Tuition: Persuasive speech

Specific purpose: To persuade my audience that paying tuition is essential today.

Central idea: Participation of students on expenses of their university study is the best solution for future.


INTRODUCTION

I. Introduction

A. School and school (Slovakia versus USA)

1. Look around you. Green wooden tables, hard chair, old projector for slides, cracked blackboard, sunblinds broken down… ordinary, sad state of most of our schools.

2. Close your eyes… and imagine yourself, sitting on a comfortable chair, professor giving his presentation with help of multimedia projector, computers, flip charts, quality books – everything in this very room as well as in all the others in our school…

3. Can you see the difference? Now open your eyes…

(I will show a letter with sign “$25,000”)

4. This is the difference.

B. Nowadays, big discussion spread in Slovakia about tuition at universities. Maybe I made a big thing of the example, but I guess you got the point.

C. In next few minutes, I will tell you what the current situation is, how it could be reformed and – most important – why is it important to reform the system and why students should pay tuition.


BODY

I. Current Situation at Slovak Universities

A. The school system is fusty, old fashioned, with generally low quality.

1. Education is based on memorizing theorems that often do not reflect practice.

2. Both students and professors miss motivation, initiative and creativity.

3. Thanks to that, we are wasting precious potential of young people.

B. Students are still less qualified when leaving universities.

1. Nowadays, students often only have 3 goals: credit, regular exams and final state examination.

2. Students don’t mind that they get low quality education.

3. Technical equipment is getting “out of date”, there is not enough money to buy new.

C. Constitution says: “Everybody has a right for free university education according to capabilities of citizen and society.”

1. In current situation, it is beyond our capabilities to maintain and develop the school system and without reform, it can collapse one day – and the day may come soon.

2. Already today, Slovak education is not free – it is financed from the state budget.

3. In other words, all citizens in Slovakia contribute to every single of us by about 3,000 Sk a year – also masons, clerks and others that may not have anything to do with universities.

4. In other words, nowadays everybody pays for our education; except of – us.

(Transition: As you can see, the question is not whether university school system needs more money; the question is where to get it. Frankly – do you think that our school system is good and we get everything that we could get? My answer is – no.)