19 ms·

The Corrosion of High School Debate

• creaghpatr 9y ago
  Reminds me of this episode of Radiolab "Debatable" http://www.radiolab.org/story/debatable/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/debatable/ The comments section of the episode page gives you an idea of people's opinion of the state of high school debate.
• jackhack 9y ago
  If anyone has a doubt as to how far "debate" has fallen, this should be an eye-opening case-in-point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8 [edit: Flagged? Really?? - this video exposes the very absurdity discussed in the article. A Championship debate team doing what few educated persons would recognize or identify as debate.]
  • QAPereo 9y ago
    The study of history has clearly taken it on the chin as well.
    • model_m_warrior 9y ago
      That should hardly be news. It is up to parents to teach history and a philosophy of history. Public schooling has went full on post modernist indoctrination.
  • huac 9y ago
    All I see and hear are two black women articulating a complex argument well.
    • ars 9y ago
      > articulating a complex argument well. You do? (Or are you being sarcastic?) Did we watch the same video? I can't even understand what they are saying. Is it words?
    • gareim 9y ago
      They may have had a good argument, but articulating it well? They're just shooting out words in a flurry in order to "win" at debate; it's incredibly hard to comprehend without a transcript. And like the original article stated, this is pretty common. I remember my friend doing the same thing when he was in debate.
      • huac 9y ago
        There's a reason the poster chose this video, rather than a video of two white guys talking really fast (and there are many multiples more of those).
        • gareim 9y ago
          I mean, maybe that's true, but does that negate what I said? Also, if you could link more examples, I'd love to see them. I'm amused by the fast talking, but City Cleveland high school or whatever dominates the first few results on YouTube and jumping around, I see only a mild form of it. EDIT: actually, I just saw that 2 minutes ago someone posted another example! :)
        • jackhack 9y ago
          I posted it, and your implication of some deeper reason is rubbish. Race or sex has zero to do with anything. The reason I chose this video is due to the stunning contrast between the news reporter describing the "debate" team's win as a high-brow achievement and a calm discussion of the merits of the debate along with the preparation, etc. which paint a picture of intellectual refinement, cut with the video full of racist n-words peppered with "uh uh uh" which exposes the event to be a sham. It is a sham. The video is a study in contrast. THAT is what made it effective to expose the absurdity of the "win", and probably why you don't like it. I notice you called it a "dog whistle" in a different comment, which I resent. That term seems to be a favorite term of the political left synonymous with "this doesn't agree with my worldview so I'm going to cast it as a racist viewpoint to shut down debate. I will insinuate racism where it doesn't exist."
    • smacktoward 9y ago
      Let's take race and gender off the table and consider this video instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0 Here we see a bunch of (white, male) kids, all of whom are supposed to be experts in persuasive rhetoric, who have been trained to make arguments in a way that is utterly unpersuasive to anyone who has not spent years steeping in the world of academic debate. In fact, not only is it unpersuasive to the untrained ear, it is actively off-putting -- difficult and unpleasant to listen to. Their method demonstrates both of the troubling points that TFA calls out: 1) They have been taught to cram more arguments into a given amount of time than their opponents can, so they race through their arguments at 350 words per minute like meth-fueled auctioneers; and 2) They have been taught to crowd out their opponents' time to make their own arguments by throwing out as many outrageous, nonsensical arguments as they can, since an argument their opponent does not refute will be scored by the judges as a point won regardless of its factual merit. These things are fine if you see debate as a sort of abstract exercise. But if the point of debate is to train young people how to argue persuasively in the real world, they are disastrous, because they do the opposite. The "overload your opponent with nonsensical arguments" part teaches them to be aggressively obtuse, and the "spit out the words as fast as you can" part teaches them to communicate in a way that no lay person can understand or appreciate. And taken together they send the message that debating policy positions is an activity for a narrowly educated priesthood to do among themselves, not an activity in which the goal is to educate and persuade masses of normal people. For all the good their teachers are doing these kids, they might as well be teaching them to argue in Latin. And that's a problem if you think of debate as a way to train future leaders in a democratic society.
      • jackhack 9y ago
        that's it in a nutshell. Modern debate has nothing to do with logic, reasoning, rhetoric, facts, persuasiveness or eloquence. It is a perversion of the concept.
      • Chaebixi 9y ago
        > so they race through their arguments at 350 words per minute like meth-fueled auctioneers Honestly, it kinda seems like they need a rule that forbids speaking faster than a certain rate, say 150 wpm or whatever a comfortable speaking rate is. I assume the debates have time limits to limit argument size, and speaking fast is just a cheap way of gaming that system. I'm surprised they've let it go on so long.
    • alva 9y ago
      "articulating a complex argument well" This is the transcript of the first two arguments in the video. This is the winning team of a national debate. "they say the n* is always already queers thats exactly the point it means that the impact is that that is than an impact turn to the afraid is that that it is the case turned to the affirmative because uh uh we we are saying that queer bodies are not able to survive the necessarily means in the body uh uh the n* is not able to survive when the n* uh sees these people uh peace and suffering that he can only uh envision himself uh that he uh does not see another n* that he uh feel sympathy for or embrace but rather uh that the other n* gets obliterated"
  • CobrastanJorji 9y ago
    Fallen over what kind of a timescale? I did policy debate in the late '90s, and this sounds pretty much the same to me as debate did then.
    • Chaebixi 9y ago
      > I did policy debate in the late '90s, and this sounds pretty much the same to me as debate did then. Really? I guess I've never watched high school debate, but my image was definitely not of hyperventilated slur-heavy slam-poetry.
      • CobrastanJorji 9y ago
        Here, I searched on YouTube for "1999 policy debate tournament" and found a typical one: https://youtu.be/5D20PppPIOc?t=2m6s https://youtu.be/5D20PppPIOc?t=2m6s
• projektfu 9y ago
  Hang on. Before you saw this headline, did it ever occur to you too be concerned about the state or quality of high school debate?
  • rexreed 9y ago
    I could say the same thing about 99.9% of HN Posts. It's nice to expand my horizons and learn about things I didn't know before. Ironic given this article is about the deteriorating state of discourse.
  • glenstein 9y ago
    In my case, yes. I've only view championship-level HS debates on youtube, but was tremendously disappointed at the focus on rapid fire to the point of barely breathing arguments and the structure of debate that allowed the practice to flourish.
  • anigbrowl 9y ago
    Actually yes, I have very strong opinions on it indeed.
• sudosteph 9y ago
  I suppose everyone has their own experience. I was also on my high school debate team, Student Congress to be specific (though Lincoln-Douglas was an option). I joined because I loved policy and imagining the impact of legislative changes. The fact that most of our debates were on mock legislation that other students had written made it even better, because we argued topics that the real congress would never touch. I learned so much about researching and building arguments, even if my record didn't show it (never placed once in 2 years). I learned that being right was not as important as being aware of the tone of the room and making yourself heard and tailoring your arguments appropriately. I was not naturally gifted for on-the-fly speaking, but I did improve even so. And importantly, I learned things about myself and avoided pursuing a career I might have hated. I regret nothing even though I have no dusty trophies to show. The friendship and experience I gained from traveling around the state with other politics nerds was, and always will be, the best part.
  • osi 9y ago
    ah, Student Congress. I did that and loved it too. I enjoyed it more for learning how to effectively troll, since I wasn't as good as the "politics" part needed to win.
  • jmh530 9y ago
    I started out doing policy debate in the early 2000s and eventually switched to Congress. Was a wise decision. Taught much more about how to actually speak persuasively in front of people and make coherent arguments instead of just talking as fast as you can.
