The School of Persuasion is designed primarily for graduates of the Leadership Program of the Rockies, but we also encourage applications from men and women who are ambitious, smart, active in civic life, and who seek to exercise and improve their skills of persuasion within a framework of the principles of free society.

Applications are available online at: www.leadershipprogram.org

September 30, 2011

The course opens with an “immersion weekend,” November 4th-5th, where students spend two full days exploring the principles of political and economic freedom. Then, beginning December 2nd, 2011, classes will be held on one Friday per month through June, 2012. Classes will typically begin in the early morning and run through late afternoon, with an informal social hour afterwards.

Tuition for the program is $2,000. Participants in the School of Persuasion are expected to pay the tuition themselves, or raise whatever amount they might be short—this is one metric of whether an applicant is as influential as he might think he is. Partial tuition scholarships will be made available to select students who are excellent candidates for the program and demonstrate a prohibitive financial need.

If you are accepted into the School of Persuasion, you already take seriously your responsibilities and rights as an American citizen. You understand that without freedom, success in almost any venture is impossible, and you are looking to refine your persuasive skills because you want success in your personal life and you want to advance the cause of freedom in public life. And you want to study and work with people of similar ambitions, interests, and levels of energy.

The School of Persuasion is about serious learning and self-improvement, not frills: the work-intensive seminars will be in a classroom-style setting. You will invest time mastering the skills of persuasion, including messaging, analyzing your resources, identifying ambitious yet realistic goals and the means to reach them, all of which will form a strategic plan for success that you will prepare and refine throughout the nine-month program. You will have homework and it will be critiqued, and you will help critique the work of your classmates—the School of Persuasion will be a highly interactive experience.

Perhaps most importantly, you will practice making appeals to both the heart and mind, attempting to persuade those who think differently than you and hold opinions different from yours. In its deepest meaning, persuasion is an art, not a technical science. Persuasion is not a mere list of facts to be memorized or maneuvers to be mastered. Persuasion requires understanding one’s audience and understanding oneself; it also requires patience, prudence, timing, tone, and other factors that are sometimes difficult to measure. In this way, we invite you not only to learn from us, but with us. The School of Persuasion is a process, a constant work in progress—because the art of persuasive communication is never final or perfect—in which we will help you become a better, more persuasive communicator, and you will help us become better, too.