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> Yes, but a more important function of debate in school is to expose people to new ideas and to question assumptions. While this is definitely the overall goa
by morelisp 3y ago
> Yes, but a more important function of debate in school is to expose people to new ideas and to question assumptions.
While this is definitely the overall goal of teaching debate, it's not clear to me this is actually how policy debate in school should operate in order to teach that. For one thing, I think other events (congressional is more persuasive and iterative, group discussion more freeform and collaborative, L-D more moralistic) have the potential to do this better. Policy's structure is really meant to force you to defend an evidence-based position in depth. Basically inherent the format is that at least 50% of the time you won't agree with it.
- ang_cire 3y agoWhich is how you get exposed to new ideas. Learning how to argue for something you don't agree with means actually learning about that thing, in depth. You will not learn more in a 40 minute debate round than you will in the hundreds of hours you spend *preparing* for debate rounds (which is something that many other forms lack in comparison to policy). If it's my job to argue the GND is bad, I have to actually learn what the real tenets of it are, because otherwise I'm not going to find evidence to counter their impact and solvency claims. Likewise, if I have to argue it's good, I have to learn what its tenets are in order to find evidence supporting what it can accomplish, etc. (Just using GND as an example, obviously you aren't assigned advocacies in policy)