• Theodores 9y ago
  The people that make it to the UK parliament got their education in debating chambers. This is taken seriously at the posh schools, e.g. Eton, and the posh universities, e.g. Oxford. It is not important in most state comprehensive schools or those universities that have access courses. I was lucky enough to go to a comprehensive school where the debating chamber was important. The school does not have a debating chamber now. A few key teachers retired and momentum was lost. Strange how the must attend event no longer matters.
  • sandworm101 9y ago
    Those chambers are very different than these debate clubs within American highschools. Posh schools emphasize decorum and rationality. Eton is an argument between politician's at Speaker's Corner. US debate clubs are teenagers using twitter. I'm not being hyperbolic. The skills to win at US debate are exactly the same skills one uses in a flame war: The goal is to lead the narrative by forcing your opponent to spend the majority of their time denying your arguments. Silence = weakness.
    • eldavido 9y ago
      Well, sort of, given equal/lesser preparation. What goes missing from your analysis is how much of the round is won before it even starts. A team coming prepared with well-organized files, "answer-to" blocks, recently-cut politics blocks, etc. will destroy a team using rough-cut cards and analytics.
  • walshemj 9y ago
    Or for traditional labor MP's speaking from the floor or top table of conference (union or party)
• 3131s 9y ago
  This is an on-point critique of high school debate and hits on many of the reasons I didn't stick with it for more than a season. My best friend growing up is a near mystical figure in the insular LD debate community and has coached a lot of nationally successful debaters, including his younger sister who won the TOC and is considered the most dominant LD debater ever as far as I know. Aside from him, at one point another close friend was #1 ranked in the country (he had the most TOC bids that year) and another won Novice Nationals. I was naturally good at it as well (I quit literally hours after winning the Novice state tournament), but I absolutely hated debate for all the reasons listed -- "spreading", abstruse philosophical critiques that always devolved into nuclear war, and the barely intelligible speed-talking that even motivated the dorkiest of debaters to practice circular breathing. I had to find a new friend group (for a while, we're still all close) because these guys talked about nothing except for debate. > High school debate today is basically an intellectual game, not an exercise in truth-seeking. I couldn't agree more, and I have said nearly the exact same thing to many people that are unfamiliar with high school debate.
  • dpc59 9y ago
    It's not just high school debates that end up like that. Most matters of opinions or incomplete data devolve into stupid arguments when it gets political.
    • whatshisface 9y ago
      I think there's a difference between stupid arguments and stupid arguments delivered at 300WPM by highschoolers specially trained over years to breathe in such a way that they can produce and deploy stupid arguments as quickly and efficiently as possible. It's like... littering versus the government selling our highway medians to WM.
    • jackmott 9y ago
      everything is political
      • goatlover 9y ago
• CobrastanJorji 9y ago
  I see the parallels that are being drawn to politics, but debate IS a scorable game. There's a winner and a judge. Of course game tactics are going to play a major role, and of course more arguments are going to be advantageous compared to fewer arguments. You might want debate to a Socratic exercise in truth-seeking, but if you wanted that, you wouldn't declare one team the winner. None of this is related to the current political climate, which has a much stranger problem around the rejection of facts and evidence and logic entirely. If you want make debate about convincing an audience of laymen, the judgement needs to be done by an audience of laymen. Do that, and the pace of the debate will slow significantly, since there's no benefit to making an argument that the audience can't hear or understand. But then your complaint will become "these people are dumbing down their arguments and winning, how can we fix this?!"
  • elefanten 9y ago
    This is, in my experience, exactly on point. I debated and coached debate in high school and college -- same format being critiqued. The reason debates keep evolving that way is because of the rules of the game. The HUGE point this author leaves out that makes the activity so amazing is that there are essentially no rules but the speech times. And in that 'free market' environment, the incentive to go fast has often been optimal. But there are many ways to play and win the game, perhaps the most important of which is framing the debate for the judge... convincing them how they should evaluate and score it. If you want to argue for absurdity, you can... but you have to do some combination of 1) proving it rigorously with documented evidence, 2) being more convincing and 3) framing the debate for the judge and persuading them to evaluate the big picture a certain way. It is a completely acceptable and successful strategy to answer nonsense by pointing out it's nonsense. You just have to know how to do so within the parameters of the game, which has its own 'language', style and conventions. It is definitely not the best arena for truth-seeking on specific issues. It absolutely is a game. But it's a difficult and deep and brilliant one.
• kevmo 9y ago
  "Corrosion"? It sounds like high school debate started relatively recently, in the 70s, and basically went downhill within a few years. So it's always been a sewer. I enjoy "intellectual discussion", so I went to a college debate team practice once to see if I wanted to join (back in 2003 or so) - I walked out of there with my mind blown. There was absolutely nothing intellectual about college debate team. The entire point was just to see who could say the most words per minute. When I explicitly asked, I was told that content doesn't really matter, just fast talking.
  • kelvin0 9y ago
    So the debate is basically a gentrified 'yo-mama'/rap-battle? Don't get me wrong: I love a good rap battle and the improv prowess of some rappers is simply astounding. But at the end of the day the delivery matters more than the content. I didn't know anything about debate teams, but it seems most similar to football than to chess?
    • nnfy 9y ago
      I dont know if it is acceptable to post YouTube links on HN, but here is a recording of recent national champions.[1] That it is even called debate is tragic. 1.https://youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8
      • kelvin0 9y ago
        Using the 'N' word in a debate competition? besides that it has more the allure of a verbal seizure ... as you said tragic.
      • scrumper 9y ago
        That’s not really just a recording of the champions is it? It’s a selective edit of bits of the debate with a news interview with the winners. it’s intentionally jarring. Do you have a link to the actual recording? The owner of the clip you linked to removed his link to the actual debate recording after the poster of the original recording asked that this be taken down.
• Puer 9y ago
  Unfortunately, this is even more true in college. Policy debate teams are well funded at universities (the policy team at mine has a 6 figure budget) because they essentially conduct research writing cases on gun control, drug policy, healthcare, etc. I compete in British Parliamentary Debate in which no evidence packets are allowed in the round and the resolution is only revealed 15 minutes before the start. The consequence is that argumentation and persuasion take precedence over pretentious motermouthed screaming comparisons of Harvard studies vs Yale studies that only exclude minorities and women from the activity.
  • HanayamaTriplet 9y ago
    I agree with the article that debate competitions get gamed very quickly with age. I competed in Parli in both high school, where it was a new event in our circuit, and in college, where there was an established scene. The difference was night and day. High school Parli was similar to what you described and was a joy to compete in; a more "pure" debate where clever argumentation and thinking on your feet really mattered. College Parli was a nightmare morass of arguments over rules technicalities in attempts to define the topic as something obviously favorable to your side - my team had a stock "farm subsidies are bad" speech we would try to guide every possible round towards. On average, 60% of each speech was spent on arguing over what the debate round should be about rather than anything of substance.
    • walshemj 9y ago
      Need a strong chair to shut that down and shurley amending the motion is disallowed by the rules one the motion is on the order paper that's it
  • jogjayr 9y ago
    > I compete in British Parliamentary Debate in which no evidence packets are allowed in the round and the resolution is only revealed 15 minutes before the start. The consequence is that argumentation and persuasion take precedence over pretentious motermouthed screaming comparisons of Harvard studies vs Yale studies that only exclude minorities and women from the activity. It's counter-intuitive to me that more preparation leads to worse discussion on the topic.
