Rhetorical Analysis Of Ted's Speech

Geoffrey Canada, head of the Harlem Children’s Zone, gives a speech at Ted on May, 2013. In the speech, he requires educators to innovate the education. He mentions education in these days has followed the same path as it has done for last 50 years, whereas technology has been changed. He asserts recent education doesn’t consider children and repeats same business model that has failed. And also he emphasizes the fact that failure shouldn't stop us from stepping forward. Through speech he uses pathos and ethos to criticize education. However, he weakens his argument by committing logical fallacies and hidden assumption. To begin with, since topic is serious, he uses lots of humor and satire to break tension between speaker and audience. He starts his speech with humor and keeps using it through the speech. For example, he tells an episode with his wife and compares poor schools with wine. Through the speech, he employs pathos, mentioning anger for poor education and educator and he insists we are going to lose millions of children needlessly, which evokes sympathy for poor children. However, this statement can be seen as a hyperbole which is the use of exaggeration to create strong impression because …show more content…
Educated people know. And their kids have an advantage. Poor people don’t know.” he declares wealthy people know the importance of brain development and kids whose parents are wealthy have an advantage. And also he uses ad populum argument. He appeals to supposed prejudices by referring the rich know but the poor don’t and people don’t anything for the poor to arouse audiences’ sympathy. He has assumptions that wealthy people know well about education and generalizes that assumption to whole wealthy people. And he regards all school systems as totally failed and implies educators don’t want to make innovation, referring “people in our business get mad about