throughout the continent. As social elites passed through these places, they learned huge quantities of Greek and Latin prose and poetry by heart. Later in life, they quoted these phrases to each other in parliamentary speeches and casual club conversations and so on. The quotes functioned as a kind of secret code that labelled elites and also made a useful common cultural vocabulary. One didn’t have to puzzle out anger abstractly. One could rather talk about Achilles sulking in his tent. Indeed, I can remember quite a few people envisioning the Vietnam War as America’s equivalent of the Athenian expedition to Sicily where, in Thucydides’ immortal sentences,

κατα παντα γαρ παντως νικηϟεντες και ουδεν ολιγον ες ουδεν κακοπαϟησαντες πανωλεϟρια δν το λεγομενον και πεζος και νηες και ουδεν οτι ουκ απωλετο, και ολιγοι απο πολλων επ’ οικου απενοστσαν. ταυτα μεν τα περι Σικελιαν γενομενα. (Thucydides 7.87.6)

Yes, that’s right. It doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know Greek. A canon works only if everybody who is supposed to have it agrees on what it is. A hundred years ago, half of you would have known what I was saying. (Maybe I would, too.) But the situation of our current educational system is that since nobody in fact agrees on what the canon is—even in the broadest terms—the system definitionally does not have a canon. In fact, there is a common culture of examples and rhetorical figures in America today. But most of it comes from sports, entertainment, and current events. In short, there is not an academic or high cultural canon, and to the extent that there is a canon of another kind, professors aren’t especially expert in it.

Perhaps the one thing we can save from this wreck is what I shall call the gymnastics argument. This is the argument implicit in my discussion of replacing college with a rotation through large-scale internships, as well as in my noting that writing full time for a newspaper may be as intellectually challenging as doing work in classrooms. On the gymnastics argument, it doesn’t really matter what you do intellectually in the next four years as long as it is intellectually challenging. Any kind of strong intellectual exercise will develop or at least maintain your intellectual skills. Since it happens that the type of exercise most easily available is college instruction itself, you might as well take advantage of it and get your exercise there. It’s like going to the intellectual health club on the next block rather than bothering to drive downtown to the Chicago Intellectual Athletics Club.

The gymnastics argument was in fact at the heart of the reform of nineteenth-century Oxford and Cambridge. Nobody thought that learning Greek was going to directly help you rule India. But a person who could truly master Greek or vector calculus could be trusted to learn whatever was necessary to govern India, so they thought. Having once had the experience of extended and difficult study, such a person could master anything. At its extreme, this argument led to an absolute ignorance of the real issues at hand; many a British colonial administrator was far more comfortable with aorist middle subjunctives than with subaltern populations. But as a pure intellectual discipline it was a great idea. Unfortunately, as this example and my previous discussion of professions make clear, maybe later work is not mainly about intellectual matters at all, so maybe the intellectual gymnastics exercises are truly irrelevant.

Let me pull my argument together about what are not the aims of education before turning, in the time remaining, to the question of what those aims are. I have shown first that your general level of worldly success does not depend on your study here—indeed that success is already pretty much guaranteed. I have shown second that your detailed level of worldly success is a function of occupational choices that will come after your time here and that will be largely unrelated to it. I have shown third that there is no strong evidence that college instruction gives you cogni- tive skills not available elsewhere and fourth that the much-vaunted basic intellectual skills may not in fact be the most important skills either in professional school or professional life. Nor finally is there any reason to believe in a canon, since said canon is manifestly absent in actual American life. The sole thing I am willing to grant out of this whole discussion is that college instruction may be justifiable as a form of mental gymnastics. But lots of other things might serve that purpose just as well.

So the long and the short of it is that there is no instrumental reason to get an education, to study in your courses, or to pick a concentration and lose yourself in it. It won’t get you anything you won’t get anyway or get some other way. So forget everything you ever thought about all these instrumental reasons for getting an education.

The reason for getting an education here—or anywhere else—is that it is better to be educated than not to be. It is better in and of itself. Not because it gets you something. Not because it is a means to some other end. It is better because it is better. Note that this statement implies that the phrase “aims of education” is nonsensical; education is not a thing of which aims can be predicated. It has no aim other than itself.

There are two parts to this denial that education has aims. The first concerns the future. By saying that education does not have aims I mean that we should not want education now in order to get something later, whether that something is further education or something else entirely. The second argument concerns the present. By saying that education does not have aims I also mean that we should not want education in order to use it for something besides itself in the present.

Let me begin with the first of these. I have already shown at some length that if there are extrinsic aims of education, they do not lie in the future. Insofar as we can measure, education in the sense of college class instruction seems to have little to do with your future worldly success or even with your future cognitive functioning. But even setting aside my earlier social-scientific approach and thinking theoretically for a moment, the central problem with thinking that education has aims in the future is that the world and our knowledge of it and our ways of thinking about it will all change fundamentally by the time that future arrives. No matter what area of endeavor we consider, the facts concerning that area and the very theories and concepts by which we understand it change perpetually. Medicine, law, business, physics, architecture, farming, social work, you name it—its knowledge basis will have changed in important ways between your graduation from college and the time of your tenth reunion. Not only the facts and materials, but even the deep skills involved in these areas change with remarkable speed.

The situation becomes clearer when I state this change not in passive but in active terms. Changes in knowledge happen not just automatically, in some disembodied way, but because people envision them. Thus, people find new facts and materials because they look for them. They make new theories and methods because they want to replace older ones they now find unsatisfactory. But whoever we are—doctors or lawyers or farmers or accountants—we have to be able to envision these new ways of thinking about the world and of doing things in it if we are going to bring them about. So our education cannot consist of mastering disciplinary or professional material or even general skills. To the extent that you master and then reify those things—turn them into fixed, concrete rigidities— you will be unable to imagine the things that will replace them. No, to be able to transform and change and renew the ideas you work with you have to master something that enables you to see them from outside. That something is education.

This argument rejects the common idea that the aim of education is to give you the skills to survive the rapid changes in the first-level materials of knowledge. That is because the skills change, too. Writing was a far more important skill a century or even half a century ago than it is today. Now we could move up yet another step by talking about formal education at a third level—education in skills of envisioning how to change skills. But every time we move up a level in this way, we are thinking less and less about the future and more and more about a kind of constant of intellectuality—a set of mental habits that are enduring qualities of a mind. To the extent that we escape the trap that historical change presents for concepts of education, we escape it by moving to a less and less temporally directed concept of education. We move from thinking about the future to thinking about an enduring quality of the present. In short, even when we argue in this theoretical style, we do not find that education has aims in the future. Any serious concept of education seems inevitably to root itself in a state of being that endures—one based in the perpetual present of the self.

Note, incidentally, that in the process of denying aims of education in the future I have also disposed of the notion that education means learning a bunch of particular contents. I have already given a down-market rejection of that argument in its lingua franca guise. But the problem of the steady change of ideas (or viewed from the more active side, the problem of the perpetual need to imagine new ideas) demolishes the notion that the essence of education consists in mastering certain contents or materials. You are not little birdies sitting in the nest with your mouths open to receive half-digested worms of knowledge regurgitated by the faculty. Education is not about content. It is not even about skills. It is a habit or stance of mind. It is not something you have. It is something you are.

But now, having disposed (yet again) of the notion that education has aims in the future, I turn to my assertion that education does not have any aim in the present other than itself. I shall not argue this negatively, as I have argued so far, but rather positively, by showing that education in the sense I shall define it is a good in itself. If it is good in itself, we don’t have to care much about whether it has other uses. They are mere byproducts and hence of no substantive interest.

By education I am going to mean the ability to make more and more complex, more and more profound and extensive, the meanings that we attach to events and phenomena. When we are reading a text, we call this adducing of new meanings interpretation. When we are doing mathematics, we call this giving of meaning intuition and proof. When we are reading history, we call it a sense of historical context. When we are doing social science, we call it the sociological imagination. In all these areas, to be educated is to have the habit of finding many and diverse new meanings to attach to whatever events or phenomena we examine. We have lots of standard routines for doing this—interpretive paradigms, heuristic methods, theoretical schemes, investigative disciplines, and so on. But education is not these paradigms and methods and disciplines. Rather it is the instinctive habit of looking for new meanings, of questioning old ones, of perpetually playing with and fighting about the meanings we assign to events and texts and phenomena. We can teach you the paradigms and the methods, but we can’t teach you the habit of playing with them. That’s something you must find within yourself.

Now after all this buildup, that may seem like saying education is not much. “I can already do this,” you say. “Meanings,” you say, “I can give you ten meanings for your last paragraph. Not a problem. Moreover,” you say, “why should that be a good thing? Who gives a damn about all this new meaning? It’s just blowing smoke. Let’s cut to the chase.”

Well, in the first place, I’m not at all sure that most of you can play with meaning all that much. Because plenty of you are fidgeting in your seats wondering when the hell I’m going to finish. You are having trouble sitting still and thinking about one of the most important qualities of your life even for as long as fifty-five minutes. But if you’ve thought up all the new thoughts and imaginings you can generate about education in the forty minutes that have so far elapsed, maybe we had better dismiss the argument that you are—at least in this sense—fully educated already.

But the more important issue is the question of why attaching endless new meanings to things should be in itself a good thing? The answer is this: by attaching more meanings to things, by bringing more of experience under our current range of meaning and extending our range to embrace more things in more complex and abstract or sometimes ambiguous ways, we in effect enable ourselves to experience more of life in a given present, a given now. An educated person experiences more in a given period than does a noneducated person. This is not to say that there is something inherently bad or damaged about lives that lack education. An uneducated human life commands the same dignity as any other. But given the opportunity, you are a fool not to avail yourself of every means to extend your experience in the now. The quality of education is our central means for doing that.

“Bor-ing,” you say. “This argument is too abstract. It’s not about anything. What does he mean education is a way of having more experience in a given period?” Well, let’s talk about something that will get your attention. Sex. The argument I am making is essentially the following. Any animal can take off its clothes, rub and fondle a bit, arrange its sexual organs properly, and hump away till it’s done. But the experience of sex will literally be better, in the sense that it will seem to take much more time (and of course you can make it seem interesting much longer) if you break up the preliminaries into foreplay and relaxation, if you turn aside from the straight path a bit and graze elsewhere, if you make the thing a complex conversation of bodies referring to dozens of different imaginations in your brains, rather than just bashing away as any animal can do. That’s my argument. By increasing the density of meanings in an experience, you expand that experience. You make it more extensive and more enduring all within the same social and temporal space. Education is a way of expanding experience.

If you don’t like that example, consider looking at a painting in a museum. Yes, it’s easy enough to look at the painting and to come up with things to think about it. But how much richer they are when you know already the many different traditions of imagining the visual world, when you can understand the detailed references the painter made to those traditions, when your immediate knowledge of the painting’s social and cultural context makes you literally see dozens of things that aren’t there if you don’t know those contexts. It’s the same argument. The experience becomes “bigger” because you are educated. Not merely in the sense that you can look at the painting longer without being bored, but also in that within a single look you will see more. And note that education doesn’t lie simply in knowing the whole of the dead list of facts and contexts of who taught whom and which style was which, but rather in taking such facts as you do know and playing with them and the painting.

Now note that in arguing that “educated sex” is better sex or that educated museum-going is better museum-going, I’m not arguing that you should, as it were, miss the main point, either of the sex or of the painting. That is, because you have made the event more complex doesn’t mean you have to lose the overarching sense of the simpler version. But it is true that you can’t fill your brain endlessly—it has finite power. And so one of the crucial decisions you make about your education is how to balance breadth and depth. Because breadth too constitutes a way of expanding your experience. Complexifying is not the only way of making meaning.

Thus, I argue that education is good in itself because it expands the range of your experience, both temporally and spatially. Education means figuring out how to arrange the finite things you can know, their varying levels of abstraction and detail, their mix of skill and data, fact and theory, so as to maximize the potential array of meaning that you can experience in the now. Whatever your temporal and spatial present, education lets you live more within it, by bringing more meanings into play, by creating a dialogue of complexity and simplification, of distinction and analogy, that transforms your immediate world and reaches beyond it. To be sure, we are all bound to a reality that is local in a million ways—by language, location, race, gender, age, occupation, body type, religion, and so on. Just because you know a lot of abstract stuff doesn’t mean you can escape that locality. After all being located somewhere is, paradoxically, one of the universal human attributes, and there is a provinciality of abstraction that is just as inane as that of detail. But in the mind of a thoughtful person, education is a habit that expands experience so as to overcome that provinciality by increasing ties between your locality and other human meanings. Sometimes abstraction is the mechanism for this, sometimes identification, sometimes grand simplification, sometimes the link goes through the tiniest of similar factual details, such as a similar eye color or a shared hometown.

Bear in mind too that this localism, this provinciality, is not only in space—geographical and social—but also in time. All of you live in a local temporality—one in which the future is your twenties and mid-life is light-years away. To you I am a fixed object who doesn’t live in a now, a “professor,” who was and is and always will be. But I too live a contingent life, in which things might be radically different in a very short time. To me, you are the fixed ones, who will wander probabilistically through the chances of life as I did, with just as varied results. But just as education enables overcoming impoverished localism in terms of social and cultural space, so also it means overcoming this mutual and provincial illusion of temporal fixedness so that together we can simultaneously experience the contingencies of both mid-life and youth.

As teachers, we try to entice you into this habit of education by a variety of exercises, just as a Zen monk tries to get a novice to achieve enlightenment by giving him a koan to meditate on. Note that the Zen koan is not enlightenment but rather is a means to enlightenment. So too there is, as I have said, nothing special about the exercises we teach— analytic reasoning, good writing, critical thinking, and so on. All the stuff of the core. They are exercises we give you hoping that they will somehow help you find the flash of enlightenment that is education. In that sense, the phrase “aims of education” is exactly backward. Education doesn’t have aims. It is the aim of other things.

