According to the Mishnah, "a fence about wisdom is silence." I am well-advised not to talk so much. But faced with an audience like this and with an opportunity to speak about something of importance, I will disregard that ancient counsel of prudence. When it comes to oral language, I'm a user.

What I will do, however, is pay attention to and practice what teachers have been teaching for centuries: I have worked out carefully beforehand what it is I want to say. I have even written it all out.

This is going to be a longer speech than usual for me. At commencements I follow a strict rule to speak for no more than 20 minutes: there is so much else to be done in those ceremonies. At faculty meetings I learned that prudence and brevity were necessary for survival. Eloquence and elaboration were fine for the faculty, but the president should watch his words. The less said, the better.

I've been asked to talk about instruction in oral language as a means to improved learning and discourse in the schools. The jargon changes all the time, and I gather that I could say that I'm going to talk about "speech communication" as well as "oral language."

But what I am most interested in is what is called "rhetoric" in the classical sense: instruction in the arts of language and thought as used in persuasion.

In the course of my remarks I'm going to talk about an attempted revolution in teaching thinking in Venezuela; about the erratic career of rhetoric as an educational idea; about the triumph of populism in the 20th century, and about the place of oral language and rhetoric in the schools. The theme that I will try to pursue is the classical idea that democratic society can survive only if its people are able to develop their abilities of thinking and speaking about the issues that confront them. The only alternative to democracy is some form of oppression.

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Liberation from oppression is the goal of the new ministry for the development of intelligence in Venezuela. The ministry was created in 1978, and its purpose is to democratize scientific knowledge for the Venezuelan people. More specifically, the minister, Luis Alberto Machado, seeks to apply universally the knowledge that has been gained in the past fifty years about perception, learning, and thinking.

Minister Machado argues that the scientific opinion of fifty years ago that intelligence is fixed at birth and that intellectual development continues only to about age 25, at which time it begins a long, slow deterioration, is a set of ideas that have been demonstrated to be false or inadequate. What has been demonstrated is that each of us has a capacity to learn far beyond the potential we actually develop.

The Third World lags behind, he argues, because its people have not been taught to think. Underdevelopment is not simply a matter of changing the structures of society, as the Marxists have argued, but a matter of liberating individuals to realize their own intellectual potential. To do that means going beyond the boundaries of formal education in the schools. It means creating a climate of learning, an environment of stimulation of intelligence, from birth to death.

Minister Machado lays no claim to discovering new scientific ideas. His goal is to democratize -- to make available to the people -- what science already knows about how we think. Historically, thinking skills have been taught in a narrow tradition of deductive logic and analysis; only recently have we begun to teach thinking in broader ways, reflecting both sides of the brain. What is now known and shared by the educated citizens of the developed countries must be made accessible to the ninety percent of those people of the world who do not yet know how to think, and thus how to act in their own interest.

The first projects in Venezuela are aimed at teaching teachers how to think, and how to teach students how to think. The minister has enlisted Edward De Bono, the British specialist in cognition who invented "lateral thinking" in the late 60's. As of this moment, 42,000 teachers have already completed the course. By the end of the year 100,000 teachers will have been trained. While this has been going on, thinking skills courses have been introduced into the civil service and the military. Civil service bureaucracy is oppressive because bureaucrats are not taught how to think. They are tied to rules and regulations and red tape. In the military, strategy now forbids concentration of forces because of the destructive power of weapons; survival requires dispersal of forces, and that requires intelligence: the ability to assess a situation, make decisions, communicate. The success of the guerilla soldier results from the constant exercise of intelligence at all levels of the military hierarchy.

Minister Machado's vision is profoundly democratic. It is also without ideology; thinking can be taught in totalitarian states as well as in democratic ones. But democratic states are democratic because the people participate in governing themselves. Democracy fails when governments begin to think for the people and the people cease to think for themselves.

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