Rhetorical Analysis and Quotables- Sindy J.

Part 4- Rhetorical Analysis

Wendy Berliner is one of the CEOs of the Education Media Centre. Berliner is also an award-winning journalist and an author of many pieces like the “Great Minds And How To Grow Them” and “How To Succeed At School”. Berliner makes sure to target the educators, general public and the Department of Education so there can be changes made. Berliner wants them to encourage curiosity to be supported in schools and not seen as a disturbance by teachers. The author chooses the genre of the feature article to include pictures of how curiosity can help kids become more interested if it is let in class. This lets her audience know how it could look like if they push for it. Berliner uses pathos by giving evidence of how it’s children feel when teachers incorporate activates that get their curiosity going. The use of ethos is shown by Berliner because she includes that she is author to show she is trustworthy. While using logos by including research from researchers from the University of Michigan CS Mott Children Hospitals and more to prove her claim. This piece was written on The Guardian, a British daily newspaper, which is a proven to be a very credible source. 

Part 5- Notable Quotes

“… a leading international authority on curiosity in children, finds questioning drops like a stone once children start school. When her team logged classroom questions, she found the youngest children in an American suburban elementary school asked between two and five questions in a two-hour period. Even worse, as they got older the children gave up asking altogether. There were two-hour stretches in fifth grade (year 6) where 10 and 11-year-olds failed to ask their teacher a single question.” (Berliner 2)

“‘When you visit schools in many parts of the world it can be difficult to remember they are full of active, intellectual children, because no one is talking about their inner mental lives. How well they behave, and how they perform seem much more important to many people in the educational communities. Often educational bureaucracies have shunted curiosity to the side.’” (Berliner 3)

“When teachers teach young children not to ask questions, it is not surprising that high-performing students studied by American researchers in 2013 were found to be less curious, because they saw curiosity as a risk to their results. The questions they asked were aimed at improving their results, whereas the questions asked by more curious students were aimed at understanding a topic more deeply.” (Berliner 3)