This “education,” this flash of enlightenment, is the emergence of the habit of looking for new meanings, of seeking out new connections, of investing experience with complexity or extension that makes it richer and longer, even though it remains anchored in some local bit of both social space and social time. Everything else we teach is an exercise to achieve that.

At the same time, one should not despise these exercises. Just because I have argued that the materials and skills we try to teach in class are not themselves the thing that is education does not mean one can easily find education without them. Indeed, to invoke another, more famous, metaphor, you can think of the curriculum as the shadows cast on a wall by the light of education itself as it shines over, under, around, and through the myriad phases of our experience. It is a mistake to be sure to take these shadows for the reality, but they are something that helps us find or grasp or intuit that reality. The false notions that there is a fixed curriculum, that there is a list of things that an educated person ought to know, and that the shadow-exercises on the wall themselves are the content of education— these false notions all come from taking too seriously what was originally a wise recognition—the recognition that the shadows do in fact provide a starting point in our attempt to fully envision reality.

But note that in this metaphor it is not just the shadows on the wall that are not education. Knowing reality isn’t education either. Education is the light, the shining thing that assigns meanings. If you have it, all the rest—the core skills and the lingua franca and the basic materials, all those shadows on the wall—suddenly becomes obvious. That is why so many happy alumni who found the spark of education mistake in retrospect the exercises for the reality. Once the spark is found it makes the pathway to it seem unproblematic, self-evident. For education is an invisible creativity that radiates from within. It is not something you have. It is something you are.

In summary, from a practical point of view there is no evidence that undertaking the particular intellectual exercises we set for you here at college has any exclusive connection with your worldly success or your cognitive development. Nor is there really an effective theoretical argument for aims of education going forward into the future. The reality is that education is a present quality of the self, a way of being in the moment. And that quality is its own aim, because it expands our present experience and hence is worthwhile in itself.

Three important matters in closing: First a word about the future. I have in a way deceived you with my argument that education has nothing to do with the future. I have argued that education is a quality of one’s self in the present. But of course we will always live “in the present,” even though from where we are now, future presents look like fixed things. “I’ll be a doctor” or “I’m going to write a great novel,” we say—as if these future presents were simple and fixed states of being. When you get to the future—when you become the doctor or write the novel—you’ll find that your future nows are just as contingent, just as uneasy, just as “presentlike,” as is your present today. So it turns out that cultivating education— a sense of a self that perpetually, restlessly looks for new meanings in situations and facts and ideas—is a crucial resource for the future, because the future is a series of contingent moments just like the present.

As a result it is in an odd way true that education is your best way to “plan” for the future. (Odd because “education” in that sentence does not mean what you used to think it did.) The one thing we know of the future is that although we cannot predict it, it will happen anyway. Look at the person to your right. Now look at the person to your left. In 20 years, all three of you will have married and one of you will have divorced. You don’t imagine that now. Nobody in this room, I would imagine, is planning to get divorced. But over 40 percent of you eventually will. History happens.

And these personal happenings are only one type of chance. The events of a year ago will have persuaded you that there is no escaping history. But believe it or not those events will seem quite minor in 50 years—harbingers perhaps, but not by any means the great events of the next half century. After all, nearly ten times as many people died every single day for six years in World War II as died in the one day of the World Trade Center attacks. The society in which most of you will die fifty or so years hence will not look at all like this society now. Widespread, everyday biological terrorism could be a fact of life, as could comprehensive economic globalization, worldwide religious war, genetic registration, disappearance of national boundaries, rationing of procreation, implanted personal locator chips—who knows what is coming?

Now you cannot plan for these things, overwhelming as they are. But you can be prepared to comprehend them by becoming a person who can find meaning in events, a person of education. Indeed, if you are educated you will be able not simply to experience these events, but to shape their meanings for yourself and others. You will not just experience the future, but also make it. In that sense, being educated is your best plan for an uncertain future.

Second concluding remark: I have throughout this talk considered matters of cognition. I have not talked about emotional and moral education, even though both social science studies and theories of education recognize the importance of emotional and moral growth in the college years. We do know that intellectual study will be only one of three basic activities you do here. The second is paid work. The majority of you will work on and off through college and, indeed, many of you will work nearly half time by the standards of the labor force. And the third activity is that vast body of other things—sports and clubs and love affairs and cruising blues bars and eating at restaurants and so on—that we so aptly call the extracurriculum.

Now people who think about formal education have focused on cognition and have paid remarkably little attention to what we might call the moral and emotional curricula of college, which are “taught”—for the most part—in your work life and your extracurricular life. This is not because the emotional and moral curricula lack importance. Recall that in my earlier remarks about the professions I said that professional elites often require moral and emotional skills like leadership, understanding, and organization far more than they do cognitive skills like analytic thinking and clear writing. So these are important skills indeed. But in practice our moral curriculum boils down to some brief discussions about getting along in dormitories and some politicized and often phony class discussions about race, class, gender, and so on. My friend John Mearsheimer had the guts to stand where I am standing four years ago and argue forcefully that college education is not moral education. Theoretically, Professor Mearsheimer may have been right—he argued from a strong libertarian and cognitivist viewpoint—but empirically he was dead wrong. Willy-nilly, moral learning will be central in your college experience. You will do a lot of moral learning even in the classroom, much of it learning to dissemble your real views in discussions that are more apparent than real. Sad to say, you will find this skill extremely useful in later life.

Our emotional curriculum is in an even worse state. Basically, we bring all of you here, brim full of needs and desires and hormones, let you loose on each other like so many animals in a wildlife sanctuary, and hope for the best. Why we should have arranged cognitive learning so that intergenerational transmission is highly effective but emotional learning so that every generation has to start over from the beginning is beyond me.

Now my point is that for you as individuals, your responsibility to yourselves for finding education is not limited to the cognitive matters to which the University—following Mearsheimer’s argument—largely restricts itself. You need to become educated in morals and emotion as well. And in those areas, I am sad to say, we do not really provide you with anything like the systematic set of exercises in self-development that we provide on the cognitive side. So you are on your own.

Third and finally, this talk may seem to have given you an extraordinary charter of freedom. I have said—and the studies show—that what you do here has few clearly evident consequences for your future. To many of you, this may seem like a license to do whatever you damn well please for the next four years. In a sense, you do indeed have that license. Education is here to look for, but nobody can actually force you to find it. And nobody here can deny that the world is full of very successful people, at the highest places in our society, who have college degrees from eminent places and who yet lack even the most rudimentary forms of education. To put it simply, the system as it currently exists trusts you with the whole store. Education is the most valuable, the most human, and the most humane basis around which a person can build him- or herself. And you are here offered an unparalleled set of resources for finding the flash of enlightenment that kindles education within you. But it is in practice completely your decision whether you seek that flash. You can go through here and do nothing. Or you can go through here like a tourist, listening to lectures here and there, consulting your college Fodor’s for “important intellectual attractions” that “should not be missed during your stay.” Or you can go through here mechanically, stuffing yourself with materials and skills till you’re gorged with them. And whichever of these three you choose, you’ll do just fine in the world after you leave. You will be happy and you will be successful.

Or on the other hand you can seek education. It will not be easy. We have only helpful exercises for you. We can’t give you the thing itself. And there will be extraordinary temptations—to spend whole months wallowing in a concentration that doesn’t work for you because you have some myth about your future, to blow off intellectual effort in all but one area because you are too lazy to challenge yourself, to wander off to Europe for a year of enlightenment that rapidly turns into touristic self-indulgence. There will be the temptations of timidity, too, temptations to forgo all experimentation, to miss the glorious randomness of college, to give up the prodigal possibilities that—let me tell you—you will never find again; temptations to go rigidly through the motions and then wonder why education has eluded you.

There are no aims of education. The aim is education. If—and only if—you seek it . . . education will find you.

Welcome to the University of Chicago.

Speechwriting

8 Purpose and Thesis

Speechwriting Essentials

In this chapter . . .

As discussed in the chapter on Speaking Occasion , speechwriting begins with careful analysis of the speech occasion and its given circumstances, leading to the choice of an appropriate topic. As with essay writing, the early work of speechwriting follows familiar steps: brainstorming, research, pre-writing, thesis, and so on.

This chapter focuses on techniques that are unique to speechwriting. As a spoken form, speeches must be clear  about the purpose and main idea or “takeaway.” Planned redundancy means that you will be repeating these elements several times over during the speech.

Furthermore, finding purpose and thesis are essential whether you’re preparing an outline for extemporaneous delivery or a completely written manuscript for presentation. When you know your topic, your general and specific purpose, and your thesis or central idea, you have all the elements you need to write a speech that is focused, clear, and audience friendly.

Recognizing the General Purpose

Speeches have traditionally been grouped into one of three categories according to their primary purpose: 1) to inform, 2) to persuade, or 3) to inspire, honor, or entertain. These broad goals are commonly known as the  general purpose of a speech . Earlier, you learned about the actor’s tool of intention or objectives. The general purpose is like a super-objective; it defines the broadest goal of a speech. These three purposes are not necessarily exclusive to the others. A speech designed to be persuasive can also be informative and entertaining. However, a speech should have one primary goal. That is its general purpose.

Why is it helpful to talk about speeches in such broad terms? Being perfectly clear about what you want your speech to do or make happen for your audience will keep you focused. You can make a clearer distinction between whether you want your audience to leave your speech knowing more (to inform), or  ready to take action (to persuade), or feeling something (to inspire)

It’s okay to use synonyms for these broad categories. Here are some of them:

• To inform could be to explain, to demonstrate, to describe, to teach.
• To persuade could be to convince, to argue, to motivate, to prove.
• To inspire might be to honor, or entertain, to celebrate, to mourn.

In summary, the first question you must ask yourself when starting to prepare a speech is, “Is the primary purpose of my speech to inform, to persuade, or to inspire?”

Articulating Specific Purpose

A specific purpose statement builds upon your general purpose and makes it specific (as the name suggests). For example, if you have been invited to give a speech about how to do something, your general purpose is “to inform.”  Choosing a topic appropriate to that general purpose, you decide to speak about how to protect a personal from cyberattacks. Now you are on your way to identifying a specific purpose.

A good specific purpose statement has three elements: goal, target audience, and content.

If you think about the above as a kind of recipe, then the first two “ingredients” — your goal and your audience — should be simple. Words describing the target audience should be as specific as possible. Instead of “my peers,” you could say, for example, “students in their senior year at my university.”

The third ingredient in this recipe is content, or what we call the topic of your speech. This is where things get a bit difficult. You want your content to be specific and something that you can express succinctly in a sentence. Here are some common problems that speakers make in defining the content, and the fix:

Now you know the “recipe” for a specific purpose statement. It’s made up of  T o, plus an active W ord, a specific  A udience, and clearly stated  C ontent. Remember this formula: T + W + A + C.

A: for a group of new students

C: the term “plagiarism”

Here are some further examples a good specific purpose statement:

• To explain to a group of first-year students how to join a school organization.
• To persuade the members of the Greek society to take a spring break trip in Daytona Beach.
• To motivate my classmates in English 101 to participate in a study abroad program.
• To convince first-year students that they need at least seven hours of sleep per night to do well in their studies.
• To inspire my Church community about the accomplishments of our pastor.

The General and Specific Purpose Statements are writing tools in the sense that they help you, as a speechwriter, clarify your ideas.

Creating a Thesis Statement

Once you are clear about your general purpose and specific purpose, you can turn your attention to crafting a thesis statement. A thesis is the central idea in an essay or a speech. In speechwriting, the thesis or central idea explains the message of the content. It’s the speech’s “takeaway.” A good thesis statement will also reveal and clarify the ideas or assertions you’ll be addressing in your speech (your main points). Consider this example:

General Purpose: To persuade. Specific Purpose: To motivate my classmates in English 101 to participate in a study abroad program. Thesis: A semester-long study abroad experience produces lifelong benefits by teaching you about another culture, developing your language skills, and enhancing your future career prospects.

The difference between a specific purpose statement and a thesis statement is clear in this example. The thesis provides the takeaway (the lifelong benefits of study abroad). It also points to the assertions that will be addressed in the speech. Like the specific purpose statement, the thesis statement is a writing tool. You’ll incorporate it into your speech, usually as part of the introduction and conclusion.

All good expository, rhetorical, and even narrative writing contains a thesis. Many students and even experienced writers struggle with formulating a thesis. We struggle when we attempt to “come up with something” before doing the necessary research and reflection. A thesis only becomes clear through the thinking and writing process. As you develop your speech content, keep asking yourself: What is important here? If the audience can remember only one thing about this topic, what do I want them to remember?

Example #2: General Purpose: To inform Specific Purpose: To demonstrate to my audience the correct method for cleaning a computer keyboard. Central Idea: Your computer keyboard needs regular cleaning to function well, and you can achieve that in four easy steps.

Example # 3 General Purpose: To Inform Specific Purpose: To describe how makeup is done for the TV show The Walking Dead . Central Idea: The wildly popular zombie show The Walking Dead achieves incredibly scary and believable makeup effects, and in the next few minutes I will tell you who does it, what they use, and how they do it.

Notice in the examples above that neither the specific purpose nor the central idea ever exceeds one sentence. If your central idea consists of more than one sentence, then you are probably including too much information.

Problems to Avoid

The first problem many students have in writing their specific purpose statement has already been mentioned: specific purpose statements sometimes try to cover far too much and are too broad. For example:

“To explain to my classmates the history of ballet.”

Aside from the fact that this subject may be difficult for everyone in your audience to relate to, it’s enough for a three-hour lecture, maybe even a whole course. You’ll probably find that your first attempt at a specific purpose statement will need refining. These examples are much more specific and much more manageable given the limited amount of time you’ll have.

• To explain to my classmates how ballet came to be performed and studied in the U.S.
• To explain to my classmates the difference between Russian and French ballet.
• To explain to my classmates how ballet originated as an art form in the Renaissance.
• To explain to my classmates the origin of the ballet dancers’ clothing.

