Sarah Palin, with the sponsorship of GoDaddy.Com, will launch an online Public Speaking Academy. Enrollment starts in February with a tuition price of $8,700 for six months of “Speakin’ like a real America.”
Known as Sarah Speaks Academy, the announcement comes on the tail end of what Palin calls “a crazy, just crazy, sort of rock and roll crazy, y’know, just crazy kind of response” to her speech endorsing Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid.
The online school will use video conferencing to conduct classes and grades will be determined on recorded video personally viewed by Palin. “This isn’t a rinky-dink type school. I will know every student and personally monitor their progress,” Palin wrote in a release statement. “It’s a funny thing about teaching; sometimes the teacher learns more than the students.”
Palin views the academy as her “patriotic, civic mission duty.” A mission that costs $8,700 for six months of solitary public speaking.
“We can afford no retreads of bad education and bad public policy and the sort of lack of educational knowledge which keeps our great nation, America, the America we live in and could be a great nation, to be part of the status quo, simply because we retread back and offer these back treading educational services and don’t step forward in terms of education and educating our youth and teaching them to be good speakers,” Palin told a Sylvan Learning newsletter.
The school also recommends practicing speeches on street corners. Palin said that’s how she started her Alaskan gubernatorial campaign. “Some people thought I was a crazy person yelling on the street corner but six months later I was governor, and that’s what I want to instill in our students that speaking like that in six months you can perfect public speaking because I think my accomplishments speak for themselves.”
Along with public speaking, the Academy will offer introductory courses in Regional Dialects, Improvisational Comedy, and Small Talk for Dummies.
“We considered joining forces with Second City, or the Groundlings,” said Dave Robbins, the school’s president, “but they laughed at my request. I think they thought a Sarah Palin Speaking Academy was a joke and hung up before I could explain our mission.”