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 paral

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.