The second problem happens when the “communication verb” in the specific purpose does not match the content; for example, persuasive content is paired with “to inform” or “to explain.” Can you find the errors in the following purpose statements?

• To inform my audience why capital punishment is unconstitutional. (This is persuasive. It can’t be informative since it’s taking a side)
• To persuade my audience about the three types of individual retirement accounts. (Even though the purpose statement says “persuade,” it isn’t persuading the audience of anything. It is informative.)
• To inform my classmates that Universal Studios is a better theme park than Six Flags over Georgia. (This is clearly an opinion; hence it is a persuasive speech and not merely informative)

The third problem exists when the content part of the specific purpose statement has two parts. One specific purpose is enough. These examples cover two different topics.

• To explain to my audience how to swing a golf club and choose the best golf shoes.
• To persuade my classmates to be involved in the Special Olympics and vote to fund better classes for the intellectually disabled.

To fix this problem of combined or hybrid purposes, you’ll need to select one of the topics in these examples and speak on that one alone.

The fourth problem with both specific purpose and central idea statements is related to formatting. There are some general guidelines that need to be followed in terms of how you write out these elements of your speech:

• Don’t write either statement as a question.
• Always use complete sentences for central idea statements and infinitive phrases (beginning with “to”) for the specific purpose statement.
• Use concrete language (“I admire Beyoncé for being a talented performer and businesswoman”) and avoid subjective or slang terms (“My speech is about why I think Beyoncé is the bomb”) or jargon and acronyms (“PLA is better than CBE for adult learners.”)

There are also problems to avoid in writing the central idea statement. As mentioned above, remember that:

• The specific purpose and central idea statements are not the same thing, although they are related.
• The central idea statement should be clear and not complicated or wordy; it should “stand out” to the audience. As you practice delivery, you should emphasize it with your voice.
• The central idea statement should not be the first thing you say but should follow the steps of a good introduction as outlined in the next chapters.

You should be aware that all aspects of your speech are constantly going to change as you move toward the moment of giving your speech. The exact wording of your central idea may change, and you can experiment with different versions for effectiveness. However, your specific purpose statement should not change unless there is a good reason to do so. There are many aspects to consider in the seemingly simple task of writing a specific purpose statement and its companion, the central idea statement. Writing good ones at the beginning will save you some trouble later in the speech preparation process.

Public Speaking as Performance Copyright © 2023 by Mechele Leon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Speech Writing Format, Tips and Examples

Table of Contents

Speech Writing : Speech writing is a skill that can empower you to convey your thoughts, inspire others, and leave a lasting impact. Whether you’re preparing a speech for a school , a business meeting, or a special occasion, knowing how to craft an effective speech is invaluable. In this blog, we’ll explore what makes good speech writing, the structure of a speech, and the eight essential steps to ensure your speech resonates with your audience. Let’s dive into the world of successful speech writing Class 11 !

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What is Good Speech Writing?

Good speech writing refers to the skillful art of starting a speech that effectively communicates a message, engages the audience, and leaves a lasting impact. Deliver an impactful and inspiring speech on success , unveiling the keys to achievement and empowerment that captivate your audience.” A well-written speech is characterized by several key elements:

Clarity:  A good speech is clear and easy to understand. It conveys the message in a straightforward manner, avoiding unnecessary jargon or complexity.

Relevance:  It is tailored to the audience’s needs and interests. A good speech addresses the concerns and expectations of the audience, making it relatable and engaging.

Structure:  A well-structured speech has a clear beginning, middle, and end. It follows a logical flow, with each section building upon the previous one.

Engagement:  Good speech writing captures the audience’s attention from the start and maintains it throughout the speech. It uses effective hooks, anecdotes, and rhetorical devices to engage the audience emotionally and intellectually.

Content:  The content of a good speech is well-researched and supported by credible evidence, facts, examples, and anecdotes. It provides valuable information or conveys a persuasive argument.

Delivery:  While speech writing focuses on the text, good delivery speech is essential for effective communication. A well-written speech is delivered with confidence, appropriate tone, and proper pacing.

Memorability:  A good speech leaves a lasting impression on the audience. It may include memorable quotes, stories, or calls to action that resonate with listeners.

Purpose:  The purpose of the speech is clearly defined, whether it’s to inform, persuade, inspire, entertain, or a combination of these objectives. The speech aligns with its intended purpose.

Connection:  It establishes a connection with the audience by addressing their concerns, values, and emotions. A good speech can make the audience feel heard and understood.

Impact:  Ultimately, good speech writing aims to have an impact. It may lead to changed perspectives, inspired actions, or a deeper understanding of the topic.

How to Start a Speech in English

The opening of a speech is the gateway to engaging an audience. Begin by captivating attention with a compelling question, a captivating story, or an intriguing fact. A well-chosen quote or a vivid scene can also stir curiosity and set the tone for what’s to come. The key lies in drawing listeners in, making them eager to journey through the words you’re about to share. An impactful start sets the stage for a memorable and engaging speech. Speech writing class 11: Where words become powerful tools and students learn to articulate their thoughts with confidence and eloquence.

Structure of a Good Speech Writing

The speech writing class 11 format plays a crucial role in organizing and delivering your message effectively. A well-structured speech typically consists of three main parts:

Introduction

Hook:  Begin with a compelling opening that grabs your audience’s attention. This could be a question, a quote, a startling fact, or a personal anecdote related to your topic.

Purpose Statement:  Clearly state the purpose of your speech. Let your audience know what you aim to achieve or convey.

Preview:  Provide a brief overview of the main points or topics you will cover in your speech. This gives your audience a roadmap of what to expect.

Body: Main Points: Organize your speech into two or more main points or sections, each addressing a specific aspect of your topic. These main points should be related and support your overall message.

Supporting Material:  Within each main point, include supporting evidence, examples, statistics, anecdotes, or arguments that reinforce your message.

Transitions:  Use transitional phrases or sentences to smoothly move from one main point to the next. Transitions help maintain the flow of your speech.

Summary:  Summarize the key points you’ve discussed in the body of your speech. Restate your purpose and message to reinforce them.

Closing Statement:  End your speech with a strong closing statement or memorable quote that leaves a lasting impression on your audience.

Call to Action (if applicable):  If your speech has a persuasive or actionable component, issue a call to action. Encourage your audience to take specific steps or consider your message seriously.

How to Write a Speech Writing?

Writing speech can be a rewarding experience, allowing you to communicate your thoughts, inspire, inform, or persuade an audience effectively. A well-written speech not only conveys your message effectively but also engages and resonates with your audience. To craft a compelling speech, start by understanding your audience and defining your purpose. Thorough research is essential to gather supporting evidence and examples. Organize your ideas into a coherent structure with a captivating opening, well-developed main points, and a powerful conclusion. Engage your audience emotionally and intellectually through relatable stories and effective communication techniques. Practice and rehearsal will help you deliver your speech confidently. Effective speech writing combines these elements to create a message that resonates and inspires your audience. Practice and preparation are key to delivering a successful speech.

We also offer a diverse array of English speech topics for students , fostering both skill development and engagement in public speaking.

8 Important Steps to Successful Speech Writing

Writing a speech is a skill that combines art and strategy. To write a successful speech that captivates your audience and effectively communicates your message, follow these eight key steps:

• Understand Your Audience: Start by understanding your audience’s interests, knowledge level, and expectations. Tailor your speech to resonate with their needs and preferences.
• Define Your Purpose: Clearly define the purpose of your speech. Are you informing, persuading, motivating, or entertaining? Knowing your objective will guide your content.
• Research Thoroughly: Gather reliable and relevant information, facts, statistics, anecdotes, and examples that support your message. Cite credible sources to enhance your speech’s credibility.
• Organize Your Ideas: Create a logical structure or outline for your speech. Identify the main points or sections and arrange them in a coherent order.
• Craft a Compelling Opening: Grab your audience’s attention from the beginning with a strong hook. This could be a question, a quote, a story, or a surprising fact. Clearly state your purpose.
• Develop Your Main Points: Elaborate on each main point or section of your speech with supporting evidence, examples, and transitions. Ensure a clear and smooth flow between points.
• Engage Your Audience: Use relatable stories, anecdotes, humor, rhetorical devices, and interactive elements to connect with your audience emotionally and intellectually. Encourage participation through questions or thought-provoking statements.
• Conclude with Impact: Summarize your key points in the conclusion. Reiterate your purpose and message. End with a memorable closing statement, a call to action, or a thought-provoking question.

By following these eight key steps, you can craft a successful speech that effectively conveys your message, engages your audience, and leaves a lasting impression. Remember to practice and rehearse your speech to ensure confident and impactful delivery.

Speech Writing Examples

Here are two speech writing Class 11 examples for different purposes:

Speech Writing Example 1: Motivational Speech (Theme: Resilience)

“Good morning, everyone. Today, I want to share a story of resilience and determination. Imagine facing seemingly insurmountable obstacles and finding the strength to overcome them. That’s what true determination is all about.

Think of the legendary figure Thomas Edison, who attempted over a thousand times before successfully inventing the light bulb. He once said, ‘I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.’ Edison’s unwavering commitment to his goal teaches us that setbacks are stepping stones to success.

In our own lives, we encounter challenges that test our resolve. It could be academic, personal, or professional challenges. But remember, it’s not the adversity itself but how we respond that defines us.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from setbacks, to learn from failures, and to keep moving forward. It’s a quality we all possess, waiting to be awakened. The path to success may be filled with obstacles, but it’s the determination to overcome them that lights our way.

So, let’s embrace our inner resilience, face challenges head-on, and keep pushing forward. As Edison proved, with unwavering determination, even the darkest moments can lead to the brightest successes. Thank you.”

Speech Writing Example 2: Business Presentation (Theme: Company Progress)

“Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed colleagues, today, let’s dive into our company’s progress over the past year. Our growth has been steady, and I’ll present the data to support this claim.

In the fiscal year 2022-2023, our company achieved a remarkable 15% increase in revenue compared to the previous year. This growth can be attributed to our strategic expansion into new markets, our commitment to innovation, and the dedication of our talented team.

Our customer satisfaction rates also reached an all-time high, with an impressive 95% of our customers expressing their satisfaction with our products and services. This reflects our dedication to delivering value and excellence.

Furthermore, our sustainability initiatives have not only reduced our carbon footprint but have also gained recognition in the industry. We’ve implemented eco-friendly diwali , reduced waste, and made significant strides toward our goal of becoming a more environmentally responsible organization.

As we look ahead, we are excited about the opportunities that lie before us. Our commitment to innovation, customer satisfaction, and sustainability will continue to be the driving forces behind our success.

In conclusion, our progress over the past year reflects our dedication to excellence and our ability to adapt to changing times. We are poised for a future of continued growth and success. Thank you for your support and dedication to our company.

Successful speech writing involves careful planning, research, and effective communication techniques. By following the eight key steps outlined in this article, you can craft speeches that captivate your audience and deliver your message with impact and conviction.

Speech Writing Topics for Students and Children’s

Speech writing faq’s, how do i write a speech.

To craft a speech, start by selecting a topic you're passionate about. Outline key points, create an engaging introduction, elaborate on the main ideas, and conclude with a strong ending. Ensure a logical flow and use anecdotes or examples to connect with your audience.

What is speech writing for class 11?

In class 11, speech writing aims to develop students' ability to structure and express ideas effectively. It often involves learning various speech formats, understanding audience engagement, and honing language skills.

What is speech writing in English

Speech writing in English refers to the process of composing a spoken presentation intended to be delivered to an audience. It involves structuring thoughts, organizing ideas, and crafting a coherent and engaging script that effectively communicates a message or viewpoint.

What is the format for speech writing?

The format for speech writing typically involves an introduction, body, and conclusion. It includes an attention-grabbing opening, a clear message in the body with supporting points, and a memorable closing.

What are the 7 steps to writing a speech?

The seven steps to writing a speech include: Understanding the audience. Defining the purpose of the speech. Structuring the speech with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Outlining key points or arguments. Adding supporting evidence or examples. Rehearsing the speech for clarity and flow. Making revisions for improvement if needed before delivering it.

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Module 5: Choosing and Researching a Topic

Finding the purpose and central idea of your speech, learning objectives.

• Identify the specific purpose of a speech.
• Explain how to formulate a central idea statement for a speech.

General Purpose

The general purpose of most speeches will fall into one of four categories: to inform , to persuade , to entertain , and to commemorate or celebrate . The first step of defining the purpose of your speech is to think about which category best describes your  overall  goal with the speech. What do you want your audience to think, feel, or do as a consequence of hearing you speak? Often, the general purpose of your speech will be defined by the speaking situation. If you’re asked to run a training session at work, your purpose isn’t to entertain but rather to inform. Likewise, if you are invited to introduce the winner of an award, you’re not trying to change the audience’s mind about something; you’re honoring the recipient of the award. In a public speaking class, your general purpose may be included in the assignment: for instance, “Give a persuasive speech about . . . .”  When you’re assigned a speech project, you should always make sure you know whether the general purpose is included in the assignment or whether you need to decide on the general purpose yourself.

Specific Purpose

Now that you know your general purpose (to inform, to persuade, or to entertain), you can start to move in the direction of the specific purpose. A specific purpose statement builds on your general purpose and makes it more specific (as the name suggests). So if your first speech is an informative speech, your general purpose will be to inform your audience  about a very specific realm of knowledge.

In writing your specific purpose statement, you will take three contributing elements and bring them together to help you determine your specific purpose :

• You (your interests, your background, experience, education, etc.)
• Your audience
• The context or setting

There are three elements that combine to create a specific purpose statements: your own interests and knowledge, the interests and needs of your audience, and the context or setting in which you will be speaking.

Keeping these three inputs in mind, you can begin to write a specific purpose statement, which will be the foundation for everything you say in the speech and a guide for what you do not say. This formula will help you in putting together your specific purpose statement:

To _______________ [ Specific Communication Word (inform, explain, demonstrate, describe, define, persuade, convince, prove, argue)] _______________ [ Target Audience (my classmates, the members of the Social Work Club, my coworkers] __________________. [ The Content (how to bake brownies, that Macs are better than PCs].

