At the Porchlight (Books) blog on August 21, 2020 John Bowe
published a ChangeThis manifesto titled Talking About Talking: the art of
public speaking in an age of disconnection which can be downloaded as a 16-page
pdf file. In it he claimed (my italics):
“….The average American today speaks 16,000 to 20,000 words
a day. We depend on speech – and persuasion - as much as ever to define and
explain ourselves, to give and receive orders, to make our case for love,
money, and power. But the teaching of rhetoric – and public speaking – has all
but disappeared. Modern education curricula train us from the age of five
through our late teens and even mid-twenties to read, write, and master the
processing of ideas to paper. But what about interacting live, with actual
humans?”
That claim about public speaking having almost disappeared from
curricula ignores what the Common Core State Standards for English Language
Arts (ELA) say about Speaking and Listening. If you download the 66-page pdf you will find the following description of what Grade 11 and 12 students are
expected to know (page 50) about Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas:
“Present information, findings, and supporting evidence,
conveying a clear and distinctive perspective, such that listeners can follow
the line of reasoning, alternative or opposing perspectives are addressed, and
the organization, development, substance, and style are appropriate to purpose,
audience, and a range of formal and informal tasks.
Make strategic use of digital media (e.g. textual, graphical,
audio, visual and interactive elements) in presentations to enhance
understanding of findings, reasoning, and evidence and to add interest.
Adapt speech to a variety of contexts and tasks,
demonstrating a command of formal English when indicated or appropriate.”
The South Kingston High School in Wakefield, Rhode Island
has a 12-page .pdf about their specific curriculum.
How about universities? There is an article in the 2020
Basic Communication Course Annual titled Mastering Essential Learning Outcomes
for Public Speaking that opens by stating:
“According to the Association of American Colleges and
Universities (AAC&U), almost 70% of accredited colleges and universities across
the United States have a required general education basic communication course
(Hart Research Associates, 2016). The most common version of this course is
public speaking, with more than 61% of institutions responding to a basic
course survey indicating this is the course structure they use (Morreale et al,
2016). With thousands of basic communication courses being offered in any given
semester, it is beneficial to have an established set of communications
competencies that guide course development, as well as a variety of measures
that can be utilized to assess course effectiveness and learning.”
That Morreale et al, 2016 article is titled Study IX of the
basic communication course at two- and four-year U.S. colleges and universities:
a re-examination of our discipline’s “front porch.” It appeared in Communication Education, which is a magazine
published by the National Communication Association (NCA), founded back in
1914. The previous study in 2010 is described in another article titled The
basic communication course at two- and four-year U.S. colleges and universities:
Study VIII – the 40th anniversary, which indicates in its abstract that that
series of surveys began back in 1968.
On August 14, 2020 I had blogged about how Toastmaster
magazine is spreading nonsense from John Bowe about how common the fear of
public speaking is. In a post on September 24, 2018 titled Teenage students
need to learn how to speak up in classes I had mentioned the Common Core standards.
