But contrary to conservative rhetoric, studies show that going to college does not make students substantially more liberal.
Demosthenes learned rhetoric by studying the speeches of previous great orators.
The basic learning of the letters and numbers remained the province of the family or a village priest, but the secondary subjects of the trivium grammar, rhetoric, logic were studied in cathedral schools or in schools provided by cities.
Unlike scientific disciplines like astrophysics and biochemistry, or even social sciences like sociology and psychology, English -- understood in its broadest sense as encompassing rhetoric, writing, cultural studies, and film studies -- deals not in data, equations, or experiments (although the "digital humanities" movement is changing some of this).
Eventually there were additions of mathematics, nature study, rhetoric, poetry, grammar, and astronomy all studied, it seems, very largely through the medium of the Irish language.
In particular, it is necessary to note the place that rhetoric (the systematic study of oratory) had assumed in the educational system of the late Roman Empire.
Meanwhile, Obama's rhetoric reflects his study of the nation's founding documents – the US constitution and Declaration of Independence – as well as basic texts of our civic culture, from the Bible to the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D Roosevelt, John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
It made me think of classical lands and of people making long journeys in ancient times to famous cities, to study rhetoric or philosophy or to put a question to the local oracle.
It's not something you shout".... Bill Clinton presents something of a conundrum to academics who study rhetoric: he is the ultimate postmodern political practitioner, a fabulous communicator who almost never says anything memorable... Kennedy biographer Ted Sorensen said: "...Clinton's the master of a practice we never thought of: the applause line".
Apuleius, for example, though born and reared in a small North African town of the 2nd century, was sent to Athens to study rhetoric; on his return he could find not only an audience for his presentations in Greek but ordinary people in the marketplace able to read a letter in that language.