Example: The purpose of my presentation is to demonstrate to  my coworkers the value of informed intercultural communication .

Formulating a Central Idea Statement

While you will not actually say your specific purpose statement during your speech, you will need to clearly state what your focus and main points are going to be. The statement that reveals your main points is commonly known as the central idea statement (or just the central idea). Just as you would create a thesis statement for an essay or research paper, the central idea statement helps focus your presentation by defining your topic, purpose, direction, angle, and/or point of view. Here are two examples:

• Central Idea—When elderly persons lose their animal companions, they can experience serious psychological, emotional, and physical effects.
• Central Idea—Your computer keyboard needs regular cleaning to function well, and you can achieve that in four easy steps.

Please note that your central idea will emerge and evolve as you research and write your speech, so be open to where your research takes you and anticipate that formulating your central idea will be an ongoing process.

Below are four guidelines for writing a strong central idea.

• Your central idea should be one, full sentence.
• Your central idea should be a statement, not a question.
• Your central idea should be specific and use concrete language.
• Each element of your central idea should be related to the others.

Using the topic “Benefits of Yoga for College Students’ Stress,” here are some correct and incorrect ways to write a central idea.

A strong central idea shows that your speech is focused around a clear and concise topic and that you have a strong sense of what you want your audience to know and understand as a result of your speech. Again, it is unlikely that you will have a final central idea before you begin your research. Instead, it will come together as you research your topic and develop your main points.

• Purpose and Central Idea Statements. Provided by : eCampusOntario. Project : Communication for Business Professionals. License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
• Finding the Purpose of Your Speech. Authored by : Susan Bagley-Koyle with Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution

4 Minute Speech on Education In English

A very good morning to one and all present here. Today, I will be giving a short speech on the topic of ‘Education’.

Wikipedia defines the term ‘education’ to be “a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims, such as transmitting knowledge or fostering skills and character traits. These aims may include the development of understanding, rationality, kindness, and honesty.”

Education, as the above-given definition, must thus not only be confined to mere theoretical knowledge as it is often misinterpreted to be. It should rather be a holistic process which aims to hone one to become a qualified individual as one grows up into adulthood.

The process of acquiring a basic level of knowledge like this through schooling is crucial for everyone as they grow up from children to adults. Moreover, it teaches one integral values in life and helps build character and become financially independent at a later stage.

Realising the importance of education, the Constitution (Eighty-sixth Amendment) Act, 2002 inserted Article 21-A in the Constitution of India to provide free and compulsory education of all children in the age group of six to fourteen years as a Fundamental Right in such a manner as the State may, by law, determine. It also implemented The Right to Education Act of India which further decreed that private schools must reserve 25% of the seats for underprivileged children. 

Today, however, the aim of education does not have anything to do with knowledge. Rather, it has morphed into a rat race!

Being academically proficient and receiving straight As is of prime importance nowadays. Rather than understanding new concepts and learning meaningfully from them, what matters now is blindly memorizing the syllabus for the sake of ‘scoring good grades’ and writing answers that would appease the examiner with appropriate ‘keywords’!

The education system as a whole needs to be revised thus. The aim of education must shift from receiving good grades to learning knowledge and learning through a more hands-on approach. Practical skills must be given more importance thus rather than education turning into a bloodthirsty battle for marks!

Thank you. 

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Speech Writing

• Updated on  
• Jan 16, 2024

The power of good, inspiring, motivating, and thought-provoking speeches can never be overlooked. If we retrospect, a good speech has not only won people’s hearts but also has been a verbal tool to conquer nations. For centuries, many leaders have used this instrument to charm audiences with their powerful speeches. Apart from vocalizing your speech perfectly, the words you choose in a speech carry immense weight, and practising speech writing begins with our school life. Speech writing is an important part of the English syllabus for Class 12th, Class 11th, and Class 8th to 10th. This blog brings you the Speech Writing format, samples, examples, tips, and tricks!

This Blog Includes:

What is speech writing, speech in english language writing, how do you begin an english-language speech, introduction, how to write a speech, speech writing samples, example of a great speech, english speech topics, practice time.

Must Read: Story Writing Format for Class 9 & 10

Speech writing is the art of using proper grammar and expression to convey a thought or message to a reader. Speech writing isn’t all that distinct from other types of narrative writing. However, students should be aware of certain distinct punctuation and writing style techniques. While writing the ideal speech might be challenging, sticking to the appropriate speech writing structure will ensure that you never fall short.

“There are three things to aim at in public speaking: first, to get into your subject, then to get your subject into yourself, and lastly, to get your subject into the heart of your audience.”- Alexander Gregg

The English language includes eight parts of speech i.e. nouns , pronouns , verbs , adjectives 410 , adverbs , prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections.

• Noun- A noun is a word that describes anything, such as an animal, a person, a place, or an emotion. Nouns are the building blocks for most sentences.
• Pronoun – Pronouns are words that can be used in place of nouns. They are used so that we don’t have to repeat words. This makes our writing and speaking much more natural.
• Verb – A verb is a term that implies activity or ‘doing.’ These are very vital for your children’s grammar studies, as a sentence cannot be complete without a verb.
• Adjective – An adjective is a term that describes something. An adjective is frequently used before a noun to add extra information or description.
• Prepositions- A preposition is a term that expresses the location or timing of something in relation to something else.
• Conjunction- Because every language has its own set of conjunctions, English conjunctions differ from those found in other languages. They’re typically used as a connecting word between two statements, concepts, or ideas.
• Interjections- Interjections are words that are used to describe a strong emotion or a sudden feeling.

Relevant Read: Speech on the Importance of English

The way you start your English speech can set the tone for the remainder of it. This semester, there are a variety of options for you to begin presentations in your classes. For example, try some of these engaging speech in English language starters.

• Rhetorical questions : A rhetorical question is a figure of speech that uses a question to convey a point rather than asking for a response. The answer to a rhetorical question may be clear, yet the questioner asks it to emphasize the point. Rhetorical questions may be a good method for students to start their English speeches. This method of introducing your material might be appealing to the viewers and encourage them to consider how they personally relate to your issue.
• Statistics: When making an instructive or persuasive speech in an English class, statistics can help to strengthen the speaker’s authority and understanding of the subject. To get your point over quickly and create an emotional response, try using an unexpected statistic or fact that will resonate with the audience.
• Set up an imaginary scene: Create an imaginary situation in your audience’s thoughts if you want to persuade them to agree with you with your speech. This method of starting your speech assists each member of the audience in visualizing a fantastic scenario that you wish to see come true.

Relevant Read: Reported Speech Rules With Exercises

Format of Speech Writing

Here is the format of Speech Writing:

• Introduction : Greet the audience, tell them about yourself and further introduce the topic.
• Body : Present the topic in an elaborate way, explaining its key features, pros and cons, if any and the like.
• Conclusion : Summary of your speech, wrap up the topic and leave your audience with a compelling reminder to think about!

Let’s further understand each element of the format of Speech Writing in further detail:

After the greetings, the Introduction has to be attention-getting. Quickly get people’s attention. The goal of a speech is to engage the audience and persuade them to think or act in your favour. The introduction must effectively include: 

• A brief preview of your topic. 
• Define the outlines of your speech. (For example, I’ll be talking about…First..Second…Third)
• Begin with a story, quote, fact, joke, or observation in the room. It shouldn’t be longer than 3-4 lines. (For Example: “Mahatma Gandhi said once…”, or “This topic reminds me of an incident/story…”)

This part is also important because that’s when your audience decides if the speech is worth their time. Keep your introduction factual, interesting, and convincing.

It is the most important part of any speech. You should provide a number of reasons and arguments to convince the audience to agree with you.

Handling objections is an important aspect of speech composition. There is no time for questions or concerns since a speech is a monologue. Any concerns that may occur during the speech will be addressed by a powerful speech. As a result, you’ll be able to respond to questions as they come in from the crowd. To make speech simpler you can prepare a flow chart of the details in a systematic way.

For example: If your speech is about waste management; distribute information and arrange it according to subparagraphs for your reference. It could include:

• What is Waste Management?
• Major techniques used to manage waste
• Advantages of Waste Management  
• Importance of Waste Management 

The conclusion should be something that the audience takes with them. It could be a reminder, a collective call to action, a summary of your speech, or a story. For example: “It is upon us to choose the fate of our home, the earth by choosing to begin waste management at our personal spaces.”

After concluding, add a few lines of gratitude to the audience for their time.

For example: “Thank you for being a wonderful audience and lending me your time. Hope this speech gave you something to take away.”

Practice Your Speech Writing with these English Speech topics for students !

A good speech is well-timed, informative, and thought-provoking. Here are the tips for writing a good school speech:

Speech Sandwich of Public Speaking

The introduction and conclusion must be crisp. People psychologically follow the primacy effect (tendency to remember the first part of the list/speech) and recency effect (tendency to recall the last part of the list/speech). 

Use Concrete Facts

Make sure you thoroughly research your topic. Including facts appeals to the audience and makes your speech stronger. How much waste is managed? Give names of organisations and provide numerical data in one line.

Use Rhetorical Strategies and Humour

Include one or two open-ended or thought-provoking questions.  For Example: “Would we want our future generation to face trouble due to global warming?” Also, make good use of humour and convenient jokes that engages your audience and keeps them listening.

Check Out: Message Writing

Know your Audience and Plan Accordingly

This is essential before writing your speech. To whom is it directed? The categorised audience on the basis of –

• Knowledge of the Topic (familiar or unfamiliar)

Use the information to formulate the speech accordingly, use information that they will understand, and a sentence that they can retain.

Timing Yourself is Important

An important aspect of your speech is to time yourself.  Don’t write a speech that exceeds your word limit. Here’s how can decide the right timing for your speech writing:

• A one-minute speech roughly requires around 130-150 words
• A two-minute speech requires roughly around 250-300 words

Recommended Read: Letter Writing

Speech Writing Examples

Here are some examples to help you understand how to write a good speech. Read these to prepare for your next speech:

Write a speech to be delivered in the school assembly as Rahul/ Rubaina of Delhi Public School emphasises the importance of cleanliness, implying that the level of cleanliness represents the character of its residents. (150-200 words)

“Cleanliness is next to godliness,” said the great John Wesley. Hello, respected principal, instructors, and good friends. Today, I, Rahul/Rubaina, stand in front of you all to emphasise the significance of cleanliness.

Cleanliness is the condition or attribute of being or remaining clean. Everyone must learn about cleaning, hygiene, sanitation, and the different diseases that are produced by unsanitary circumstances. It is essential for physical well-being and the maintenance of a healthy atmosphere at home and at school. A filthy atmosphere invites a large number of mosquitos to grow and spread dangerous diseases. On the other side, poor personal cleanliness causes a variety of skin disorders as well as lowered immunity.

Habits formed at a young age become ingrained in one’s personality. Even if we teach our children to wash their hands before and after meals, brush their teeth and bathe on a regular basis, we are unconcerned about keeping public places clean. On October 2, 2014, the Indian Prime Minister began the “Swachh Bharat” programme to offer sanitation amenities to every family, including toilets, solid and liquid waste disposal systems, village cleanliness, and safe and appropriate drinking water supplies. Teachers and children in schools are actively participating in the ‘Clean India Campaign’ with zeal and excitement.

Good health ensures a healthy mind, which leads to better overall productivity, higher living standards, and economic development. It will improve India’s international standing. As a result, a clean environment is a green environment with fewer illnesses. Thus, cleanliness is defined as a symbol of mental purity.

Thank you very much.

Relevant Read: Speech on Corruption

You are Sahil/Sanya, the school’s Head Girl/Head Boy. You are greatly troubled by the increasing instances of aggressive behaviour among your students. You decide to speak about it during the morning assembly. Create a speech about “School Discipline.” (150 – 200 words)

INDISCIPLINE IN SCHOOLS,

It has been reported that the frequency of fights and incidences of bullying in our school has increased dramatically in the previous several months. Good morning to everyone present. Today, I, Sahil/Sanya, your head boy/girl, am here to shed light on the serious topic of “Increased Indiscipline in Schools.”

It has come to light that instructor disobedience, bullying, confrontations with students, truancy, and insults are becoming more widespread. Furthermore, there have been reports of parents noticing a shift in their children’s attitudes. As a result, many children are suffering emotionally, psychologically, and physically. The impact of this mindset on children at a young age is devastating and irreversible.

Not to mention the harm done to the school’s property. Theft of chalk, scribbling on desks, walls and lavatory doors, destruction of CCTV cameras and so forth. We are merely depriving ourselves of the comforts granted to us by doing so.

Following numerous meetings, it was determined that the main reasons for the problem were a lack of sufficient guidance, excessive use of social media, and peer pressure. The council is working to make things better. Everyone is required to take life skills classes. Counselling, motivating, and instilling friendly ideals will be part of the curriculum. Seminars for parents and students will be held on a regular basis.

A counsellor is being made available to help you all discuss your sentiments, grudges, and personal problems. We are doing everything we can and expect you to do the same.

So, let us work together to create an environment in which we encourage, motivate, assist, and be nice to one another because we are good and civilised humans capable of a great deal of love.

Relevant Read: How to Write a Speech on Discipline?

The current increase in incidences of violent student misbehaviour is cause for alarm for everyone. Students who learn how to manage their anger can help to alleviate the situation. Write a 150-200-word speech about the topic to be delivered at the school’s morning assembly. (10)

HOW TO CONTROL ANGER

Honourable Principal, Respected Teachers, and Dear Friends, I’d like to share a few “Ways to Manage Anger” with you today.

The growing intolerance among the younger generation, which is resulting in violence against teachers, is cause for severe concern. The guru-shishya parampara is losing its lustre. Aggressive behaviour in students can be provoked by a variety of factors, including self-defence, stressful circumstance, over-stimulation, or a lack of adult supervision.

