Teaching rhetoric: A proposal to renew rhetorical education in Hungarian and Central European contexts

Abstract

Rhetorical education faces significant challenges of the virtual knowledge society. Classroom teaching in skill-development still seems inevitable, however, the face-to-face experience has to gain more momentum and improve quality. It is especially important in Central European contexts where the history of teaching rhetoric has not been without fractures after World War II. The present paper is an approach that conceptualizes new aims of teaching rhetoric and suggests ways to reform the educational program of rhetoric at the secondary level. It sets of from the assumption that rhetoric should no longer be conceived and taught of as a toolkit to formulate texts, but rather as a behaviour and sensitivity to human affairs. Thus, rhetorical education should facilitate not so much the production of speeches but the birth of the rhetorical citizen. The education serving this aim does not the eliminate the classical roots of rhetorical literacy. On the contrary, it exploits the dynamic capacities of the two-millennia old faculty. The paper introduces a detailed, three-phased educational process with which rhetorical sensitivity can be bred in the classroom, while improving rhetoric as a subject matter itself