Debate kids, like theater kids, are a type. Those of us who were debaters instantly know the look: the off-kilter neckties, the boxes of Tic Tacs, the stacks of three-ring binders jammed with old case drafts and printouts of evidence, the fingertips slightly stained with ink from Bic pens. And, of course, there’s the tendency to rattle off information at a faster-than-average clip—a habit I’ve still never quite kicked.
I started out a nonbeliever, vowing that I’d lock myself in the family minivan rather than actually compete at a tournament. But all it took was a little success before I was hooked. Debate became the driving theme of my high school years, and stretched on into college. And from an educational perspective, what’s not to love? Debate, after all, is inherently participatory, requiring a competitor to distill complex ideas and communicate conclusions in her own words. It is the ultimate alternative to what Paulo Freire derisively described as the banking model of education, “in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits.”[1]
Perhaps that’s why debate, understood as part of the transition from bare fact-knowledge (“grammar”) to articulation of persuasive argument (“rhetoric”), has been a mainstay of the classical education movement.[2] And the sentiment is broadly shared. Indeed, a recent article in the left-wing magazine Current Affairs argues that “[m]erely encouraging more students to think critically is insufficient if we want a critical mass of the next generation to emerge with a more robust toolkit to resist the influence of right-wing propaganda” and speculates that “[w]hat is needed is a vehicle to train students with the skills that help them become better researchers, better critical thinkers, and better reasoners. Debate is that vehicle.”[3] The prospect of common ground is tantalizing: in a political moment unusually focused on education, might debate be the one pedagogical practice capable of uniting rival camps?
Or maybe not. Those of us who spent years in the tournament scene have learned to ask a different question: for those of us who drank deeply at the well of competitive forensics, what if there was always something slightly nasty at the bottom?
Over my years as a competitive debater, three styles loomed largest: traditional policy debate, Lincoln-Douglas “value” debate (known as LD for short), and parliamentary debate. Policy and LD were fixtures of my high school years; parliamentary didn’t make an appearance until college.
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I don’t think it’s a coincidence that high-level debaters are notorious for drinking themselves into stupors. At the 2013 World Championship in Berlin, multiple competitors were hospitalized after overindulging in yakka, a nasty “combination of bottom-shelf vodka, white sugar and lemons, left to macerate for hours, or sometimes days, before it’s ladled out at debate functions.”[9] But if there’s really nothing worth fighting and dying for, if the arguments and conflicts that take up so much of the world’s time and energy are at bottom merely a matter of who wins, why not go hard or go home? Eat, drink, and be merry, for eventually we all die.
. . .
In hindsight, it seems to me that those who benefited the most from competitive debate were those who never immersed themselves in it fully—those for whom it never became a lifestyle, and those who didn’t forget to care about their subjects. The universal “tell” of someone not yet steeped in the debater mindset—“I don’t know how I feel about this argument”—was not, after all, a sign of weakness, but of humanity.
And I’ve increasingly come to wonder whether, in all our culture’s talk of the need for “critical thinking,” something important has been lost. Critical thinking is important, no doubt. But equally important is critical belief formation, learning to affirmatively build up claims and arguments rather than simply knock them down. Such arguments, crucially, cannot be mere constructions serving a short-term end. They must be rooted in existential conviction, the sort of conviction that leads people to order their lives differently, to fight and to die for something true. And the only way to accomplish this is to learn the conditions under which primal trust is worth it, regardless of whether such faith could survive a Cartesian test of certainty or satisfy a jaded debater.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