It has become imperative to address the situation. Life skills workshops will be included in the curriculum. Teachers should be trained to deal with such stubborn and confrontational behaviours. Meditation and deep breathing are very beneficial and should be practised every morning. Students should be taught to count to ten before reacting angrily. Sessions on anger control and its importance must also be held.

Remember that Anger is one letter away from danger. It becomes much more crucial to be able to control one’s rage. It’s never too late to start, as a wise man once said.

“Every minute you stay angry, you lose sixty seconds of peace of mind.”

Relevant Read: English Speech Topics for Students

Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have A Dream’ is one of his most famous speeches. Its impact has lasted through generations. The speech is written by utilising the techniques above. Here are some examples:

“still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination” – emotive Language

“In a sense, we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check” – personalising the speech

“to stand up for freedom together” – a call to action.

Importantly, this is an example of how the listener comes first while drafting a speech. The language chosen appeals to a specific sort of audience and was widely utilised in 1963 when the speech was delivered.

• The Best Day of My Life
• Social Media: Bane or Boon?
• Pros and Cons of Online Learning
• Benefits of Yoga
• If I had a Superpower
• I wish I were ______
• Environment Conservation
• Women Should Rule the World!
• The Best Lesson I Have Learned
• Paperbacks vs E-books
• How to Tackle a Bad Habit?
• My Favorite Pastime/Hobby
• Understanding Feminism
• Fear of Missing Out (FOMO): Is it real or not?
• Importance of Reading
• Importance of Books in Our Life
• My Favorite Fictional Character
• Introverts vs Extroverts
• Lessons to Learn from Sports
• Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Also Read: How to Ace IELTS Writing Section?

Ans. Speech writing is the process of communicating a notion or message to a reader by employing proper punctuation and expression. Speech writing is similar to other types of narrative writing. However, students should be aware of some different punctuation and writing structure techniques.

Ans. Before beginning with the speech, choose an important topic. Create an outline; rehearse your speech, and adjust the outline based on comments from the rehearsal. This five-step strategy for speech planning serves as the foundation for both lessons and learning activities.

Ans. Writing down a speech is vital since it helps you better comprehend the issue, organises your thoughts, prevents errors in your speech, allows you to get more comfortable with it, and improves its overall quality.

Speech writing and public speaking are effective and influential. Hope this blog helped you know the various tips for writing the speech people would want to hear. If you need help in making the right career choices at any phase of your academic and professional journey, our Leverage Edu experts are here to guide you. Sign up for a free session now!

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Speech Writing: Introduction with Examples

What is a speech.

• A speech is a formal address delivered to an audience.
• It always has a purpose. It aims to convey the purpose with logically connected ideas.
• Speech writing is a method of telling a thought or message to a reader using correct punctuation and expressions.

While writing a speech we should concentrate on the three ‘ C’ s.

Your speech should be clear, concise, and consistent .

• Clear: The speech should be simple and easy to understand.
• Concise: It should not be too long. Generally, the word limit is 150-200 words. But it may vary.
• Consistent: The speech should be logically in order.

Let’s see the format of speech writing.

It contains two parts.

Title: Give a good title to the topic while writing a speech.

Content: The content section is divided into 3 subparts.

• Introduction

1. INTRODUCTION:

Start greeting the audience with the phrases like:

• Respected Sir/Ma’am
• Dear students
• Good morning, everyone

Share your personal introduction in one or two lines.

Then write in brief what is the theme of the speech.

• Explain the topic in detail.
• Be clear and specific about your thoughts.
• We can use 3 techniques while writing a speech.

Advantage & Disadvantage

Cause & Effect

Problem & Solution

Let’s learn them in detail.

Advantages & Disadvantages:

• Tell the advantages and disadvantages of the thing.
• Example: If the topic is ‘online education’, you can write its benefits and side effects.

Cause & Effect:

• Write why it is happening or the cause of the thing given in the speech.
• What is its effect on society?
• Example: If the topic is ‘ pollution ’, you can write its cause and effect on the earth.

Problem & Solution:

• Discuss the problem and write the proper solution to it.
• Write the need for that thing in your daily life.

3. CONCLUSION:

• Conclude the speech by giving an overall view or summary.
• Add the specific action you want the audience to do right away.

Some important things you must keep in mind while writing a speech.

• Figure out the primary point of the speech.
• Identify the audience who will listen to the speech.
• Give proper support and structure to the speech.
• Make sure to use correct punctuation while writing.

Sample of Speech:

Good morning respected principal sir, all the teachers, and my dear friends.

Today we have gathered here to celebrate the Teachers’ Day.

First, I would like to wish all my respected teachers a very happy Teachers’ Day. Thank you for being

our backbone and support. Teachers play a big role in building the character of students. They give

us knowledge and help in achieving our dreams. They are our guiding spirits and role models.

Teachers help in building the character of students. Teachers plays an important role in the education

of students, society, and country.

On behalf of all students, I would like to thank all the teachers for their tireless efforts they make to give us knowledge and shape our future.

Another Example of Speech :

Write a speech on “Importance of Education” which you will deliver in your school.

Good morning respected teachers and my dear friends.

      I am Linda studying from grade 3.

The topic of my speech is ‘Importance of Education’. I would let you know all about the value of education and its contribution to our lives.

      Education helps us to remove doubt and fear of challenges in our lives. We can say it is a tool that keeps us happy and give courage to fight in difficult situations. We need education to make ourselves confident and to be aware of equality. It makes us self -dependent. Education shape us for the future challenges in life. It helps you to earn money to fulfill the basic need of life.

If we are not properly educated, we may face challenges in some situations. Education is not about gaining knowledge only; it means learning the ways to be happy and social life.

      My dear friends, education is like a healthy food that nourishes us both internally and externally. It gives us confidence by developing our personality. We should help others as well as ourselves to be educated and contribute to the development of the society.

      Thank you!!!

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What are Parts of Speech? Parts of speech determine words’ grammatical and semantic position in a sentence. Activity time The parts of speech are nouns, adverbs, conjunctions, pronouns, interjections, adjectives, articles, prepositions, and verbs. Identify the parts of speech of the underlined words in the following sentences. White- Adjective Big- Adjective    Exciting- Adjectives New- […]

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Memoir: A memoir is a narrative written from an author’s perspective about a particular facet of his/her own life. ‘Memoir’ word comes from the French word ‘memoire’, which means ‘memory’ or ‘reminiscence’. Example Night: Elie Wiesel gives an account of how he survived his teenage years at Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps during World War […]

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Every story or paragraph or non-fictional text has at least one main idea. The MAIN IDEA is what the text is mostly about. (It is backed up or supported by SUPPORTING DETAILS) Before discussing how to find the main idea, we shall first look at TOPIC. Can you define a topic? A topic can be […]

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What is an article? Structure of Article Writing : Title : Draw the attention of readers with an attractive title and indicate the main topic of the article Introduction : Attract the reader’s attention with a sentence that gives a general presentation of the topic. Main Body : Between these sentences, the body should do […]

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Value of Education Speech for Students and Children

Value of education speech.

Good Evening, Ladies and gentlemen. I am here before you today to present the Value of Education speech. Education is the basic human right. The value of education is very essential for the exercise of all other human rights. It provides freedom and empowerment to all individuals. Education is the most powerful tool by which economically and socially backward adults and children can lift themselves out of poverty line. It is the foundation of our society. Education helps to stimulate our minds and mold curious minds into intellectuals. Education takes the intellect to the next level. It provides a deeper understanding of the world around us. It forms the very essence of our actions.

Source: pixabay.com

Our behavior, our perception is what we have learned, either through instructions or through observation. Education is a ladder that can carry us to high limits. Without education, without knowledge, you cannot contribute to the world or earn money. Knowledge is power.

The value of education helps you know what you can do, and so you can go that extra mile. The value of education is much higher than we can express in words. It helps to remove dirt from our mind, doubts and fears what could lead us in backsteps. It helps to makes us happy and successful and makes us better human beings. The light of education removes the darkness, and suddenly we find how beautiful this world is.

Types of Education

We can divide the education system into 3 types; formal, informal and non-formal education. What we learn from school, colleges or universities gives us formal education. Informal education can be earned throughout our life. It doesn’t follow any specific syllabus or time table.

Learning informal education is endless and we continue to learn it as our lives go on. Non-formal education is often used interchangeably with terms such as community education, adult education, continuing education, and second-chance education.

Get the Huge list of 100+ Speech Topics here

Importance of Education in Life

Reading, writing, and understanding is the first value that we receive from Education. Most information is done by writing. Without writing skill we will miss out on a lot of information. Consequently, Education makes people literate. Above all, Education is extremely important for employment. Proper education gives us a great opportunity to make a decent living.

We understood the values of education when we see people with a high paying job. Uneducated people have a huge disadvantage when it comes to jobs due to a lack of education. Better Communication is yet another role in Education. It enhances and improves the speech of a person. Educated individuals can express their views efficiently and in a clear manner.

Importance of Education in Society

The values of Education lies in spreading knowledge in society. Spreading of knowledge creates our environment and this is perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Education. Education brings in the development and innovation in fields of technology, medicine, lifestyle, etc.

The more the proper education we get, the more technology will spread. Apart from this the value of education plays a very crucial role in securing a country’s economic and social progress and improving people’s income distribution.

The value of Education is the most important ingredient to change the world. It helps us to gain knowledge and that knowledge can be used to make a better living. Most importantly the value of education is something that can never be destroyed by any type of natural or manmade disaster. It plays an important role in an individual’s life. Education is the path for the development of society and the overall development of the Nation also.

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Nevada Today

Dedicated to making an impact one syllable at a time, madelyn montgomery shares how she found her purpose in speech-language pathology.

Madelyn Montgomery plans to lead with kindness and compassion in pediatric settings after graduating this spring.

In the world of Speech-Language Pathology (SLP), each word spoken holds the potential to transform lives.   

Madelyn Montgomery approaches her role as an SLP graduate student at the University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine (UNR Med) with a sense of purpose and dedication, knowing that each intervention, each word spoken, has the potential to improve the quality of life for those she serves.  

Initially embarking on her undergraduate journey in psychology, she was driven by a passion to make a meaningful difference in the lives of those around her. However, it was through the discovery of speech-language pathology that her purpose found its true calling.  

Now, as a recipient of the Nevada Collaborative (NVC) Interdisciplinary Training to Improve Educational Opportunities for Young Children with Autism Grant, Montgomery finds herself at the intersection of education, early intervention and autism support. This grant, awarded to a select few graduate students each year, has provided her with invaluable opportunities to deepen her understanding of early childhood special education and autism populations.   

With a commitment to leveraging her education to make a tangible impact, Montogomery aims to continue her work with pediatric populations, whether in early intervention programs or elementary school settings.  

Why did you decide to become a speech pathologist/audiologist?  

“I originally began my undergraduate journey pursuing a degree in psychology, driven by a desire to understand and support others, particularly children. However, my passion for making a meaningful impact in other’s lives was further honed when I discovered speech-language pathology. Through my experience as an SLP graduate student, I have found immense fulfillment in leveraging my knowledge and skills to empower individuals, enhance their communication and improve their overall quality of life. I firmly believe in the transformative power of empathy and compassion, resonating with the quote that ‘happiness comes when your work and words are of benefit to yourself and others.’ This serves as a guiding principle in my professional journey, reminding me of the importance of selflessness and the profound impact that we can have when we use our abilities to uplift and support those around us."

What is the biggest challenge you have faced in your medical education and how did you overcome it?  

“During the initial two weeks of my graduate program, I encountered significant challenges, grappling with intense imposter syndrome and heightened anxiety due to the abrupt shift in academic demands and clinical responsibilities. Fortunately, I was surrounded by peers and professors who provided a supportive environment for me to voice my concerns and uncertainties without judgement. They reassured me that as I gained hands-on experience with clients and witnessed the tangible impact of my work, everything would start to make sense. Sure enough, as I began interacting with clients and observing the positive changes I could facilitate in their lives, the underlying purpose became clear to me. As I continued to face moments of panic or doubts throughout the program, reminding myself that ‘pressure is a privilege’ helped me maintain perspective.”  

Can you share a memorable experience during your medical training that has significantly impacted your journey as a future speech-language pathologist?  

“I had the privilege of attending the inaugural Nevada Aphasia Camp, organized by Dr. Tami Brancamp and the Aphasia Center of Nevada. This weekend retreat in the eastern Sierras provided a safe and nurturing space that allowed adults with aphasia and their families to build confidence, share experiences and connect with others. Aphasia, a language disorder caused by damage to the brain, can be an extremely isolating condition as it affects individuals’ communication abilities, making social interactions challenging. This camp offered participants a unique opportunity to engage in adapted recreational activities and group exercises, including ropes courses, kayaking, rock climbing, team-based games and hiking, that not only encouraged communication, teamwork and camaraderie, but embraced each person’s abilities and contributions. The weekend concluded with skits, songs and stargazing around a bonfire, serving as a beautiful celebration of the connections and memories made during the camp and reinforcing the importance of community, understanding and mutual support in overcoming the challenges posed by aphasia.”  

What advice do you have for future students interested in becoming a speech pathologist?  

“My advice for future students is to trust yourself and your instincts. Leading with kindness and compassion will always guide you in the right direction. As an SLP, you will often encounter clients and families on their worst days. It’s essential to approach each individual with a desire to understand their unique circumstances, even beyond the clinical setting. By aiming to create a deep understanding and connection with each person you work with, you will enhance both your professional skills and the difference you make in their lives.”  

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USC Cancels Muslim Valedictorian’s Speech Over Safety Concerns Amid Middle East Conflict

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The University of Southern California , citing safety concerns and passions around the latest Middle East conflict, has canceled its valedictorian speech from a Muslim student who said she was being silenced by anti-Palestinian hatred for her views on human rights.

