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Julianna Li

Mr. Hurt

English 10H- Period 3

05 May 2019

Striving for Equality in Education

In her article on Nov 2nd, 2015, in discussing the global crisis in girls’ education, former

first lady of the United States, Michelle Obama emphasizes the importance of providing equal

opportunities to girls education throughout the world. Obama effectively utilizes criticizing

diction, motivating diction, and anaphora to stress the significance of unequal access and

opportunities to girls as a result of cultural beliefs and societal values.

Obama skillfully engages her audience through criticizing diction to bring prominence to

the problems that girls face in education. When describing the treatment that girls in school

experience, she describes it as a “failure to invest enough money in educating girls” (2). Her

emphasis on failure envokes an emotional response in her audience as she again reapplies that

structure to describing girls forced to “stay home when they have their periods, and then fall

behind and wind up dropping out” (3). This reoccurring issue that girls have to experience sole

applies to their gender and again indicates the unequal approach that education funding provides

for them. Moreover, Obama then criticizes that although “these investments are absolutely

necessary to solve our girls’ education problem, they are simply not sufficient” (4). She

continues criticizing the culture of inequality as she addresses extensive problems, such as rape.

Obama clearly understands the connection between unequal treatment to unequal access in girls’

education. In applying criticizing diction in the beginning paragraphs of her speech, Obama
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reinstates the possible power that government institutions and organizations, like her position as

the first lady in the US, have over providing equal treatment in educating girls.

In agreement with her employment of criticizing diction, she also exercises motivating

diction in exemplifying the power that girls, everywhere and every generation have. Obama

begins with describing that “legal and cultural change is possible” and the laws or social

structures that are in place now can improve (6). Obama claims that decades ago, women had

less substantial and significant roles in society as well as in the household; however, women

have taken significant steps in pushing forward for change and raising their social status. They

had changed cultural practices through “individual acts like taking their bosses to court, fighting

to prosecute their rapists, and leaving their abusive husband” (8). Here, Obama pushes women to

recognize that change is possible and it is significant that each individual women push for

change. Obama stresses the importance of equality throughout education, as “educated girls also

earn high salaries— 15 to 25 percent more for each additional year of secondary school— and

studies have shown that sending more girls to school can boost an entire country’s GDP” (8).

This representation of the strong and victorious roles that educated women can take in society

reinforces the importance of giving girls motivation to push for equal access to education.

The last main element that Obama uses is anaphora to reinforce her idea that public and

government action needs to be taken on this issue. Her repetition of “we should never” reinforces

the importance of treating young girls with the respect that they deserve in pushing them to reach

their goals and that “we should never have to accept our girls having their bodies mutilated or

being married off to grown men as teenagers, confined to lives of dependence and abuse” (11).

Obama’s reinstatement of the importance of equality again employs her message that despite all

these horrible treatments that girls and women have to face around the world, people have still
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failed to take action. Obama effectively employs anaphora as a call to action for public

awareness.

In her speech addressing the unbalanced treatment in education for girls, Obama

successfully applies criticizing and motivation diction, as well as anaphora to push for change as

she believes that everyone has “a moral obligation to give all of these girls a future worthy of

their promise and their dreams” (12).

Word count: 646