Public Speaking and Self-Discovery
“Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am! Why can’t I say that, Willy?”
The student—a tenth grader channeling Biff Loman—wraps up the speech from Death of a Salesman and says, gently and simply, “Thank you.” His classmates sit up, as if released from a spell, to offer sincere, unprompted applause. A visitor to this Drama class, I grin broadly behind my mask, confident that my smile isn’t the only one in the audience.
Learning how to write well can be very difficult, and remains a vital component of any liberal arts education worthy of the name; as Robert Frost once told the students of Amherst College: “To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.” On the other hand, we spend far more time speaking and listening than we do writing and reading, and one might wonder if educational institutions should give commensurate attention to oral skills. As the Columbia University linguist John McWhorter recently lamented: “[T]hat there exists an organization like Toastmasters, which fosters ability in public speaking, only underscores that this skill is no longer a given from schooling and general acculturation.” But to prize writing—as our school does—need not imply the disparagement or diminution of the importance of oral communication in its many forms, and Browning works hard to give its boys experience as speakers as well as writers.
Part of this effort exists in technical and pedagogical terms, with projects like the Grade 10 Drama course, the Lyman Tobin Public Speaking program in Grades 3 and 4, and our annual Middle School play. To participate in these activities is to receive significant instruction in how to speak with precision and purpose, how to identify with the intentions of an author, and how to read and respond to an audience. And the successes of these efforts are legible not only in a fourth grader finding his voice in Nelson Mandela’s words, or a Grade 8 boy delivering a crisp Shakespearean soliloquy, but also in downstream pursuits: A bevy of successful auditions for plays at neighboring schools, the engaging and attentive tours given by student volunteers in the Key Society, powerful declamations at Model UN conferences, and so on.
“Speaking well in public simultaneously invites togetherness, demands admiration, and occasions self-discovery.”
At the same time, like seeds that require sun and soil and water, programmatic efforts can only bloom within conditions that support them. First, the careful and dedicated coaching that our thespians and public speakers receive is of particular quality; indeed, our school boasts multiple professional actors among its faculty. And our general approach to instruction in all classes and divisions encourages boys to expand upon the answers they share in class (“Interesting—what makes you say that?”), a teaching move that normalizes oral presentation for students and gives them practice in telling stories and sharing perspectives in a semi-public environment.
Finally, and crucially, all of this requires a student culture that gives peers the safety and security to take chances--and every effort at drama and public speaking is, at some level, a risk—without fear of social opprobrium. Some might imagine schools for boys as places where social foibles and deviations from traditional norms are punished by a peer culture eager to pounce, but this is the stuff of stereotype; at Browning, community emphases on dignity, compassion, and courage help create the kinds of supportive relationships where status hierarchies are leveled, and actors and orators are given the same warmth and approbation as student athletes, musicians, and club leaders. (And, to be sure, the actors and orators are often athletes, musicians, and club leaders themselves.)
With Arthur Miller, we want Browning boys to know who they are—and so we want to give them the chance to animate the written word through speech, to develop habits of precise and engaging oral communication, and to bring our community together in celebration of their courage, commitment, and proficiency on stage and at the dais. Speaking well in public simultaneously invites togetherness, demands admiration, and occasions self-discovery, and it thus remains a significant step on the purposeful journey offered to the young men of our community.