A SAMPLING OF SENIOR RHETORIC PRESENTATIONS

Rhetorical training at Westminster Academy focuses on equipping students to be able to persuade logically and passionately with integrity.  The presentations require that students show the ability to synthesize learning across the liberal arts AND then to persuasively and winsomely in writing and orally, present and defend a thesis. 

As with the other skills of the Trivium (the Verbal Arts), rhetoric is a tool (see why Rhetoric). While rhetoric is taught at Westminster Academy as a formal subject to the more advanced student, the habits of rhetoric are developed for all students of all ages even from day one. 

Westminster Academy�s formal instruction in rhetoric includes substantial study of both great rhetorical works, great rhetoricians and their methods.

Once as sophomores and twice as both juniors and seniors, our students are required to make formal rhetorical presentations before their peers, faculty, parents and guests. Each presenter must defend orally his or her presentation.   The majority of presentations last thirty minutes or more.   At the end of each presentation, the student is given a comphrehensive evaluation. Our belief and prayer is that this training, which incorporates earlier training in formal logic and consistent Biblical thinking throughout the curriculum, equips students to be able to respond to the culture AND by God's grace, to influence it.  Following are examples of senior works:

1999
John Locke: Reality According to Knowledge and Reason 

2000
Pragmatism and Christianity: A Squirrel, Philosophy and Compatibility
The Biblical Mandate for Ethical Hunting
Sartrean Ethics: Lofty Aspirations and Brutal Reality
C.S. Lewis and Religious Language  

2001
Another Great Depression?
Social Insecurity: The Imminent Failure of Social Security and What Must Be Done to Solve the Problem
The Legacy of Malcolm X: Hero or Racist?
Hiroshima and the Atomic Bomb
The Causes of the Great Depression