• mitchellst 9y ago
  These articles pop up once in a while, and it always makes me grateful for my high school debate experience. New England private schools don't compete in NFL, they have their own league that's federated with some other private school leagues from around the world. Spreading is banned, essentially on the good, old-fashioned, "we know it when we see it" standard. I readily admit that for most people, it's not so simple as, "you want good high school debate? Simple! Just go to Hotchkiss or Exeter." (schools that cost $50k/year) In theory, there's no reason why other leagues and schools could not ban spreading and put down a rhetoric-forward, comprehensive debate format. The catch, it seems, is that none of them have successfully done so. It's probably a culture thing-- the New England prep schools have a fairly large community of teachers and students who know how their debate format works, who know how to practice and judge for a less formulaic format. It's not obvious how you would create such a culture out of nowhere, and you'll get little help from New Englanders, especially the prep set, who are famously provincial about education.
  • pigscantfly 9y ago
    To provide a competing narrative, I spent my first year of high school competing in LD at a high level (broke at many national tournaments, qualled to NCFL Nats, etc.) working with captains who had won Harvard and were competing at TOCs from a small school in Florida. After my parents forced me into the boarding school system, I grew to hate the activity, since no one was serious about practice or skill and just using it to pad their college applications. I was on the board of Philo at Phillips Andover until in-fighting between the president and VP resulted in my expulsion from the team after refusing to vote to impeach the president over personal (bad breakup) reasons couched in procedural nonsense (a hallmark of these societies). I regularly mopped the floor with the other prep school kids (including Hotchkiss and Exeter) in what I considered extremely basic rounds compared to what I'd seen (as a novice!) on the national circuit. The New England prep school league was more a club for lazy, privileged kids who didn't care much for working on cases or practicing delivery; the reasons no one on my team spread were because the judges were too incompetent to follow it and the kids were too lazy to learn how to think that quickly - not some noble principles or rules banning it, which I've never heard of. They were far more concerned with access to the team budget and the ability to establish a pecking order with associated privileges (like international travel) than actual skill at debate (which was totally orthogonal to one's ability to succeed socially on the team). Besides, the events were a joke -- after dinner speaking? After being exposed to LD and Policy? Give me a break.
• huac 9y ago
  Huge surprise that this article ignores the most important movement in policy debate (and LD) over the last 20-30 years: a shift from policy to critical debate, which is focused less on abstract notions of 'nuke war' and more on critically discussing and analyzing social issues. Another poster posted (as a dog-whistle) a link to Towson JR, the first team of black women to win the national debate championship. Policy debate is an incredibly privileged activity at the upper levels - costs of traveling to tournaments on both coasts, hiring coaches, subscribing to Lexis Nexis, etc, limits competition to only the most affluent. The author of this article went to a "pr-Ivy" with a $70 million endowment. That's some privilege to complain about - he even humblebrags about it: "From winter to spring, in settings as grand as a Harvard lecture hall and as cramped as a boiler room in a Salt Lake City public school, [...]". Flying to Alta (so sorry their campus isn't as nice as yours) isn't cheap or something everyone can do! Also, since everybody rants about spreading - many critical teams do not spread, or are at least under 300 words per minute. There is a growing recognition and acceptance of the privilege it takes to spend an hour each night doing speaking drills. This is a much better article about the state of debate: https://www.salon.com/2014/05/13/%E2%80%9Ci_was_hurt%E2%80%9D_how_white_elite_racism_invaded_a_college_debate_championship/ https://www.salon.com/2014/05/13/%E2%80%9Ci_was_hurt%E2%80%9...
  • nunez 9y ago
    > Policy debate is an incredibly privileged activity at the upper levels - costs of traveling to tournaments on both coasts, hiring coaches, subscribing to Lexis Nexis, etc, limits competition to only the most affluent. LOL nah. Have you ever heard of the Urban Debate League? This is a debate league that is entirely comprised of debate programs from inner city schools. Any school can create a debate program and join the UDL, and they will give you money to become a traveling team if you do well enough. Many schools sent their students to stupid expensive debate camps, too. While our school was part of the NFL, my family was relatively broke compared to the families that you describe. They still did their damnest to keep me in debate. Very few of my team members were “privileged.” There were plenty of scholarships that gave us the ability to attend debate camps at significant discounts, and many took advantage of them. There were plenty of kids who were able to pay outright, but it certainly wasn’t exclusive.
• nunez 9y ago
  I did high school Policy debate for three and a half years. I last judged a debate round five years ago. 1. Spreading is definitely a thing in Lincoln Douglas now as are the wonky Mead 92-like arguments. It’s even easier to spread now that we can flow on computers (which was just beginning when I left in 2005, so I learned how to flow on paper. I still use this format for interviewing people.) 2. People were complaining about the “diminishing intellectual integrity” of debate when I was doing it over 15 years ago, so I’m going to guess that things haven’t changed as much as the author is making it seem. 3. Crazy arguments aside, debate is the only academic sport I can think of that teaches you how to: 1) formulate coherent arguments, 2) defend those arguments with facts instead of opinions, 3) learn how to speak in front of people (sometimes lots of people) and 4) make do out of nothing (we often debated in classrooms, even in tournaments held at colleges). Debate changed my life. I met people from all sorts of walks of life, rich and poor alike. I debated against and amongst people from all races that believed all sorts of things. If there is any activity that can solve for the notorious achievement gap problem, then this is it. I learned about rock music by rooming with a guy at Catholic during debate camp. (He introduced me to Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan. I was hooked since.) I had my first serious relationship through debate. God, some of the best memories of my life came through debate. My first flights? Debate. I was devastated when my school (Bergenfield HS) dissolved their debate team during my senior year. We had one of the best Policy and LD programs in the country and often beat out much wealthier schools than ours (though we had nothing against Texas). Most of the folks that joined our program did well later on in life: a few doctors, a few lawyers, etc. I’m positive that I wouldn’t have the life that I have now had I not said yes to my future captains asking me if I argued too much at home and needed an outlet. My coach had a huge falling out with the school and called it quits (very difficult decision for him; he was homosexual and was often prosecuted for it). No other teacher wanted to take up the program, which made no sense to me initially but after dating (and eventually marrying) a teacher made a ton of sense (this was likely a labor of love for my old coach that didn’t pay the bills; no other teacher had that passion). The football, basketball, baseball and golf programs went unscathed, of course. I tried to start a program at Stevens, but scheduling made it really hard. College debate is no damn joke; it’s practically a sport in its own right. People have failed out due to going too hard on debate. The most I could do to get involved was by being a judge on the weekends, but even that got difficult once I started getting into serious relationships and working more. If we have kids, I will definitely nudge them to try debate.
• ashark 9y ago
  > This was because if a team “dropped” an argument by its opponent—if it did not respond to the other side’s claim—that argument was conceded as “true,” no matter how inane it was. Chief among the strategies exploiting this rule was “spreading” (a combination of “speed” and “reading”), where debaters would rattle off arguments at a blistering pace. Their speeches often exceeded 300 words per minute. (A conversational pace is about 60 per minute.) This is a failure of the "game" rules, provided the intended outcome is something other than this (as it surely was/is). Making a game with winners and losers and any kind of objective scoring system out of something resembling a real activity is really hard to do without distorting that activity until it no longer resembles what you wanted it to. It'll happen as soon as someone who's willing to consider only the rules of the game in constructing their strategy comes along, and easily crushes all their competitors while making the whole thing un-fun and entirely unlike what was intended. It's unsurprising that the attempt to fix this (Lincoln-Douglas style) ended up with similar distortions of the spirit of the competition becoming the only way to win. Designing a game like this is hard if people are playing to win and not playing for some other purpose (i.e. they're not willing to wholly voluntarily and with no fuss take fewer points than they could to work toward the common good of maintaining the spirit of the event—at which point you've introduced role-playing elements, basically)
  • linuxps2 9y ago
    As someone who ran highly kritikal affs and Ks on neg - the rules aren't set, they are up to you to define in the round. Sure, you could get a judge that is super pro-policy and hates anything critical but those were fairly few and far between. If someone is trying to spread you or put an independent voting issue on something inane, critique that entire style of debate. Merely dropping an argument isn't enough to lose you the round - unless it was a fairly big IVI.
