Remembering Debate

I was reading some blog entries yesterday about debates on various topics, and it got me thinking about my own debate experience in high schoolFor context, in the Northern Twin Cities suburbs there was (and may still be) this little homegrown league and format known as Classic Debate. For those of you familiar with high school debate at all, think of it as policy debate where there is only one permitted plan.

For the rest of you, there are two teams of two in front of a judge. One team says “Yes, [we should do proposed government action]/[fact about life is true]” and the other says “No, [we should not do proposed governement action]/[fact about life is not true].” They each read a prepared case, then there are a couple rounds of cross examination and rebuttal followed by closing arguments. All in all it takes something like 62 minutes to get through.

The whole point of this homegrown format was a group of about a dozen schools decided they didn’t like the trend in policy debate (their origional format, basically rounds are longer and the affirmative side can defend any government action which purports to achieve some stated objective). These trends were things like generic negative arguments (basically an argument applicable to whatever the affirmative picks to defend), “kritiks” which argued all manner of things about the nature of the round itself (there were feminist kritiks about how the round doesn’t allow proper female voices, for instance), an especially topicality arguments (which try to use narrow definitions of terms to show the affirmative’s case isn’t within the scope of the objective to be met without actually engaging it on its merits).

But I had friends who still did policy debate, and I listened to them describe what they did and thought to myself: “All of this is still applicable, it’s just not popular.” So I tried to run it anyway.

There were some interesting things that happened. One topic I did was whether or not standardized tests improved education. This was a fun one because time and time again I heard people say “The SAT and ACT are racially biased and therefore all testing is bad.” This is obviously malarky. Or else it was “No Child Left Behind’s failure to fund tests means all testing is bad.” The other side pretty much came down to the universal argument for testing: “You can’t figure out what the problems are or what works to fix them if you don’t test, and the only correct way to do that testing is in some sort of standardized format to allow comparison across classroom, schools, and states.” And then there were the endless squabbles over whether or not testing worked, and if some test didn’t did that mean it was impossible, and around and around it went.

Another memorable one was whether or not the US Government should ratify the Kyoto Accord. Here was a great example of a topic which invited clever argument and it never seemed to work. People would trot out their ICCP report clippings about how many thousand scientists agreed the evidence was overwhelming versus the roll call of skeptics. Then people would trot out how global warming would mean untold death and destruction, primarially in the Third World due to disease and in low-lying areas due to flooding, against arguments like “let’s use all the money we’ll save not implimenting Kyoto to pay for moving people to higher ground and to develop better drugs to fight tropical diseases, and oh, by the way, warmer climates are associated with periods of growth, prosperity, and invention in the northern parts of the Northern Hemisphere (read Europe, especially Scandenavia).”

Today I can only imagine what a field day high school debaters are having over the Obama budget, the global economic situation, and pitting supply-siders against demand-siders in trying to argue on one hand that a ballooning national debt and government intervention is a Bad Thing versus the ranks of people who believe only government intervention including borrow and spend or <gasp> tax and spend policies are the Only Answer.

Funny enough, it reminds me of watching the news, except in a debate round if I can understand the speed reading I might actually learn more than I ever knew about a topic after listening to a day’s worth of debates.