The other day I was lucky enough to attend the graduation ceremony at La Chataigneraie, one of the three campuses of the International School of Geneva. It was a special graduation: 50 years of the IB at the campus with a guest star appearance of the first IB Diploma coordinator, Anthony Peiris, who spoke touchingly about how different things were in 1973.

However, the undisputed highlight of the graduation came right at the end with an extraordinary speech by a graduate called (appropriately) Hector, who took to the stage and swept up the audience with him as his speech drew increasingly comical and intricate parallels between Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme. Hector had carefully mapped out each component of the IB to an Ancient Greek punishment, hero, chimaera or monster. The rhythmic quality of the delivery bewitched the audience and by the end of it, we were hanging on every word until the elegiac conclusion could create no other conclusion than a standing ovation and several seconds of applause, foot stomping and cheering: it was one of those speeches where halfway through something tells you “this is a great speech”.

Speech making was a fundamental part of a classical Western education, so much so that the school of the Sophists, against which Socrates rebelled, made up of giants of rhetoric such as Gorgias, Protagoras and Demosthenes, was the core social institution of Athens. The Ancient Greek trivium, which was considered the essence of learning, consisted of grammar, logic and rhetoric. Rhetoric continued to be taught as a major part of the curriculum until it died out in the Middle Ages. 

Speech makers have different methods: the great Roman orator Cicero is said to have memorised long passages by imagining that he was walking through his villa, attributing each room to a theme by way of a mnemonic; Winston Churchill, whose speeches remain some of the greatest in the English language, composed many of them in his bathtub while consuming a bottle (or more!) of whiskey and they say that Martin Luther King wrote his magnetic, soaring and eternally evocative “I Have A Dream” speech through several different iterations, starting at the age of 15, gradually working up to the famous version he gave in Washington in 1963. Some of the better known speeches of more recent times come from teenagers or very young adults such as Greta Thurnberg and Amanda Gorman. 

There is no recipe for a great speech but similar figures of speech tend to be used (anaphora, anadiplosis, epanalepsis, chiasmus) and, as Aristotle said, a great speech should contain three features: logos (logic), pathos (emotions) and ethos (values). As we all know, stories are more interesting to listen to than laundry lists and it’s best when the speaker is engaged with the audience and not reading off a script (or a phone!) The most formulaic approach is the TedTalk, always 18 minutes and following a very similar pattern of emotional hooks, data, big questions, humour and so on.

You don’t need to be reading this to know just how important speech making is in many walks of professional life, from job interviews to formal presentations, political gatherings to official statements. Even for non-professional moments such as weddings, funerals and birthdays, knowing how to make a speech helps. This is not to say that everybody should be able to make a good speech, but I do think that it is helpful to give students some keys.

Interestingly, most curriculum frameworks around the world do not have explicit and intentional courses in public speaking. Students will do presentations in classes and sit oral examinations, but there are relatively few examples where public speaking is a core subject, as it was in Ancient Greece. This is unfortunate given just how important speech making is. Approaches to remedy this can go from teaching public speaking as a unit in language classes (where students can study and deliver great speeches) to designing assessment criteria for presentations that focus as much on the technical and emotional power of rhetoric as the content (something I do with my philosophy students, assessing them on the innovation and communication as much as content). Ensuring that students are given ample opportunity to give speeches in assemblies is important, as is coaching them in how to use a microphone, how to communicate with the audience, being aware of body language and presence, tone, rhythm and style.

As we continue to work together across systems to make sure our curricula are relevant, may we draw upon the power of speech making to give our students strategies and lessons to empower them to be confident and agile in their public communication.