    • nunez 9y ago
      Awww man the rounds with folks that ran Policy k’s were fun. Many didn’t do a good job of it, but those that did, oh man.
    • dlubarov 9y ago
• powertower 9y ago
  I don't know how bad it is at the high school level, but it does get worse as you go up to the University level... For an example, take the 2014 CEDA Championship Debate held at Indiana University - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8 * It seems that all the original videos from the above have been removed (from youtube), only clips are available. For those that are interested, a response to the criticism of the above "debate" was made that is itself cringe-worthy and difficult to watch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pij5Sg4_DY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pij5Sg4_DY
  • jeffrom 9y ago
    warning: this is super conservative and bordering on racist. It certainly caused many white supremacists to send death threats to the competitors.
  • lukasschwab 9y ago
    McCordick argues that debate is becoming an inaccessible rhetorical monoculture; you point out a trend towards rhetorical diversification, affect theory, and personalization. This is arguably competitive debate's biggest culture clash (though debaters from neither camp could be successful without proficiency in the other)––even if you believe them to be corrosive, it's misguided to construe them as parts of the same trend. Additionally, it's interesting that you select 2014 CEDA finals as an example, which was not only criticized but also met with fairly vicious racism––why not the 2015 NDT, which exemplifies the kind of debate McCordick criticizes? Or the 2013 NDT, which shows the two styles in interaction?
• frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  Former HS debater, our district desperately needed judges for districts last year so I've judged in the past year. Speed-reading is a problem in Policy, but I don't think it's spreading and not to PF especially. At least where I live, judges are broken out with the most sophisticated going to Policy and LD and Public Forum gets who ever is left. When I did PF it was totally normal to have a HS Bus Driver or some freshman's mom as a judge. In that environment spreading and weird arguments could actually make you lose (although so could a judge's hard biases.) Once you made it to semis you might start to get former LD/Policy debaters as judges and so you might speed it up or adjust the rhetoric/evidence. But that's what made PF so fun, you had to read the audience and adjust and you only had a month of practice and a few four minute speeches to do it. Maybe I'm insulated because I went to a midwest high-school who didn't care much for the elite tournaments but we still managed to do well at nats. EDIT: >High school debate today is basically an intellectual game, not an exercise in truth-seeking. That depends on your perspective. I'd say the judges learned some things in my debates, would they have changed their minds? Probably not, because 16 year olds just aren't that convincing to most people. It's like that bear joke, you just have to be better than the other guy. But what about my opinions? They may have never changed in the midst of a debate, but case-building is definitely an exercise in truth-seeking. Debaters get more out of it than judges but that'd be natural, they're the ones poring over all the evidence and picking out the good bits. Being adversarial with yourself as you write an aff and neg is far more enlightening than any other approach I've found.
• jeffrom 9y ago
  > "He and his teammates from Regis High School won the high school debating national championship this year." I guess he would know. I did policy debate in college, and my experience with it (and coaching / judging high school debate) was vastly different from what is described in this article. Also the history of spreading in the activity is very different as I understand it.
• Kuiper 9y ago
  As Policy Debate grew in popularity, the more Machiavellian debaters attempted to gain an edge by overwhelming their opponents with as many arguments and as much supporting evidence as possible. This was because if a team “dropped” an argument by its opponent—if it did not respond to the other side’s claim—that argument was conceded as “true,” no matter how inane it was. Chief among the strategies exploiting this rule was “spreading” (a combination of “speed” and “reading”), where debaters would rattle off arguments at a blistering pace. Their speeches often exceeded 300 words per minute. (A conversational pace is about 60 per minute.) To understand just how fast these kids are talking, spend a few seconds watching a debate video (this was the first thing that came up when I searched "policy debate" on Youtube, and it's consistent with my own experiences): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4MzZ_WS_Ww#t=1m45s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4MzZ_WS_Ww#t=1m45s Debaters started formulating outlandish arguments. The more apocalyptic the outcome the better, with little care for the argument’s probability or real-world application. “A new retirement program will trigger a nuclear war.” “Prison overcrowding would cause the destruction of the ozone layer.” High school debate had come to this. If anyone thinks this is hyperbolic, I can assure you from my 4 years of experience on the California high school debate circuit during the 00's it is not. The premise of the competition, that "failing to respond to an argument means you concede the argument" means that it doesn't matter whether you have effective talking points; simply that you have talking points of any sort. Volume over effectiveness, speed over eloquence. However, there was always a stark difference between local debate competitions and invitational or state-level competitions--at higher-level competitions, many judges are former participants, and will take notes on the "flow" of the debate, which allows them to confirm, "Yes, the affirmative side made ten arguments, and the negation side only responded to nine of them," turning into a game of scoring points. Converesly, at many local/league competitions (which might include volunteer judges with no debate experience, e.g. parents of kids at the schools participating, or faculty at the school hosting the event), many judges lack both the familiarity and the inclination to effectively recognize teams that have "won" based on this technicality, and weight was often given to students who were able to talk "like real people" at a reasonable pace that the judges were able to follow. The "negative" side of this is that sometimes debates were decided by who was a better orator or came across as more charismatic rather than which side had the better logical argument (though you could make an argument that there's value in that as well). Granted, this is based on my experience in the Yosemite Forensics League; I'm sure the tenor at "local" competitions varies on a league-to-league basis, and YAL does include a lot of California's more "rural" counties (think Bakersfield, not San Jose). I think my experience does get toward a different point, which is that the kind of competition you see at high levels may not be reflective of what some (or even most) kids experience when they simply go to tournaments several Saturdays out of the year and never advance to a larger state tournament. If you're going to a prep school that is renowned for having a champion debate team, then sure, you're going to get fast-talking spreading, but for some kids who aren't hyper-competitive, never advance (and are okay with that), there's still plenty to get out of the program (and arguably more to be gained from a personal enrichment standpoint, even if there's no accolades). That being said, my best experiences with the National Forensics League programs were more on the "individual events" (which features events explicitly score based on oratory ability, e.g. "dramatic interpretation" or "original oratory"), rather than the debate side of things. (At my school, both were coached under the same umbrella program.)
• ipsin 9y ago
  I was a high school debater. The topic that year, if I recall, was "Resolved: the United States should embark on a campaign to restore political stability to Latin America". The last competition I was at, some of my school's teammates went up against what I thought of as "The Superweapon". The debate starts out with the normal political, social and military arguments related to your side of the proposition, and then moves on to phase 2: even so, none of it matters because Jesus Christ's return to Earth is imminent. "Expert" after "expert" weighing in on Christ's return and its implication for Latin America. I had a very large briefcase -- a case full of briefs -- but, uh, none of those briefs really addressed that particular line of attack.
  • std_throwaway 9y ago
    An argument invoking an statement that is not falsifiable is immediately invalid. At least in sane societies, so help us God! EDIT: correction of "unprovable" to "not falsifiable"
    • pavel_lishin 9y ago
      But most statements are unprovable. How do you prove that your plan to stabilize Latin America will work?