USC Provost Andrew Guzman said in a statement on Monday that the decision to scrub the traditional valedictorian address at next month’s graduation had “nothing to do with freedom of speech” and was simply aimed at protecting campus security.

The valedictorian, biomedical engineering major Asna Tabassum, in her own statement challenged the university’s rationale, questioning “whether USC’s decision to revoke my invitation to speak is made solely on the basis of safety.”

Guzman’s statement did not refer to Tabassum by name, or specify what about her speech, background or political views had raised concerns. Nor did it detail any particular threats.

The provost referred more broadly to how “discussion relating to the selection of our valedictorian had taken on an alarming tenor” in recent days.

“The intensity of feelings, fueled by both social media and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, has grown to include many voices outside of USC and has escalated to the point of creating substantial risks relating to security and disruption at commencement,” he wrote.

As a consequence, “we have decided that our student valedictorian will not deliver a speech at commencement,” Guzman wrote, adding, “tradition must give way to safety.” The Los Angeles Times reported the decision was a first for USC.

Public safety officials and civil rights advocates have reported a rise in hate crimes against Muslims, Jews, Arabs and Palestinians in the United States, along with heightened tensions on college campuses related to the Israel-Gaza war, since the conflict erupted on Oct. 7.

According to Tabassum, who described herself as a “first-generation South Asian-American Muslim,” USC officials refused in an April 14 meeting with her to share details of the university’s security assessment.

The highly selective university, renowned for an intercollegiate athletic program, did not respond to Reuters’ request for further comment.

‘Caving to Fear’

Tabassum said she also was told USC possessed the ability “to take appropriate safety measures for my valedictory speech” but opted not to because a tougher security posture was “not what the university wants to ‘present as an image.'”

Instead, Tabassum said USC was “caving to fear and rewarding hatred,” which she said was being directed by “anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian voices” targeting her “because of my uncompromising belief in human rights for all.”

Neither Tabassum nor USC made explicit mention of the Israel-Gaza war.

Trojans for Israel, a USC-based group, and We Are Tov (Hebrew for “good”), a group advocating support for Israel and Jews in collegiate life, had called for Tabassum’s removal as commencement speaker earlier this month, saying she had espoused antisemitic views in the past.

Local media reported both groups had mounted opposition to Tabassum based on her social media profile, including an Instagram account with a link directing users to a slideshow about “what’s happening in Palestine and how to help.” It advocated for “one Palestinian state” and “the complete abolishment of the state of Israel.”

Tabassum told an NBC News affiliate that she posted the link five years earlier and did not author the slideshow.

In her statement, Tabassum said her undergraduate minor studies in genocide resistance had shown her the danger of allowing “cries for equality and human dignity” to be deliberately conflated with “expressions of hatred.”

“Due to widespread fear, I was hoping to use my commencement speech to inspire my classmates with a message of hope,” she wrote.

Sonya Meyerson-Knox, spokesperson for the Jewish anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace, said the USC episode was part of a larger pattern on U.S. college campuses of students being censured as anti-Jewish for criticizing Israel’s government or for expressing support for Palestinian rights.

“Holding the government of Israel accountable for committing grave human rights violations and war crimes and possible genocide has nothing to do with antisemitism,” she said.

Other Jewish groups have countered that anti-Zionist rhetoric — sometimes marked by calls for Israel’s destruction or right to exist — frequently feeds overt forms of anti-Jewish hatred.

Tabassum was chosen valedictorian from nearly 100 applicants — submitted from among the more than 200 graduating seniors — who qualified for the honor based on their grade-point-averages, according to USC.

The university had not asked for an advanced copy of Tabassum’s address before withdrawing her invitation to speak, and she had not even begun working on her speech, said Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations , an advocacy group that circulated her statement.

The council launched an online campaign calling for USC to reinstate Tabassum’s invitation to speak.

The May 10 commencement exercises, honoring this year’s class of 19,000-plus graduates, is expected to draw 65,000 people to the downtown Los Angeles campus of USC, long regarded as one of California’s most prestigious private universities.

Columbia Leaders Grilled at Antisemitism Hearing Over Faculty Comments

The university’s president, Nemat Shafik, agreed that some professors had crossed the line as she testified before House lawmakers on questions of student safety and free speech.

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Nicholas Fandos ,  Stephanie Saul and Sharon Otterman

Nicholas Fandos and Stephanie Saul reported from New York. Sharon Otterman reported from the Capitol hearing room.

The president of Columbia spent the day on defense.

The president of Columbia said the university had suspended 15 students. She promised that one visiting professor “will never work at Columbia again.”

And when she was grilled over whether she would remove another professor from his leadership position, she appeared to make a decision right there on Capitol Hill: “I think I would, yes.”

The president, Nemat Shafik, disclosed the disciplinary details, which are usually confidential, as part of an all-out effort on Wednesday to persuade a House committee investigating Columbia that she was taking serious action to combat a wave of antisemitism following the Israel-Hamas war.

In nearly four hours of testimony before the Republican-led Committee on Education and the Workforce, Dr. Shafik conceded that Columbia had initially been overwhelmed by an outbreak of campus protests. But she said its leaders now agreed that some had used antisemitic language and that certain contested phrases — like “from the river to the sea” — might warrant discipline.

“I promise you, from the messages I’m hearing from students, they are getting the message that violations of our policies will have consequences,” Dr. Shafik said.

Testifying alongside her, Claire Shipman, the co-chair of Columbia’s board of trustees, made the point bluntly. “We have a moral crisis on our campus,” she said.

Republicans seemed skeptical. But Dr. Shafik’s conciliatory tone offered the latest measure of just how much universities have changed their approach toward campus protests over the last few months.

Many schools were initially hesitant to take strong steps limiting freedom of expression cherished on their campuses. But with many Jewish students, faculty and alumni raising alarms, and with the federal government investigating dozens of schools, some administrators have tried to take more assertive steps to control their campuses.

With 5,000 Jewish students and an active protest movement for the Palestinian cause, Columbia has been among the most scrutinized. Jewish students have described being verbally and even physically harassed, while demonstrators have clashed with administrators over limits to where and when they can assemble.

In bending toward House Republicans in Washington, Dr. Shafik may have further divided her New York City campus, where students had pitched tents and set up a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” early on Wednesday in open violation of university demonstration policies. Activists have rejected charges of antisemitism, and say they are speaking out for Palestinians, tens of thousands of whom have been killed by Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

Sheldon Pollock, a retired Columbia professor who helps lead Columbia’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said Dr. Shafik had been “bulldozed and bullied” into saying things she would regret.

“What happened to the idea of academic freedom?” Dr. Pollock asked. “I don’t think that phrase was used even once.”

Dr. Shafik, who took her post in July 2023 after a career in education and international agencies, did repeatedly defend the university’s commitment to free speech. But she said administrators “cannot and should not tolerate abuse of this privilege” when it puts others at risk.

Her comments stood in contrast to testimony last December by the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. Appearing before the same House committee, they offered terse, lawyerly answers and struggled to answer whether students should be punished if they called for the genocide of Jews. The firestorm that followed helped hasten their ousters.

Dr. Shafik missed that earlier hearing because of a preplanned international trip. She made clear on Wednesday she was not about to make similar mistakes.

Asked the same question, about whether calls for genocide violate Columbia’s code of conduct, Dr. Shafik answered in the affirmative — “Yes, it does” — along with the other Columbia leaders at the hearing.

Dr. Shafik explained that the university had suspended two student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, because they repeatedly violated its policies on demonstrations.

She also seemed more willing than the leaders of Harvard or Penn to condemn and potentially discipline students and faculty who use language like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Some people believe the phrase calls for the elimination of the state of Israel, while its proponents say it is an aspirational call for Palestinian freedom.

“We have some disciplinary cases ongoing around that language,” she said. “We have specified that those kinds of chants should be restricted in terms of where they happen.”

Much of the hearing, though, focused on faculty members, not students.

Under persistent questioning from Republicans, Dr. Shafik went into surprising detail about disciplinary procedures against university professors. She noted that Columbia has about 4,700 faculty members and vowed that there would be “consequences” for employees who “make remarks that cross the line in terms of antisemitism.”

So far, Dr. Shafik said, five faculty members had been removed from the classroom or dismissed in recent months for comments stemming from the war. Dr. Shafik said that Mohamed Abdou, a visiting professor who drew ire for showing support for Hamas on social media, “is grading his students’ papers and will never teach at Columbia again.” Dr. Abdou did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The president also disclosed that the university was investigating Joseph Massad, a professor of Middle Eastern studies, who used the word “ awesome ” to describe the Oct. 7 attack led by Hamas that Israel says killed 1,200 people.

Dr. Shafik and other leaders denounced his work in striking terms. But Dr. Shafik struggled to state clearly, when questioned, whether Dr. Massad would be removed from his position leading a university panel.

“Will you make the commitment to remove him as chair?” Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, asked her during one fast-paced exchange.

Dr. Shafik replied cautiously, “I think that would be — I think, I would, yes.”

In an email on Wednesday, Dr. Massad said he had not watched the hearing but had seen some clips. He accused Republicans on the committee of distorting his writing and said it was “unfortunate” that Columbia officials had not defended him.

Dr. Massad said it was also “news to me” that he was the subject of a Columbia inquiry. He noted that he was already scheduled to cycle out of his leadership role at the end of the spring semester.

Dr. Shafik’s words deeply worried some supporters of academic freedom.

“We are witnessing a new era of McCarthyism where a House Committee is using college presidents and professors for political theater,” said Irene Mulvey, the president of the American Association of University Professors. “They are pushing an agenda that will ultimately damage higher education and the robust exchanges of ideas it is founded upon.”

Democrats on the House committee uniformly denounced antisemitism, but repeatedly accused Republicans of trying to weaponize a fraught moment for elite universities like Columbia, seeking to undermine them over longstanding political differences.

When Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia, the committee’s top ranking Democrat, tried to enlist Ms. Shipman to agree that the committee should be investigating a wide range of bias around race, sex and gender, she resisted.

“We have a specific problem on our campus, so I can speak from what I know, and that is rampant antisemitism,” she said.

Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, one of only two Muslim women in Congress, pushed back on Dr. Shafik from the left, questioning what the university was doing to help students who were doxxed over their activism for the Palestinian cause or faced anti-Arab sentiment.

Dr. Shafik said the university had assembled resources to help targeted students.

By the end of the hearing, Republicans began to fact-check her claims, drawing from thousands of pages of documents the university handed over as part of the committee’s investigation.

Representative Virginia Foxx , Republican of North Carolina and the committee’s chairwoman, said that several of the student suspensions Dr. Shafik described had already been lifted and argued that students were still not taking the university’s policies seriously.

In a statement after the hearing, Ms. Stefanik said she likewise found Dr. Shafik’s assurances unpersuasive.

“If it takes a member of Congress to force a university president to fire a pro-terrorist, antisemitic faculty chair,” she said, “then Columbia University leadership is failing Jewish students and its academic mission.

Anemona Hartocollis contributed reporting.

Alan Blinder

Here are our takeaways from Wednesday’s antisemitism hearing.

Follow live updates on Pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University.

Four Columbia University officials, including the university’s president and the leaders of its board, went before Congress on Wednesday to try to extinguish criticism that the campus in New York has become a hub of antisemitic behavior and thought.

Over more than three hours, the Columbia leaders appeared to avoid the kind of caustic, viral exchange that laid the groundwork for the recent departures of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania , whose own appearances before the same House committee ultimately turned into public relations disasters.

Here are the takeaways from the hearing on Capitol Hill.

With three words, Columbia leaders neutralized the question that tripped up officials from other campuses.

In December, questions about whether calling for the genocide of Jewish people violated university disciplinary policies led the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania to offer caveat-laden, careful answers that ignited fierce criticism .

The topic surfaced early in Wednesday’s hearing about Columbia, and the Columbia witnesses did not hesitate when they answered.

“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Columbia’s code of conduct?” asked Representative Suzanne Bonamici, Democrat of Oregon.

“Yes, it does,” replied David Greenwald, the co-chair of Columbia’s board of trustees.

“Yes, it does,” Claire Shipman, the board’s other co-chair, said next.

“Yes, it does,” Nemat Shafik, Columbia’s president, followed.

“Yes, it does,” said David Schizer, a longtime Columbia faculty member who is helping to lead a university task force on antisemitism.

To some lawmakers, Columbia’s effort in recent months remains lacking.

Even before the hearing started, Columbia officials have said that its procedures were not up to the task of managing the tumult that has unfolded in the months after the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7.

In a written submission to the committee, Dr. Shafik, who became Columbia’s president last year, said she was “personally frustrated to find that Columbia’s policies and structures were sometimes unable to meet the moment.”

She added the university’s disciplinary system was far more accustomed to dealing with infractions around matters like alcohol use and academic misconduct. But Columbia officials have lately toughened rules around protests and scrutinized students and faculty members alike.

Some Republican lawmakers pressed the university to take more aggressive action.

Representative Tim Walberg, Republican of Michigan, focused on Joseph Massad, a Columbia professor he accused of glorifying the Oct. 7 attack. Mr. Walberg demanded to know whether Ms. Shipman and Mr. Greenwald would approve tenure for Dr. Massad today.

Both said they would not, prompting Mr. Walberg to retort, “Then why is he still in the classroom?"

In an email on Wednesday, Professor Massad said he had not watched the hearing but had seen some clips. He accused Mr. Walberg of distorting his writing and said it was “unfortunate” that Columbia officials had not defended him.

Professor Massad said it was also “news to me” that he was the subject of a Columbia inquiry, as Dr. Shafik said he was.

Dr. Shafik, who noted that Columbia has about 4,700 faculty members, vowed in the hearing that there would be “consequences” for employees who “make remarks that cross the line in terms of antisemitism.”

