Back to School

Back to School

The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize. -

Franklin D. Roosevelt. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt the school system is very important to Obama and in 2009 he goes "back to school".

Back to school is a pep up speech from Barack Obama. Obama is the leader of the Democratic Party and he is the president of the United States of America. The receivers of the speech are students from Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. The speech is from September 8th 2009.

Political speeches often have to convince the receivers to vote on the speaker's party. In this case Obama doesn't directly want to make the student vote on him for the next selection. Typically a high school student in USA is between twelve and eighteen years old. You have to be eighteen years old before you can vote. It means that almost all the students aren't able to vote. But of course the students get an impression and will maybe vote for him later in their life. You could also imagine that several media attended the speech. Indirectly Obama is trying to convince voters but he also wants to pep the students.

Throughout the speech Obama uses a very easy language. He doesn't use many academic words and it makes the speech very easy to understand. When you consider who the receivers are, it seems logical to use a simple language, since many of the young people would not understand a more academic language. However, I would say this is a more general feature of Obama's speeches.

Obama tells about his own experiences with the school system. Obama begins his speech with a simple question. He asks, "How's everybody doing today?" (l. 1). I think that Obama uses the question to show that he cares about the students. After the question he tells about his own experiences in the school system. "Now I wasn't too happy about getting up that early" (l. 14) I think it is a brilliant way to start the speech. By telling the students that he once was like them he wins a lot of sympathy. It is a great start because I think it catches most of the student's attention. It is not just an old man talking about the school system but a man who knows how they are doing. But he also tells them about all the hard work he was going through before he could be selected as president. Throughout the speech Obama also chooses to tell the students

Later he talks about breaking the social heritage (Like he did). Obama makes it very clear that not everyone has the same possibilities "Maybe you don't have adults in your life who give you the support the you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their jobs."

The Social heritage is an important subject to the fact that Obama is Liberal and unlike a Republican who is conservative he cares about breaking the social heritage. This is expressed in the text where he talks about the government's responsibility. "I've talked a lot about your government's responsibility for setting high standards,