      • std_throwaway 9y ago
        God told me so in a dream. Isn't that enough? Maybe we better need some logic and work our way towards a solution. Having a solid base with well tested theories is a good start. It won't ever be fully bulletproof, sure. There is only one final way to find out. Try it. Maybe we should choose a plan that doesn't involve creating a better world only in the so-called "afterlife".
    • vkou 9y ago
      "Jesus Christ will return to the Earth soon" is falsifiable. At least, it's as falsifiable as "Fourty years of exposure to Flouride in the drinking water will turn our children into communists." "A bunch of people saying that Jesus Christ will return to the Earth soon" is also falsifiable.
• didibus 9y ago
  Dialectic over Debate Why do they even teach debate, while most high school student probably have never even heard of dialectic. Debate is useful in competitive environments of power, where you have your self interest as a goal. It doesn't seem very healthy for society to be teaching such self centered tactics to high schoolers without at least also teaching about truth centered tactics like dialectics.
  • frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    Dialectics happens during case-writing and research. Without the competitive fire of debate I'm not sure many high schoolers would ever engage in dialectical modes of reasoning.
• m1n1 9y ago
  So keep the time limits but make it about whichever side is more convincing to the judges -- without specifying how they're going to judge. Make the game harder to game.
• ben1040 9y ago
  >the more Machiavellian debaters attempted to gain an edge by overwhelming their opponents with as many arguments and as much supporting evidence as possible. This was because if a team “dropped” an argument by its opponent—if it did not respond to the other side’s claim—that argument was conceded as “true,” no matter how inane it was. So in high school debate I didn't do so well. I think primarily because I didn't have enough information prepared before going in to respond to an opponents case. I had routinely been smacked down by judges who felt I didn't attack a point sufficiently to avoid conceding it. So for one tournament, the proposition at hand was whether global concerns ought to be held above local ones. I stated case that aliens had infiltrated most, if not all, national governments, and they had a goal of putting the human race into slavery, or worse. Clearly global concerns for survival trump local government concerns that may be based on ulterior motives. Hey, it was the mid 1990s, and X Files was all the rage among nerds. My opponents would say they wouldn't even dignify that stuff with an answer. I responded that they conceded my point, then, and judges agreed. Out of 4 matches that tournament I won three. The fourth time, I got an opponent who actually called my bluff since I obviously had no evidence to back up my assertion. My debate coach got the scores back and wondered what happened, because I was otherwise the losingest member of the debate team. She congratulated me on winning and hacking the rules, and then told me she never wanted to hear about me composing a case like that again.
• NikolaeVarius 9y ago
  This article massively misses the point. Debate teaches you how to think. Teaches you how to respond to arguments efficiently and concisely and how to organize information. I regard HS Debate as the best times of my life. The insane amount of stuff you learn is just crazy. What other activities are there that exposes you non stop to political critique, current events, history, energy policy and puts you in contact with some extremely smart people? And if you really hate it, there is nothing stopping you from running K's and stuff. Most were really stupid, but at the very least it teaches how to argue against irrational/stupid arguments in a practical manner.
  • mathperson 9y ago
    I second this. Debate was really fun and if you didn't want to talk fast there were plenty of lay tournaments and forums.
  • anigbrowl 9y ago
    Debate teaches you how to think. Spreading ensures that nobody else will learn any of this from listening to you.
• MilnerRoute 9y ago
  This is really on the coaches. (Yes, high school debate teams have coaches.) This was supposed to build useful skills -- public speaking, research, analysis, formal presentations. It reminds me of that scene in the "Bad News Bears" where the little league coach realizes the grown-ups pushing the kids to win win win are the bad guys.
  • pigscantfly 9y ago
    In my experience, it was the team captains -- other, older students -- who pushed innovative tactics like spreading, kritiks, and postmodernist approaches. Our adult coaches actively discouraged these strategies in the name of preserving the historical style. In my opinion, the new stuff was much more fun and exciting, and I certainly wouldn't have read any Nietzsche or Baudrillard, etc. as a fourteen-year-old without that motivation. I credit that experience with a great deal of philosophical richness in my life even now; who cares that some sixty-year-old thought we were speaking too fast? It's supposed to be for fun; whatever the kids think is fun is what it should be.
    • mathperson 9y ago
      yes!
• jasonmaydie 9y ago
  The worst part is trying to say as many words as possible in your 5 or 15min time window. They talk so fast I can barely understand anything.
• pnathan 9y ago
  > . In my four years of high school debating, I spent many long nights holed up alone in my room poring over amicus briefs or economic analyses. I passed even longer weekends on buses and planes traveling to schools across the country and staying in hotels or with local families. From winter to spring, in settings as grand as a Harvard lecture hall and as cramped as a boiler room in a Salt Lake City public school, my debate partner and I held forth on everything from nuclear proliferation to sanctions against Russia to the private prison industry. H'm. Sounds like you got a good education out of it. I wonder if there are similar fora for adults.
  • Fezzik 9y ago
    The nearest thing I can think of for adults is Toastmasters. It is non-adversarial though, so very different from debate in that regard, as it is focused on developing public speaking skills. http://www.toastmasters.org/ http://www.toastmasters.org/
• scrumper 9y ago
  Fascinating stuff, and all new to me. Those high school debaters seem like they'd be recognized as 'doubleplusgood duckspeakers' in 1984.
• WalterBright 9y ago
  > The first debate format practiced widely in high schools, beginning in the 1970s, was called Policy Debate. What? My father was on his high school debate team in the 1930's.
• glenstein 9y ago
  I guess what I don't get is how even LD debates were able to be compromised by technicality, "spreading" and increasing velocity. As other commenters mentioned, spreading can be judged on a know it when you see it basis. Velocity could be similarly judged, or stopped with an explicit limit on rate of speech. Technicality is more difficult but probably becomes less of a problem if the other two are sorted out. It sounds like the real failure is the failure to meaningfully regulate the offending behaviors. Maybe there is difficulty regulating it, but the "gee, we'll never be able to fix it regardless of how we regulate" is more likely an attitude of lethargic helplessness rather than a meditation on the nature of competitive debate itself.
  • mattmcknight 9y ago
    Combining time limits with word limits would be nice. Harder to measure though.
• WalterBright 9y ago
  > It has been turned into something that can easily be scored. No wonder it has been gamed. Intellectual pursuits can never be scored simply, and to do so means you'll get rule gaming that defeats the whole purpose. Should go back to which team "developed a more convincing argument" and leave it up to the judges.
• acjohnson55 9y ago
  This reminds me of a phenomenal Radiolab episode, on how a team of black students managed to turn the tables on teams that were effective at "spreading" [1]. I think the author alludes to this: > Some debaters even began refusing to debate the resolutions altogether, formulating elaborate theoretical and critical arguments that were, at best, tenuously linked to the topic they had been given. I do pretty much agree with the author though. Everything has become a game and we've completely lost sight of the fact that we're ultimately trying to build a better society. It's a big part of why I stopped identifying with political labels. Although, as always, I'm suspicious of the concept that there ever were "good old days". [1] https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radiolab_podcast/radiolab_podcast16debatable.mp3 https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radi...