So far, Dr. Shafik said, five people have been removed from the classroom or ousted from Columbia in recent months. Dr. Shafik said that Mohamed Abdou, a visiting professor who drew the ire of Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, “is grading his students’ papers and will never teach at Columbia again.” Dr. Abdou did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Columbia’s strategy before Congress: Signal collaboration, and even give some ground.

Congressional witnesses can use an array of approaches to get through a hearing, from defiance to genuflection. Columbia leaders’ approach on Wednesday tilted toward the latter as they faced a proceeding titled, “Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to Antisemitism.”

Ms. Shipman told lawmakers that she was “grateful” for “the spotlight that you are putting on this ancient hatred,” and Mr. Greenwald said the university appreciated “the opportunity to assist the committee in its important effort to examine antisemitism on college campuses.”

But there were moments when university leaders offered more than Washington-ready rhetoric.

When Ms. Stefanik pressed Dr. Shafik to commit to removing Professor Massad from a leadership post, the president inhaled, her hands folded before her on the witness table.

“I think that would be — I think, I would, yes. Let me come back with yes,” Dr. Shafik responded after a few seconds. (After the hearing, a university spokesman said Professor Massad’s term as chair of an academic review panel was already set to end after this semester.)

Representative Kevin Kiley, Republican of California, effectively asked Dr. Shafik to draw a red line for the faculty.

“Would you be willing to make just a statement right now to any members of the faculty at your university that if they engage in antisemitic words or conduct that they should find another place to work?” Mr. Kiley asked.

“I would be happy to make a statement that anyone, any faculty member, at Columbia who behaves in an antisemitic way or in any way a discriminatory way should find somewhere else to go,” Dr. Shafik replied.

Even though the conciliatory tactics regularly mollified lawmakers, they could deepen discontent on campus.

Republicans are already planning another hearing.

The hearing that contributed to the exits of the Harvard and Penn presidents emboldened the Republicans who control the House committee that convened on Wednesday.

Even before the proceeding with Columbia leaders, they had already scheduled a hearing for next month with top officials from the school systems in New York City, Montgomery County, Md., and Berkeley, Calif.

Stephanie Saul and Anemona Hartocollis contributed reporting.

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Anusha Bayya

Riley Chodak, 22, is graduating in a month and said she feels like her senior-year college experience has been snatched away from her because of the atmosphere on campus. “The fact that our campus is blocked off — it feels a little bit like a war zone here,” the Ohio native said. She said she believes the university is “cracking down on anyone who's trying to show anyone solidarity.”

Sharon Otterman

And we are adjourned! No single standout moment. This hearing was perhaps most remarkable for how much the Columbia representatives agreed with the committee that antisemitism was a serious problem on its campus.

It remains to be seen how Columbia’s faculty will respond to their president's pledges to crack down on Joseph Massad and other tenured faculty that the committee targeted as antisemitic and demanded disciplinary action be taken against.

In her closing statement, Representative Virginia Foxx is using some of the thousands of documents she got from Columbia to fact check some of their remarks. She says it was misleading for Columbia to say 15 students have been suspended after Oct. 7. She said only three students were, for antisemitic conduct, and those were lifted. She also says the only two students who remain suspended are the two Jewish students who were accused of attacking a protest with a foul-smelling substance.

Mimi Gupta, 45, a Columbia grad student, was in the Multicultural Center on campus where President Shafik’s testimony is being broadcast on the big screen. “The president of Columbia is just getting eviscerated," she said.

“Senators, they just are asking really leading questions, talking over her and the students are just gasping and are shocked,” she said. Some in the audience occasionally piped up, shouting towards the screen when they felt that those grilling Shafik were being particularly hostile.

Stephanie Saul

Who are the Columbia professors mentioned in the hearing?

Several Columbia faculty members — Joseph Andoni Massad, Katherine Franke and Mohamed Abdou — were in the spotlight at Wednesday’s hearing before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

All three had taken pro-Palestinian stances, and lawmakers grilled university officials over how they responded to what Columbia’s President Nemat Shafik agreed were “unacceptable” comments by the faculty members.

At the hearing, Dr. Shafik divulged that two of the professors — Dr. Massad and Ms. Franke — were under investigation for making “discriminatory remarks,” and said that Dr. Abdou “will never work at Columbia again.” Such responses drew a sharp rebuke from some professors and the American Association of University Professors, which said she capitulated to political grandstanding and, in the process, violated established tenets of academic freedom.

“We are witnessing a new era of McCarthyism where a House committee is using college presidents and professors for political theater,” said Irene Mulvey, national president of the AAUP. She added, “President Shafik’s public naming of professors under investigation to placate a hostile committee sets a dangerous precedent for academic freedom and has echoes of the cowardice often displayed during the McCarthy era.”

Dr. Massad, who is of Palestinian Christian descent, was the focus of Representative Tim Walberg’s questioning. He teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia, where he also received his Ph.D. in political science.

Long known for his anti-Israel positions, he published a controversial article in The Electronic Intifada last October, in the wake of the Hamas attack, describing it as a “resistance offensive” staged in retaliation to Israel’s settler-colonies near the Gaza border.

The piece drew a visceral response and demands for his dismissal in a petition by a Columbia student that was signed by tens of thousands of people. The petition specifically criticized Dr. Massad’s use of the word “awesome” to describe the scene of the attack.

Dr. Massad’s posture has drawn controversy for years. When he was awarded tenure in 2009, 14 Columbia professors expressed their concern in a letter to the provost. Generally, professors with tenure face a much higher bar for termination than those without the status.

More recently, however, professors nationally have rallied to support him, emphasizing his academic right to voice his opinion.

In a statement after the hearing, Dr. Massad said that the House committee members had mischaracterized his article. Mr. Walberg said that Dr. Massad had said Hamas’s murder of Jews was “awesome, astonishing, astounding and incredible.”

“I certainly said nothing of the sort,” Dr. Massad said.

In testimony responding to questions from Mr. Walberg, a Michigan Republican, Dr. Shafik said that Dr. Massad had been removed from a leadership role at the university, where he headed an academic review panel.

But Dr. Massad said in an email that he had not been notified by Columbia that he was under investigation, adding that he had been previously scheduled to end his chairmanship of the academic review committee at the end of the semester, a statement that a spokesman for Columbia verified after the hearing.

Dr. Massad said it was “unfortunate” that Dr. Shafik and other university leaders “would condemn fabricated statements that I never made when all three of them should have corrected the record to show that I never said or wrote such reprehensible statements.”

Katherine Franke, a law professor at Columbia, was also mentioned in the hearing for her activist role and a comment that “all Israeli students who served in the I.D.F. are dangerous and shouldn’t be on campus,” referring to the Israel Defense Forces.

Ms. Franke recently wrote a piece in The Nation raising questions about academic freedom at Columbia, where she has taught since 1999.

In response to the hearing, Ms. Franke said she had made a comment in a radio program that some students who served in the I.D.F. had harassed others on campus, a reference to an incident in which pro-Palestinian protesters said they were sprayed with a noxious chemical.

“I do not believe, nor did I say, that ‘all Israeli students who served in the I.D.F. are dangerous and should not be on campus,’” she said.

Mohamed Abdou was also named in the hearing. Dr. Abdou was hired as a visiting scholar for the Spring 2024 term, and was teaching a course called “ Decolonial-Queerness and Abolition. ”

A biography on Columbia’s website describes Dr. Abdou as “a North African-Egyptian Muslim anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition and decolonization.”

Representative Elise Stefanik asked why he was hired even after his social media post on Oct. 11 that read, “I’m with Hamas & Hezbollah & Islamic Jihad.” Dr. Shafik said, “He will never work at Columbia again. Dr. Abdou did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Sheldon Pollock, a retired Columbia professor who serves on the executive committee of Columbia’s American Association of University Professors chapter, called such comments about specific professors “deeply worrying,” adding that he thought Dr. Shafik was “bullied by these people into saying things I’m sure she regrets.”

He continued: “What happened to the idea of academic freedom” in today’s testimony? “I don’t think that phrase was used even once.”

A spokesman for Columbia declined to comment on the criticism of Dr. Shafik.

Elise Stefanik is up again. She is trying to get Shafik to condemn “from the River to the Sea” as antisemitic and discipline students for saying it. Shafik says “we are looking at it.”

Annie Karni

Stefanik asked the same question of Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard University. Gay’s response was that, while she personally thought the language was “abhorrent,” the university embraced “a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.”

Several Republicans have now praised the Columbia representatives for giving clear answers to their questions.

Stefanik seems to have pushed Shafik into committing to remove a professor, Joseph Massad, who has become a focus of the hearing because of his statements celebrating the Hamas attacks, as chair of the academic review committee. Shafik appeared flustered by the line of questioning, and confused about his current status. But she answered “yes” when asked if she would commit to removing him as chair.

“He was spoken to by his head of department and his dean.” “And what was he told?” “I was not in those conversations, I think —” “But you’re not what he was told —” “That language was unacceptable.” “What was he told? What was he told?” “That that language was unacceptable.” “And were there any other enforcement actions taken? Any other disciplinary actions taken?” “In his case? He has not repeated anything like that ever since.” “Does he need to repeat stating that the massacre of Israeli civilians was awesome? Does he need to repeat his participation in an unauthorized pro-Hamas demonstration on April 4? Has he been terminated as chair?” “Congresswoman, I want to confirm the facts before getting back to you.” “I know you confirmed that he was under investigation.” “Yes, I can confirm that.” “Did you confirm he was still the chair?” “I need to confirm that with you. I’m —” “Well, let me ask you this: Will you make the commitment to remove him as chair?” “I think that would be — I think, I would, yes. Let me come back with yes.”

Representative Elise Stefanik is challenging President Shafik after she had said in earlier testimony there had not been anti-Jewish protests on campus. Now, under questioning, she acknowledges anti-Jewish things were said at protests.

Overall, Republicans on this committee are pushing Columbia to take a tough stance on defining what antisemitism is, and include anti-Zionist speech, something it has tried not to do. It doesn’t have an official definition of the term.

Representative Aaron Bean, a Republican of Florida, congratulates the Columbia witnesses, saying they did better than the presidents of Harvard and Penn at their hearing in December. They were able to say they were against antisemitism, but he says that there is still fear on campus among Jewish students. “You are saying the right things.”

While there have been some tense moments in the hearing, there has not yet been the kind of viral moment related to the university’s inadequate response to antisemitism that House Republicans were able to create in the infamous hearing with the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and M.I.T. But that exchange, which ultimately lead to the ouster of two Ivy League presidents, came at the tail end of a session that lasted four and a half hours.

Here are some of the recent antisemitism allegations against Columbia.

The House committee investigating Columbia University for antisemitism has claimed that “an environment of pervasive antisemitism has been documented at Columbia for more than two decades” and that the administration has not done enough in response.

Here are some of the recent allegations :

On Oct. 11, 2023, a Columbia student who is Israeli was beaten with a stick by a former undergraduate who had been ripping down pictures of Israeli hostages, according to the New York Police Department.

Multiple students say they have been cursed at for being Jewish. One student held up a sign in October that read “Columbia doesn’t care about the safety and well-being of Jewish students.”

Following allegations that two Israeli students released a foul-smelling chemical at a pro-Palestinian demonstration in January, a poster appeared around campus with the image of a blue and white skunk with a Star of David on its back.

Several professors have made antisemitic remarks or expressed support for the Oct. 7 attack, including Joseph Massad, a professor of modern Arab politics, who published an article on Oct. 8 describing the attack with terms such as “awesome” and “astounding.”

Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, spoke on behalf of pro-Palestinian students who were suspended or hurt. Shafik said she suspended students after a Resistance 101 event, where people spoke in support of Hamas, because they did not cooperate with the investigation. Omar also asks about an alleged chemical attack on pro-Palestinian protesters. Shafik says she reached out to those students, but that the investigation is still with the police.

Omar, one of just two Muslim women serving in Congress, is grilling Shafik from the left, using her time to ask why pro-Palestinian students on campus were evicted, suspended, harassed and intimidated for their participation in a pro-Palestinian event. Shafik said it was a very serious situation and the students refused to cooperate with the investigation.

Two professors, Joseph Massad and Katherine Franke, are “under investigation for discriminatory remarks,” Shafik says, apparently breaking some news here.

Representative Jamaal Bowman, a Democrat of New York, is trying to make the case for pro-Palestinian students who feel they have a right to express their views, saying that those views aren’t necessarily hateful, even if they make people feel uncomfortable. He’s entering for the record a letter from 600 faculty and students supporting open inquiry on campus.

The hearing is back after a brief recess. The length of the proceedings could prove important, since Claudine Gay, Harvard’s former president, has partly blamed the protracted nature of an exchange during December’s hearing for answers she gave that drew widespread criticism.

Representative Lisa McClain, Republican of Michigan, is drilling down on whether there is a definition on campus for antisemitism. David Schizer, who is a co-chair of the university's task force on antisemitism, calls a New York Times article about how the task force has no definition false. However, the committee has no official definition for antisemitism. He offers his own personal definition to the committee, as does Shafik. “For me personally, any discrimination against people of the Jewish faith is antisemitism,” she said.

Earlier in the hearing, Claire Shipman, co-chair of Columbia's board of trustees, detailed steps Columbia has taken to try to get the tensions under control, including suspending two student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.

Columbia has been host to charged protests over Gaza in recent months.

Columbia University has toughened how it handles campus protests since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7. Here are some of the key moments:

Oct. 12, 2023: Hundreds of protesters gathered at Columbia University for tense pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrations that caused school administrators to take the then-extraordinary step of closing the campus to the public. The school now closes the campus routinely when protests are scheduled.

Nov. 9, 2023: Columbia suspended two main pro-Palestinian student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, after they held an unauthorized student walkout. Administrators said the event had “proceeded despite warnings and contained threatening rhetoric and intimidation” after one person shouted anti-Jewish epithets. Protest organizers said they had tried to silence the person.

