Debating for the 21st Century

four students participating in their first debate round EVER

Every year in late August or early September, around one hundred high school students and half as many adults gather to participate in a spectacle both terrifying and intriguing: a policy debate tournament.  More specifically, for the vast majority of the students it will be their first debate tournament. 

For as long as I can remember, a tournament has been organized at the beginning of the year to gently usher students into the world of competitive policy debate; in an age long past when I was competing, it was hosted by the Westminster Schools.  For the last three year, it's been run by the amazing people at Emory University's Barkley Forum, which functions as both a highly competitive college team (unquestionably one of the best in the nation) and as a service organization focused on bringing the benefits of debate to students from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds.

Why, you might be wondering, do students require a "gentle" welcome to debating?  Why do entire organizations exist organized around promoting its practice?  Both excellent questions (good job you, you're so insightful!), and both can be answered by understanding the basic structure and expectations of policy debate.

Students work in teams of two, and compete in debates over the course of the year anchored by a single question, usually refereed to as the "topic" or "resolution" of the year.  Debate topics cover quite a range of policy areas, but they all have one thing in common - they consider what actions should or should not be taken by the United States Federal government.  This year's topic is:

Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance.

Given this starting point question, students and coaches come up with particular policies that the government could enact that would be consistent resolution - passing the State Secrets Repeal Act, applying strict judicial scrutiny to police searches, or banning biometric scanners at airports, for instance.  Then, at tournaments, the students are obliged to debate both sides of the resolution (at least twice, sometimes three or four times), defending their own policy some rounds, trying to convince the judges that other students policies are a bad idea.

To convince judges, students construct an argument built on constant reference to high-quality scholarly sources and breaking news publications; they debate factual challenges, opportunity costs, unanticipated externalities, epistemological and philosophical questions, and even the meaning and parameters of the words that make up the resolution.  They do all of this under immense time pressure, speaking and listening at more than one hundred words per minute.  No kidding people, debate is like the Olympics for your brain, and students that get into this end up going to tournaments like this forty or fifty times over the course of their high school careers.

Those of you that aren't high school teachers like me might not spend as much time considering the structure of American education and how it evolves in response to the information environment of the new century, but it's a question that sorely needs considering.  A model of school that puts all its emphasis on the delivery of knowledge is laughably outdated - most students (particularly affluent students) walk around with access to a billion textbook's worth of information in their back pockets, and convincing them that they really need to dedicate mental energy to memorizing certain facts is a very hard sell.  The best case scenario is motivating most students through extrinsic fear of bad grades, which isn't going to inspire them to hold on to these tidbits for the rest of their lives.

And the truth is that at least to some extent, these students are right.  They shouldn't be spending huge amounts of time memorizing information.  They live in an era where the primary skill for success won't be knowledge acquisition, but rather information processing.  Students that can research well, that can listen to claims and assess for validity, that see into the agendas that exist behind the reams of information available on the internet - these are the students that will rise to the top in the twenty-first century.  

No activity can do more than policy debate to make you better at ALL of these things.

As I geared up for the first tournament of the year, I've been having conversations with my colleagues, and several times, after hearing what students experience while participating, the listener has told me "every student should do debate."  I couldn't agree more.