• entee 9y ago
  Having spent roughly a year doing Parliamentary style debate at the college level and various forms of speech/debate all through high school (admittedly I ended up doing mostly student-congress which is somewhat removed from direct adversarial debate but introduces other challenges), I find this article quite accurate about the state of HS debate. I wonder why at the college level (where the same kinds of "dropped argument" rules apply) the debate hasn't turned to 300 word-per-minute screeds (at least while I was competing). On a related note, I explicitly avoided policy debate in HS because of its non-sensical verbal vomit style, and by few experiences with Lincoln-Douglass (LD) just seemed too abstract. One of the things I liked at the college level was that teams would present cases that were a little more practical than LD without the "I need to memorize wikipedia and 3 years of the Economist then recite it all" aspects of Policy Debate (PD). Judges also had some discretion on judging whether the case was a fair case (the affirmative team presented a case of their invention usually), which helped curb abuse. I wonder if there's a way to replicate that flexibility at the HS level.
• juris 9y ago
  Spreading is good practice for speed reading and enunciation. Their coach has failed them if they allow it to continue into the competition room, unless they have asked both the judge and their opponents whether it is OK. Key thing here: parents judge rounds. These lay judges aren't trained to listen to 300 wpm. They don't know any better though-- they'll still come back to the tab room and say "wow, these kids are really great, I didn't even understand what they were saying!" Yuck. The politicians of tomorrow. And if your opponents haven't trained spread, what's the use of you spreading? Are you that insecure in your ability to sway others with logic and reason that you would resort to speaking quickly? Maybe instead of getting riled up by the game you should learn a real skill: listening. You'll find more of their flaws that way. If you can't speak in a way that your listeners can understand, then your words are worthless.
• newobj 9y ago
  Yeah, it's a game - is someone surprised by this? - and a really fun one. I played it for 4 years and sucked at it. Still fun as hell and really intense, even if you are mediocre. Kinda like PUBG... :P I'm sorry, did someone really think that a high school extra curricular was going to act as some kind of deep and wisened meditation for teens on rhetoric? More than anything else, debate forces you to think quick on your feet - really, /really/ quick. Tantamount to an e-sport, but WAY more open ended, since the aff and neg can run just about anything under the sun, or even go meta (which seems more common since the early 90's when I debated). Yes debate is a terrible model for useful rhetoric. It's also a hellishly fun boxing match for brains/mouths.
  • phlakaton 9y ago
    Actually yes, I really did think that, if you're going to spend time honing the craft of rhetoric, you should come out of it with actual, useful rhetoric. This probably comes from my background in music. Marching band members don't demonstrate their proficiency by ripping through scales at top speed, after all. Yes, speed is going to be a component of many live competitions, particularly among the young and impressionable. In the case of music, though, we simply temper that by including aesthetics in our judgment. It is not enough to play fast, correctly, and synchronized – you must play musically as well. Musicality may require you _not_ to take a piece quickly at all! Debate practiced at 300wpm pretty much just relegates you to the realm of competitive Rubik's Cube solvers. Which, if that's your thing, great, but it's not something you should want to highlight on your college application...
    • lukasschwab 9y ago
      How do you feel about grindcore? Certainly it has musical and aesthetic merit, historical importance, and it demands talented composers and performers. Additionally, there is lots of other music for folks who don't enjoy it. If popular accessibility is all that matters, we could pare down music to the major popular genres. I don't think marches would make the cut. Fast debate is like grindcore; there's room in civics for specialization, even specialization that isn't aesthetically obvious. It's hard for most to pick out the logic or musicality from the noise of debate or grindcore, respectively. I would hate to live in a world where grindcore is the only music out there. But I'm glad I have the option of putting on some John Zorn when I'm in the mood. Competitive cubing is pretty cool, but it's an algorithm/dexterity problem that requires none of the creativity that debate demands.
• mycentstoo 9y ago
  Brings back memories. I debated for 9 years. 4 in high school in LD winning league a couple of times and qualifying for nationals and state. I also competed on the national circuit for college policy debate. And I finished by doing a year of debate in British Parliamentary. I was usually a "traditional" debater, ie. one who spreads. I think the problem with debate is that there are actually no rules beyond speaker order and speaker time. There's been a devolution of debate to "performance", ie, the speech itself and its medium is a form of argument. RAP, music, dancing, etc. During my last tournament, I actually counted the times I debated the topic versus the rules of debate and found that it was about equal. If anything, debate doesn't have enough rules that govern it.
• topynate 9y ago
  The Attic Greeks prized debate – rhetoric – but seemed not to suffer from these problems to quite the same degree. (Their problems were different and retained their interest, I suspect, rather longer than those of North America will. Read Plato's Phaedrus for a contemporary critique.) We're a long way from vanished Hellas, but we do know a few tricks they didn't. For instance, we know that the elderly, while suffering a certain decline in the fluid intelligence necessary to react rapidly to novelty, can do well in crystallized intelligence – that factor which employs skills, knowledge, life experience, and, in short, wisdom. I therefore propose a "Legacy" debate category, to be judged only by those above the age of, say, 70. A pace of 300 words per minute, while impressive, will not be much good when assessed by those whose brains are no longer physically capable of processing that hypersyllabification.
  • mathperson 9y ago
    yeah this actually exists..there are a LOT of debate circuits that basically only allow parents to judge so you are being judged by 'typical' citizens.
• dnfehren 9y ago
  Was out of it before the later developments presented this article (was maybe out of it when the author of the article was a baby :/) but most of it seems true, though I don't think I ever had any illusions about it being in any way a useful investigation of the topics. " High school debate today is basically an intellectual game, not an exercise in truth-seeking. " Was kind of the point. If I learned any "truths" it was about myself and the other weirdos on my team as people, not, Russian foreign relations or education or whatever the other topics were but that seems pretty valuable as well.
• tunesmith 9y ago
  It's not surprising. If the goal is to engage in a true dialectic and come to either a shared truth or an exploration of how our different axiomatic values can arrive at different well-reasoned conclusions, then - surprise - it turns out we don't even have a communication medium that is well-suited for this. Debates, televised or on stage? They have time limits. Free-wheeling verbal exchanges? They still have time pressure, in that they are synchronous. And like debates, there's also a linear aspect, where it is easy to forget about tangents or branches of thought. Essays? They lack interactivity; form and presentation is prioritized over the true content of the argument. Discussion boards? They are largely immutable, and worse, they are hierarchical - it is still vulnerable to "spreading" since you cannot collapse branches together. What is needed is a communication medium that is asynchronous, that prioritizes argument content over form or presentation, and that follows a graph-structure form. We don't have that. It doesn't yet exist, outside of mathematical proofs. A system that loosened and adapted those principles for non-specialists to comfortably use could change the world. (A lot of people have tried working on this, me included - there are plenty of examples of "argument graphing" and the like out there, but none have really proved workable yet.) Excellent critical thinking takes time, the willingness to revise, and the ability to track. Focusing on speed in the short term just slows things down in the long term.
  • jkeat 9y ago
    I find the nested comment system we're communicating via right now to be an effective medium, especially in facilitating nonlinear debate. Pair that with consistent moderation and you get some pretty good discussions.
• pnmahoney 9y ago
  Debate is good at teaching you that truth-seeking is not exclusively or primarily the outcome of a speech act. Not even the ones which make truth some kind of goal (as a stellar example, you might consider that this is not even what publishing as an academic accomplishes, either). From a pitch meeting to even, say, a presidential debate: it's usually about getting someone or some group to an understanding. Probably one that could be said to have a desired impact on your audience -- it is, in other words, strategic. Even then the funny thing about this article is that, in indicting what it considers a decay in critical thinking, the article misses a lot. Spot the error: > in recent years its speed has increased markedly, as have the mountains of evidence. The emphasis on logic and critical thinking has waned. Disclosure: did this activity, was ranked #1 for my class year, etc etc. (Note that doesn't mean I think the activity's perfect, either.) One of the coolest outcomes is that - since it attracts people who want to become lawyers - you end up building a really, really deep legal bench:, fed and appellate clerks, m&a/whiteshoe types, litigators, etc.