Jan. 19, 2024: Pro-Palestinian protesters said that someone sprayed them with a foul-smelling substance at a rally, causing at least eight students to seek medical treatment. Columbia labeled the incident a possible hate crime, barred the alleged perpetrators from campus and opened an investigation. Protest attendees, citing video evidence , say they believe the perpetrators were two students who had been verbally harassing them, but Columbia has given no details about their identities.

Feb. 19, 2024: Columbia announced a new protest policy . Protests are now only permitted in designated “demonstration areas” on weekday afternoons, and require two days’ notice to administrators. First-time violators receive warnings. Repeat violators are brought before a judicial board.

April 5, 2024: The university’s president announces the immediate suspension of multiple students accused of playing a role in organizing a March 24 event, “ Resistance 101 ,” at which the presenters spoke openly in support of Hamas and other U.S.-designated terrorist organizations. The students were told they would be evicted from student housing.

Representative Burgess Owens, Republican of Utah, is drilling down on an apparent double standard at Columbia. He suggests that it would not be tolerated for a moment if people called an attack on Black people “awesome” and “stunning” but that it has been acceptable for faculty to say about Jewish students for decades.

Representative Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana, is asking about a glossary given out at the School of Social Work that lists a term that appears to classify Jews as white, and therefore privileged. Shafik says it is not an official document. He also asks why the word "folks" is spelled "folx" in the document, a progressive quirk. "They can't spell?" Shafik says, getting an audience chuckle.

Anemona Hartocollis

Representative Gregorio Sablan, a Democrat from the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Island, seized on the fact that Shafik and other Columbia officials had been cut off, and offered them a chance to complete their answers. Shafik said that many of the questionable appointments “were made in the past in a different era, and that era is done.”

Columbia University has been on strict lockdown all week, and today is no exception. Barricades have been erected, numerous police officers are stationed at both main entrances to the campus and no one is being allowed to enter without a Columbia University ID. Protesters have assembled today on Broadway wearing shirts with the words “Revolution Nothing Less!” on the front.

Nicholas Fandos

Elise Stefanik has taken aim at college presidents on elite campuses.

She may not be a committee chair, but perhaps no single Republican lawmaker has done more to exert pressure on elite universities since the Israel-Gaza war began than Representative Elise Stefanik of New York.

Ms. Stefanik was already a rising star within her party, the top-ranking woman in Republican House leadership and considered a potential presidential running mate when the House Education and Workforce Committee began investigating antisemitism on college campuses. But her grilling of the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and M.I.T. at a December hearing became a defining moment .

Ms. Stefanik pressed the leaders to say whether students would violate their universities’ codes of conduct if they called for the genocide of Jews. Their dispassionate, lawyerly answers about context and free speech set off a firestorm that ultimately helped cost two of them, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Elizabeth Magill of the Penn, their jobs.

The exchange also helped win Ms. Stefanik widespread attention and rare plaudits from grudging liberals, who typically revile her for embracing former President Donald J. Trump and his lies about the 2020 election. On Wednesday, she was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people of 2024.

Ms. Stefanik is a graduate of Harvard herself. When she first won her seat in 2014, she was the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives. She beat a centrist Democrat, and in the early days of her career, she took on more moderate stances.

These days, she describes herself as “ultra MAGA” and “proud of it .”

Ms. Stefanik, 39, has said she was “stunned” by the responses of the presidents during the last hearing. She plans to reprise that role on Wednesday, grilling the president of Columbia University, Nemat Shafik, and members of its board of trustees.

In an opinion piece in The New York Post before the hearing, Ms. Stefanik said antisemitism at Columbia had become “egregious and commonplace.” She charged Dr. Shafik with failing “to ensure Jewish students are able to attend school in a safe environment.”

Shafik emphasizes that Columbia has ramped up disciplinary proceedings.

In her opening remarks, Nemat Shafik, president of Columbia University, gave an idea of how pervasive complaints of antisemitism have become since Oct. 7, adding that Columbia had been aggressive in pursuing disciplinary action.

Dr. Shafik said that the disciplinary process at Columbia, which has about 5,000 Jewish students, typically handles 1,000 student-conduct cases a year. Most of those are related to typical campus infractions, such as academic dishonesty, the use of alcohol and illegal substances, and one-on-one student complaints.

“Today, student-misconduct cases are far outpacing last year,” said Dr. Shafik, who goes by Minouche.

She did not provide an exact number of complaints this year, and did not address what portion of the increase had to do with protests related to the Israel-Hamas war. But she implied that it was significant.

The university’s current policies were “not designed to address the types of events and protests that followed the Oct. 7 attack,” Dr. Shafik said.

The task of combating antisemitism provided a vehicle for underscoring why colleges and universities matter, she said. Antisemitism had been a scourge for some 2,000 years, she said. “One would hope that by the 21st century, antisemitism would have been related to the dustbin of history, but it has not.”

To deal with it, Dr. Shafik said, she would look toward periods “where antisemitism has been in abeyance.”

“Those periods were characterized by enlightened leadership, inclusive cultures and clarity about rights and obligations,” she said, adding that she was committed to fostering those values at Columbia.

Who are Claire Shipman and David Greenwald?

Testifying alongside Nemat Shafik, the Columbia University president, are the two co-chairs of Columbia’s board of trustees, Claire Shipman and David Greenwald . Like Dr. Shafik, they are relatively new to their roles.

Ms. Shipman is a journalist and author who spent three decades working in television news for ABC, NBC and CNN, and who now writes books about women’s leadership and confidence. A graduate of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and Columbia College, she joined the board of trustees in 2013. She became co-chair in September.

Mr. Greenwald is a corporate lawyer who was chairman of the law firm Fried Frank before stepping down earlier this year. He has also worked as a deputy general counsel for Goldman Sachs. A graduate of Columbia Law School, he also serves on other nonprofit boards, including for NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. He was elected to the 21-member board in 2018, and become co-chair in September.

Both were on the presidential search committee, which oversaw the process of selecting Dr. Shafik.

David Schizer, a former dean of Columbia Law School and a co-chair of the school’s antisemitism task force , is also testifying. He was announced as an additional witness Monday.

The New York Times

Read Nemat Shafik’s prepared opening remarks.

In her prepared opening statement, Nemat Shafik, the president of Columbia University, laid out ways the university has been responding to antisemitism on campus.

Here’s the statement.

Nemat shafik is new to columbia, but not to high-profile settings..

Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, is no stranger to handling crises.

As a young economist at the World Bank, she advised governments in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. As a deputy managing director at the International Monetary Fund, she worked to stabilize national economies during the European debt crisis, and oversaw loans to Middle East countries during the uprisings of the Arab Spring.

Now, as the first female president of Columbia University, Dr. Shafik, who goes by Minouche, finds herself at the center of American political tensions over the war in Gaza and intense criticism over Columbia’s efforts to counter antisemitism.

Dr. Shafik’s supporters hope that her experience — and also what they describe as her cut-to-the-chase decision-making style — will help her navigate the kind of questioning that tripped up her peers from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania in December.

Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Dr. Shafik’s family relocated to the United States in the 1960s after their home and property in Egypt were nationalized, she has said in interviews.

She lived in Savannah, Ga., as a child, and in Egypt as a teenager, returning to the United States to get her bachelor’s degree at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her Ph.D. in economics from St. Antony’s College, at Oxford University.

After leaving the I.M.F. in 2014, she was a deputy governor of the Bank of England before returning to academia as president of the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2017. She started at Columbia in July . Her response to campus tensions sparked by the Israel-Hamas war has been her first big test.

Read Representative Foxx’s opening remarks.

Virginia Foxx, who chairs the House Education and the Workforce Committee, listed the reasons for calling Wednesday’s hearing on campus antisemitism in her prepared opening remarks.

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Backlash as USC cancels valedictorian’s speech over support for Palestine

Asna Tabassum says university is ‘succumbing to a campaign of hate meant to silence my voice’ after decision to scrap speech

The University of Southern California is facing intense backlash for the decision to cancel the valedictorian speech of a Muslim student at the commencement ceremony in May, a decision which the student has criticized as being silenced by anti-Palestinian hatred for her views on human rights.

In a missive to the USC community, the university’s provost, Andrew Guzman, wrote that the Los Angeles university took the unprecedented step of canceling Asna Tabassum’s planned speech because the “alarming tenor” of reactions to her selection as valedictorian – along with “the intensity of feelings” surrounding Israel’s ongoing military strikes in Gaza – had created “substantial risks relating to security”.

Guzman’s statement did not refer to Tabassum by name, or specify what about her speech, background or political views had raised concerns. Nor did it detail any particular threats.

The decision has been met with outrage from online commenters and the Council of American Islamic Relations (Cair), the US’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, which, in a statement said Tabassum described herself as “shocked … and profoundly disappointed” after being informed on Monday that she would be barred from addressing her fellow graduates at their 10 May commencement.

So at @USC cops decide what speech is allowed?! According to the @latimes , @esouthersHVE —president of LA’s Board of Police Commissioners, law and order enthusiast and staunch LAPD apologist—“was part of the decision” to cancel valedictorian Asna Tabassum’s commencement speech. pic.twitter.com/ClO9M1atT2 — Jody David Armour (@NiggaTheory) April 16, 2024

“The university is succumbing to a campaign of hate meant to silence my voice,” Tabassum said in the statement.

Cair dismissed USC’s decision as “cowardly” and called on the university to reverse course – but Guzman maintained that “there was no free-speech entitlement to speak at a commencement”.

“While this is disappointing, tradition must give way to safety,” Guzman continued. “The issue here is how best to maintain campus security and safety, period.”

Since Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel killed more than 1,100 mostly civilians as well as captured hostages, and the resulting assault on Gaza has killed in excess of 30,000 mostly civilians – mainly women and children – while pushing the territory toward famine, US campuses have been roiled with debate over growing support for Palestine as well as dueling accusations of rising Islamophobia and antisemitism.

It was amid that climate that a USC committee selected Tabassum out of about 100 students with perfect, or nearly perfect, grade-point averages who applied to be valedictorian for a spring graduation ceremony honoring more than 19,000 graduates before an anticipated 65,000 spectators, according to Guzman.

NBC News described Tabassum as a first-generation south Asian American Muslim from Chino Hills – a city east of Los Angeles – in her fourth year as a biomedical engineering student. She has also been pursuing a minor in resistance to genocide.

At the top of Tabassum’s Instagram account, a link directs users to a slideshow encouraging readers “to learn about what’s happening in Palestine and how to help”. The presentation also advocates for “one Palestinian state”, saying that “would mean Palestinian liberation and the complete abolishment of the state of Israel”.

Although Tabassum told NBC’s Los Angeles affiliate that she posted the link five years earlier and did not author the slideshow, pro-Israel and Jewish groups objected to USC’s selection of her as valedictorian based on her social media activity.

In the Monday statement, USC said that their commencement ceremonies draw a crowd of more that 65,000 people which is a challenge for the public safety department on campus to handle. The university also cited heated demonstrations that have taken place at other schools as a part of their reasoning.

“The intensity of feelings, fueled by both social media and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, has grown to include many voices outside of USC and has escalated to the point of creating substantial risks relating to security and disruption at commencement,” the statement read. “We cannot ignore the fact that similar risks have led to harassment and even violence at other campuses.”

A February protest against an event organized by Jewish students at the University of California, Berkeley, resulted in police evacuating the speaker – who was from Israel – as well as the attendees at the gathering after demonstrators broke through the doors.

USC’s public safety reasoning did not sit well with Jody David Armour, a law professor at the university who specializes in race issues and legal decision-making.

“So at USC cops decide what speech is allowed?” Armour posted on X.

Tabassum said she also was told USC possessed the ability “to take appropriate safety measures for my valedictory speech” but opted not to because a tougher security posture was “not what the university wants to present as an image”.

Instead, Tabassum said USC was “caving to fear and rewarding hatred”, which she said was being directed by “anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian voices” targeting her “because of my uncompromising belief in human rights for all”.

Among those who claimed to have taken offense to Tabassum’s selection as valedictorian was the group Trojans for Israel, which said it “strongly supports the right to free expression – including informed criticism of the Israeli government”.

“However,” a statement from the group said, “rhetoric that denies the right of the Jewish people to self-determination or calls for the destruction of the only Jewish state in the world must be denounced as antisemitic bigotry.”

The group added: “All … eligible valedictory candidates have valuable work ethic and accomplishments, but the university chose a candidate who publicly propagates antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric as the most esteemed representative of the class of 2024.”

Guzman’s message to the USC community said “social media presence” was not part of the criteria that the university used to evaluate its valedictorian candidates.

The leader of Cair’s Los Angeles chapter, Hussam Ayloush, on Monday said criticism of Tabassum had been “dishonest and defamatory … [and] nothing more than thinly veiled manifestations of Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism which have been weaponized against college students across the country who speak up for human rights – and for Palestinian humanity”.

Ayloush also said: “USC cannot hide its cowardly decision behind a disingenuous concern for security.”

In her statement, Tabassum said her undergraduate minor studies in genocide resistance had shown her the danger of allowing “cries for equality and human dignity” to be deliberately conflated with “expressions of hatred”.

“Due to widespread fear, I was hoping to use my commencement speech to inspire my classmates with a message of hope,” she wrote.

Reuters contributed to this report

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Reporting by Jessie Pang, James Pomfret and Joyce Zhou; Writing by James Pomfret; Editing by Michael Perry

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Jessie Pang joined Reuters in 2019 after an internship. She covers Hong Kong with a focus on politics and general news.

Joyce is a talented visual journalist based in Hong Kong and Greater China, driven by a profound passion for capturing historical moments and sharing stories through the medium of video. Her exceptional skills and dedication to her craft earned her the prestigious title of Reuters Video Journalist of the Year in 2019. Joyce's work revolves around documenting significant events and exploring the rich cultural tapestry of the region. Outside of her professional pursuits, she finds solace and inspiration in hiking, immersing herself in the beauty of nature. With a deep appreciation for tea, Joyce enjoys discovering its diverse flavours and delving into its rich history.

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