Homeschool

I fealt that the speaker who was advocating for homeschool used a variety of appeals in her speech.  She started off by using a strong appeal to emotion when she talked about violence in school and even told the anecdote about a child being the victim of violence at school.  I thought that overal she had a good speech, but to be honest she almost completely lost me in the beginning when she was talking about school violence.  I thought that it was a false dilemma falacy to present homeschool as the only way to protect children from violence and I also thought that she greatly exaggerated the level of violence in the school system.  She was good overall at citing sources and gaining credibility, but she leaned too heavily on the fact that the audience agreed with her that public schools are violent and dangerous and gave what I fealt was an insufficient amount of evidence to support the level of her claims.  I thought that later she did a much better job using an appeal to reason when she gave the statistics about how much time the average student is actually learning in school versus how much time they spend attentively learning in homeschool.

The speaker who was against homeschooling did a good job presenting all of the options for educating children and avoided a false dilemma fallacy.  Some of his reasoning was based upon an appeal to cultural beliefs by repeatedly saying that the public school system has worked for so many in the past.  He knew that it was statistically probable that most of his audience had attended public schooling and he exploited that fact by stating that public school had brought himself and a lot of others (his audience included) to a successful adulthood.  He also appealed to logic when he quoted the line from one of his sources that, "a parent's greatest challenge is educating themselves on how and what to teach."  He also went on to say that most people do not have enough all around knowledge to teach their children everything they need to know.  I think it was also a little bit of an appeal to emotion when he asked the audience if they could imagine quitting their jobs and staying at home teaching their children full time.  He also said repeatedly that parents are not teachers.

Overall I think that I learned from the first speaker not to alienate my audience by relying to heavily on one aspect of my argument, because if they don't agree then I could lose them right off.  I thought that the second speaker did a great job of giving a good compromise to oppose his opposition when he said how important it is for parents to be supportive.  He agreed with the importance of the role a parent plays in educating their child, while maintaining a distance from the more extreme view of a parent being their child's only source of education.