• saamm 9y ago
  My experience of high school debate was dramatically different from that of the author, though I also did policy + engaged in spreading. I learned a ton about research, writing, and effective argumentation.
• throwawayjava 9y ago
  I have a hard time agreeing that there's much of a parallel between "[what's wrong with] American politics" and a 15 year old "spending many long nights holed up poring over amicus briefs or economic analyses". In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the backlash against highly technical forms of debate is most indicative of the current political moment. From my perspective, the backlash is basically just lots of people with at-best marginal interest and basically no skin in the game loudly condescending legions of volunteer educators. More-over, the politicians who most typify the current political moment more resemble the under-prepared student sweet-talking their way out of a substantive debate than the over-prepared egg head presenting an 15-point analysis of an amicus brief at break-neck speed. Critiques of overly-technical, jargon-filled, evidence-heavy debate styles aren't exactly difficult to sell. And there's a lot to be said for slowing things down (I insist on quality over quantity when I judge). But it's worth pointing out that the proposed alternative styles devolve into "dueling used car salesmen" at least as often as the former devolve into "speed competitions". I'd rather watch a bad speed match than a bad duel between clueless care salesmen, but that's certainly a personal preference between two objectively bad choices. In other words, most high school students aren't particularly good at making arguments and will settle for style when they can't win on substance. That's true regardless of the style you choose to emphasize. The important thing is that tens of thousands of kids learn how to present a speech in front of an audience and also get some practice reading "amicus briefs and economic analyses".
  • mathperson 9y ago
    This also reminds me of how often people on hackernews complain about scientific papers of being overly technical and abstract..The complexity is to a large portion necessary to communicate meaningful arguments instead of 'used car salesmen'
• jaywunder 9y ago
  > High school debate today is basically an intellectual game, not an exercise in truth-seeking. It has been turned into something that can easily be scored. This eliminates the complexity and intricacy of real discourse about real issues. If debate is a game, then the execution of a “spread” is like a well-timed blitz in football. Convincing a judge that your opponents’ arguments would cause human extinction is equivalent to a successful Hail Mary pass. I agree with this quote so much. I was on the debate and robotics team in high school, we did extemporary style in debate. I ended up leaving the debate team and focusing entirely on robotics because debate taught students how to argue, not how to listen. Whenever debate kids would leak into robotics, they would cause endless looping conversations talking about different designs. The main issue is that high school debate doesn't teach how to listen well, only how to hear well. If debate was more freeform so students could actually form opinions based on what they thought about the resolution, then I believe this problem would be fixed. I have a friend who did my proposed style and said that it was extremely fun, and turned debate into a problem solving exercise.
• lukasschwab 9y ago
  I disagree with a handful of this article's arguments, and I'm happy to see a number of debaters chiming in on this thread with similar concerns. [I did parliamentary and policy debate in high school; now I'm a High School parliamentary debate coach] 1. @elefanten correctly points out that arguments are still evaluated at speed. This is my experience; the author characterizes it as "bludgeoning," but good debaters increase their speed to add evidence to a small number of strong arguments. Bludgeoning can happen, but it's uncommon. If McCordick's characterization of Policy were accurate, we could expect the fastest debaters to predictably win all their tournaments. This isn't the case. Speed is a rough correlate to ability inasmuch as it's an early product of commitment, but there are diminishing returns. By a third year in competition a high school debater isn't focusing on speaking faster at all. The real competitive edge is in argumentation. 2. McCordick's comparison between "corrosion" in debate and "corrosion" in American national politics is extremely hasty. National politics have not become more inaccessible because they're technocratic and opaque. The 2016 presidential debates were not run at 300+ wpm, nor did they involve detailed policy advocacies. Debate is characterized by technical elitism, national politics by right- and left-populism. How is debate jargon remotely like "the kind of language currently poisoning our public sphere?" 3. McCordick speculates that debate produces students who don't care about truth and public speech, but there's no real evidence of this. Even if there's validity to his stylistic criticisms, it's unlikely debaters are on the whole less civically engaged or politically literate or eloquent than their peers. My experience, at least, is that they're dramatically ahead. 4. He ignores all the skills besides rhetoric. Research and acadmic/technical literacy are critical to prepared debate, as they are to college academics. Debate teaches a number of mental models that I've personally found extremely useful––e.g. for grokking multiple opportunity costs in decisionmaking. It teaches work ethic and self-motivation, both skills admired in athletics. Also topic knowledge at a very accelerated level for high school students. 5. McCordick gives the impression that debate is homogeneously inaccessible, which is inaccurate for a few reasons. A) High-level competition makes up the vast minority of High School debate; the vast majority of debaters are active on nationally uncompetitive local circuits where traditionalist judge expectations keep debate slow and untechnical. B) Other commenters correctly point out the rise of new performative styles that preference debate on relatable terms, which have been highly competitive for years now. C) There are plenty of debate formats that aren't hypertechnical––McCordick even competed in two of them: Public Forum and Worlds. Parliamentary debate often plays a similar role where it's offered. 6. I agree with @ashark that debate's idiosyncracies are a product of Goodhart's Law. Competition is an essential incentive for the workload, in the same way that international science fairs incentivize research (the only other high school competition in which I've seen a similar work ethic). @ashark suggests in a different comment that the only way to counteract specialization is to allow subjectivity in judging. This would just substitute judge-appeal as the metric for competitive success, which is hardly a better proxy for truth-seeking and communication skills given judges' pre-existing political biases on a topic. 7. I understand frustrations with debate's apparent inaccessibility to laypeople. It's a frustration I experienced myself when I first started. Why, though, is there so much frustration over specialization in debate? Why not similar frustration over other specialized activities? Debate definitely doesn't bring politics to the polis, but it needn't. Not all politics is about eloquence; it's also about cost-benefit analysis, philosophical dilemmas, wonky details. It isn't necessary that everyone is a technical expert, and it's naive to believe that policy doesn't demand expertise. I find grindcore offputting, but that doesn't mean grindcore is "corroding" or "perverted." Interested in developing such expertise? Competitive debate is one of many ways in which to develop it. It certainly isn't perfect, but it teaches skills that don't exist anywhere else in high school curricula. Does it erode general advocacy skills and interest in truth? Certainly not for debaters who are good at it. If anything, it builds them. Skills are not mutually exclusive. On a petty note, the article credits Jack with winning "the high school debating national championship"––America Magazine should be more precise. Regis won first in World Schools Debate, not one of the major formats.
• lurker721 9y ago
  > "Jack McCordick... and his teammates from Regis High School won the high school debating national championship this year." As far as I can tell, this claim is made up. Here's the full results packet form the 2017 National Championship: http://results.speechanddebate.org/2017/posting/2017%20Result%20Booklet_07-18-17.553692206.pdf http://results.speechanddebate.org/2017/posting/2017%20Resul.... Cmd-F McCordick: 0 results. (Did not even participate?) Cmd-F Regis: 5th place in public forum (Eoin Matthews & Randall Zuccalmaglio).
  • mathperson 9y ago
    I think it's this event. I assumed he was talking TOC or the event you posted. Ive never even heard of this format.. But it looks pretty dull in my opinion compared to ld or policy or even parli https://www.regis.org/articletest.cfm?id=7403 https://www.regis.org/articletest.cfm?id=7403
    • lurker721 9y ago
      So the format he wrote about is not the format he participated in. But he somehow neglected to mention that fact. Nice.
