Rhetorical Analysis Of The Essay 'Prison' By Peter Gray

The average person spends 18,720 hours in “prison”- I mean school , and that's not including the 9360 spending doing homework. That means a person spends almost 28,080 hours of their life dedicated to kindergarten through senior year. That gives a student a lot of time to learn and develop as a person, but do the students really learn? In the essay, “School is a prison-and damaging our kids”, author Peter Gray poorly argues that the school in our society has not helped, but hurt its students. In doing so Gray weakens his piece by using invalid arguments, a lack of appeals, and informal writing structure .

Premises

Through this piece, Gray includes many premises to prove his point that the schooling has not taught children in this society

4). Gray gives his biased opinion about how he feels when the child gets their education through a home school. He believes that home schooled children do not learning or actually taking the tests, the parent does it for them. Though he feels this way, he does not think private or public schools do any better of a job. This piece of evidence, although it may sound like it gives good numbers in support of his argument, it does not. Gray does not mention how he came to a number of two million or how he claim to the idea that the parents do the work for the children. Gray’s ethos becomes questionable when he uses informal language throughout the essay. On page 7, he uses “don't” instead of do not. Although they both have the same general meaning, using do not sounds more professional and would make the readers feel more comfortable with Gray’s knowledge on the ways school had damaged childrens will to learn. Gray also included a citation for the website wikipidea in the middle of his essay for each website he used such as www.alternativestoschool.com, www.sudval.org, and www.Wikipedia.com. Using Wikipedia let alone is an untrustworthy website, which may have the reader's question Grays reasonings. Using the website citation in this way formed a disadvantageous

If he would have included an implied reasoning reasoning with evidence to back up his claims, he could become interrupted in a different way, and may gain more people on his side. Gray also should have givn a citation or introduced the studies he used when he explained his so called “evidence”, just to validate his reasoning and logic. When he did include citations, most of the time he included websites and not studies or articles. Gray should have double checked to make sure that he had a reference page to show the readers where he received his information so they know it his claims did not form fro a made up idea. He also should have include inductive or deductive reasoning and support as to where and how he came to the conclusion of the current school system damaging