      • mathperson 9y ago
        I found him in some tabroom results for LD and public forum-so he definitely competed at least a little in the events he criticizes-but I agree it seems a tad deceptive. I feel bad attacking his credentials-I am sure he was a fine debater. This article is of course...quite silly. Comparing children reading foucault and baudrillard or cass sunstein and talking quickly about nuclear proliferation with "the kind of language currently poisoning our public sphere" is not even wrong.
• mncharity 9y ago
  It might be worth thinking more generally about the future. Continuous speech recognition allows new approaches to scoring. Teaching scientific discourse, and team collaboration, is increasingly a focus, even down to K. Imagine being able to do automated judging of team and individual performance, at listening, clear presentation, group facilitation and collaboration, problem analysis and creative problem solving, tasteful system design, and so on. That could be really neat.
• slaymaker1907 9y ago
  When I debated a few years ago (ca 2012), spreading wasn't really seen anywhere except for Policy, one event of many. Additionally, it really wasn't all that popular at my school so spreading wasn't something people practiced. Of course, people would speak quickly, but there is a big difference between that and spreading.
• OliverJones 9y ago
  What does it matter? Debate is just another extreme sport, like kayak cliff-diving or memorizing lots of numbers. By taking human capabilities to their limit, we've gone post-human and started failing the Turing test. Debate has become a worthless life skill. Members of the USA national legislature rarely give speeches to try to convince their fellow legislators of something; mostly the room is occupied by nobody but a couple of clerks and some automated CSPAN TV cameras. Aristotle might say we've abandoned pathos (understanding our audience) and ethos (personal integrity) in favor of logos (the bs that gets spewed at 300 words per minute). I'm glad this elite debater is calling bs.
• peter303 9y ago
  Spreading has been enough of a problem in academic publishing that some institution just ask for your five most significant publicationd in thepast five years on your CV. Quality, not quantity.
• aaron695 9y ago
  > High school debate today is basically an intellectual game, not an exercise in truth-seeking. It has never been, and can't be about truth-seeking, this is exactly what it is not about. It's always been about an intellectual game. So one learns the others view so one can attack it better, if thats ones goal and along the way learn critical thinking. This author seems like one of those idiots when they have audience votes, who votes for the side they agree with. That said their original thesis is correct, debating has gone absurdum and so theoretical a lot of the learning seems to be lost.
• jacinabox 9y ago
  The author's basic premise is that high school debate, done well, can help remedy the problems with US politics. But you might notice that the author describes traits for high school debate (technicality, attention to detail) that are unlike those of real politics, and asks for high school debate to become more like real politics.
• thephyber 9y ago
  An interesting documentary that touched on some of the same points is Resolved (2007)[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolved_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolved_(film)
• rumcajz 9y ago
  I haven't known this kind of competition even existed. But it strikes me as weird. Why does it even exist? Training kids to win a debate? What is that good for? If we want them to exercise debate as a democratic institution shouldn't we rather focus on ability to understand the opponent, to change one's mind, to reach compromise? One way to make that competitive would be to deliberately build a prisoner's dilemma into the rules: If one party wins, they get the most points. If they reach a compromise each party gets some points. If either party fails to convince the judge, nobody gets nothing.
• cloudkj 9y ago
  I participated in high school policy debate for all four years of high school, and can relate to some of the criticism in the article. However, I find the parallels drawn by the author between debate and today's political atmosphere tenuous at best, and perhaps exaggerated. To me, the biggest educational value of high school policy debate was its blank slate nature and its openness to different evaluation paradigms. By default, the convention was to apply a "policy maker" paradigm, in which the advantages of the plan affirming the resolution are weighed against the disadvantages brought up by the negative team, and the side with the most "weight" wins. Thus, it's natural that the arguments would eventually converge upon the scenarios with the most weight, i.e. those with the highest death tolls or biggest quantifiable impact on humanity. Nuclear war and climate change were argumentative staples in these types of debate rounds, and I even recall some cases where a policy maker judge, in his oral feedback, literally added up scenarios for each side to determine the winner. Another convention is "silence means consent", which likely led to the practice of spreading to overwhelm your opponent with arguments so that any unanswered argument automatically gets granted as won. I feel like that practice is more an artifact of the way debates are structured with time limits and restrictions on only considering arguments that were continuously extended throughout the speeches in order to be considered as a valid "reason for decision". Coupled with a desired to quantify each argument in order to outweigh the opponent, I think this behavior is inevitable given the structure of the activity. However, I feel that the open nature of the evaluation paradigm was a shining educational tool. Given the right judge (e.g. a debate coach, an experienced former debater, or a college debater), you had the option of advocating for any type of evaluation paradigm you wanted. You could open the debate up to meta topics such as whether the affirmative plan was "on topic" by nitpicking the definition of words in the resolution or arguing grammatical technicalities, and claiming that "non-topical" plans were damaging to debate as an activity and warrant a loss; you could attempt to compare the morality of certain scenarios against quantifiable death-toll scenarios, such as advocating that the moral obligation for overturning some court case to symbolize the eradication of racism against some group might outweigh any type of nuclear war scenario; you could even make arguments against the practice of "spreading", in the name of education, and demand that if the opposing team speaks too fast that would damage the educational value of debate and thus warrant a loss. All and any of these arguments would've been valid, and I feel that provided valuable lessons in thinking outside the box, looking for technicalities, and optimizing approaches for playing the game.
• zacpdx 9y ago
  While this article is true for the majority of high schools around the country, policy debate can be slow, understandable and extremely eloquent if you know where to look. Urban Debate Leagues (UDL), often produce championship level debaters that use poems and music as evidence and make arguments up entirely from their own thoughts. The format of policy is extremely loose and just because the tactics that are most commonly used can be seen as anti-intellectual that doesn't mean that you can't be extremely good while appealing to layman as well.
• CM30 9y ago
  > This was because if a team “dropped” an argument by its opponent—if it did not respond to the other side’s claim—that argument was conceded as “true,” no matter how inane it was. Chief among the strategies exploiting this rule was “spreading” (a combination of “speed” and “reading”), where debaters would rattle off arguments at a blistering pace. Their speeches often exceeded 300 words per minute. (A conversational pace is about 60 per minute.) This is quite common online too, especially among creationists: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop
• Dowwie 9y ago
  What I thought qualified as debate doesn't seem to be the case. Was the sport exploited based on poorly defined policies?
• woodandsteel 9y ago
  The article explains what is wrong with high school debate today. But if it is going to be made better, we need to have a good idea of what better would be. And for that we need to understand what it is that debate should accomplish. I say the function of debate in a democracy is to inform members of the public so that they can make intelligent political decisions. That being the case, debaters should be thought of as being educators who inform the public about the arguments on each side of an issue, and should be so evaluated. Having a winner and a loser doesn't make, sense. If they both do a poor job of informing, that should be noted, and ditto if they both do well. Perhaps there should be a few prizes in a tournament for the teams that do the best job of informing. Let me add that positions on policy or ethical matters invariably rest at least in part on deeper assumptions about things like human psychology and history. For that reason, these should be addressed in debate. As for learning how to think logically and evaluate evidence, that is all part of what it takes to be a good educator. If anyone disagrees, then they should present their own idea of what is the proper function of debate.
  • woodandsteel 9y ago
    Here are a few more points I think that the reason high school debate keeps going wrong is people have never figured out what its proper function in a democracy is. Instead it's been designed to function as a means of testing how intelligent and hard-working the debaters are. Also, let's remember that we have debates only because our form of government is a democracy and so requires a well-informed public. In countries with non-democratic governments, public debate on social and political issues is generally outlawed.