The New York Sophist

Debate education, like debate in most democratic/capitalist countries, is set up poorly because it is set up in opposition to a way of thinking and judging. As any first year debate student can tell you, you can’t win a debate by setting up your position as “Don’t do what they want to do.”

The debate culture that most debate educators have set up through their tournament-oriented, skill-development model is one that is attractive because it is not the daily, typical way that people debate.

Photo by Artur Shamsutdinov on Unsplash

Keep in mind the majority of argumentation theorists around the world gave up this form of modeling debate after World War 2, opting instead to base prescriptive modes of debating and arguing on what people do regularly in their daily lives. Building from, not opposed, to the ways people engage disagreement, choice, and incommensurate narratives of experience are the ways that theory and practice have gone in argumentation outside of tournament-centered pedagogy. Still, this is often presented as a wish, a normative practice that stands in opposition to the natural “bad reasoning” that people tend to do.

Debate is a vital epistemic practice that is a necessary part of the human practice of thinking through words. It has to be in there. In other words, it’s a feature not a bug. We keep treating it at every turn as a bug in the software instead of an essential part of the human program of thought.

What we need from a debating culture is a debate practice that doesn’t stand in opposition as its starting point, but stands in support of good options.

Debate at its best is an exploration of what we know and how we know it. It is an art of and for exploring good choices to ensure which one is better in this context, in this moment. Debate is a practice of learning about good feelings and ideas. It’s not a practice of heightened intelligence, or a practice of finding the best evidence, or a practice of making the best decision in a choice, or a tool for proving that an option or choice or way of thought is bad. It’s none of these things.

Debate is baked in given how prevalent confirmation bias is to our modes of thinking and given how eager we are to share our ideas about what should be done the minute we figure them out. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber point this out in their book The Enigma of Reason, where their research indicates that human thought, judgement, and reason is designed to occur in groups, where people can push back on what’s presented. This pushback, and this engagement of ideas in a back-and-forth communicative environment is how human knowledge is meant to be iterated and reiterated as conditions change.

Whatever models we teach and practice should be formalized expressions of what people do naturally in reason, not stand in opposition to it. Any model of debate that bolsters itself as being “better than” everyday debating is a suspicious model, most likely crafted to generate benefits other than giving us familiarity and practice with the modes of human engagement on ideas that are a part of being human.

A desirable debating culture is one where debate, as a practice we set up and do regularly on various ideas that are not necessarily associated with a big, time-sensitive decision, must be advanced based on what it provides to us and for us, not what it isn’t. Debate itself should be a good that we compare against other discourse forms because they are also good, and in this situation and context debate is well-warranted because of what it provides to our feelings, thoughts, and knowledge about an issue.

The biggest issue facing the Tournament Debate Regime around the world is that they willfully exclude the educational perspective and also work to exclude educators from participating in the creation and administration of debate events.

The biggest shock during the pandemic is that debate tournaments continued, unimpeded through online means. There was no discussion and no questioning of whether or not the form of debate should alter in ways that take advantage of the online environment.

Instead, the tournament regime framed the situation as a loss, and worked out an extreme conservative solution which appears, at best, ridiculous. The speaking style of BP is inappropriate nearly anywhere in the world except an empty classroom on a weekend, but this is revealed even more plainly on Zoom.

An unavoidable principle of rhetoric is adaptation. One adapts to the context and the audience as an ethic. This ethic has at its aim to offer the perspective of the speaker in a way that allows for maximum access by those listening. But all of this is tossed by the tournament regime, whose entire goal has to be to determine who is going to win the context. There really must not be any other goal. Winning is good because it’s winning is the only operating principle that I can see from where I’m sitting.

A great way to understand this problem is through the process of how topics are chosen for tournaments. The values of novelty and shock are held above the values of reflection, reconsideration, and research.

I didn’t mean for there to be an alliteration there, but I’m happy it happened!

The people putting together debate topics and administering tournaments are competitively successful people. This is the root of their status in the debate world. They have to simultaneously be able to determine winners, create winners through coaching, and indicate they have a “special ability” in creating winning arguments. This last one is the root of topic framing problems.

The best way for a tournament regime member to prove this is to frame a ridiculous motion that 1) has never been set before and 2) involves a lot of complicated concepts that are marked as both intellectual and special.

The motives here are not educational, but professional. The motions are not designed to help others learn about argumentation and rhetoric, but help everyone realize why the motion setter has the position that they do. There’s no consideration for others and how to help others improve their understanding of how argument “works.” The attitude among the tournament regime is that education happens elsewhere (“they should know about this already” – by what standard?), that this prepares them for difficult “out rounds” (again, a reference to the motion setter’s glorious past victories and their specialized knowledge), and that we need reduction and clarity in order to declare a winner (quite literally the only thing that the tournament regime values in terms of the art of debating).

The pace and timing of the tournament also encourages this hard sports attitude to it rather than the values of education, which require time, conversation, reading, reflection, and production of texts in order to provide multiple points of assessment on whether someone is reaching understanding. All of this is dismissed in global debate; this is a test of your extant abilities and no more. And even that fails: The standards are non-existent for what those tests would be; one simply has to “be good” at debate to then have some ability to influence the content.

A more educational model of debating would not allow those who are competitively successful anywhere near the design of the event. The event should be designed around topics that are accessible, controversial, and allow for moments of reflection on the art of rhetoric, argumentation, and debate. Some of that will be lack of familiarity with various topic areas, of course. But that’s different than the tournament regime’s standard refrain: “They didn’t know about this?? Oh my God. . .”

The relationship between research, knowledge, and articulation is the value of participating in debate. This only happens through repetition, reflection, reiteration, and research (alliteration won’t leave me be today). These things are devalued in contemporary global debate because they do not serve the tournament regime’s goals: Determine winners clearly and efficiently over the course of 48 to 72 hours. It’s incredibly disappointing that the move to online debating due to the pandemic did not raise any reflective questions about the express or implicit goals of debate, the structure of the tournament as the monopoly method for participating in debate, or the innovations in speech and thought that could be included to make a more robust and interesting event.

Educators have the perspective of development, not the celebration of the developed. Debate programs struggle for support from Universities because they are obviously not related to the university project – the closest metaphor is sports. Sports programs at the university are celebrations of the “already good” people that can be recruited to play sports in the name of the university. This is the root of the tournament model, a form that is designed to quickly and efficiently determine who is best.

Compare this to the classroom or department at the university where students are taught the practice of how to determine and justify what should be best. The rubric is under inquiry at the same time as the matter for consideration. Debate, at least the rhetorical model of it, operates under the same principles. It is not truth-seeking; it is not fact-seeking – it is seeking what counts as fact and truth and understanding why those rubrics exist. To get a degree in literature, for example, is not just to understand what works of literature are best, but the genealogy of the determination as to what counts as the best in the first place. In comparison, tournament regime participants tend to believe the rules of determining who won a debate fell from the sky.

This involves covering and re-covering “old” issues as a principle of education. This doesn’t make for exciting debate contests, but it makes for exciting conversation about argument innovation and argument that can produce moments where we aren’t sure whether something is best. That question begging moment forces a return to the conversation about the rubric, which develops it. Without the attitude toward development, such moments are dismissed as “losing” arguments, and the tournament rolls forward. After all, there’s no reward for innovation if one wants to be invited to convene and create future tournament events. It’s a conservative operation of copying what previous winners have done in order to be in the position to indicate, through obscure novel motions, that they have special insight into how debate works. This perverse system means that the more debate you are successful at, the less reflection you engage in, and the more certain you can be about things you have very little experience or exposure to – mainly critical controversies around the globe.

Without the presence of education-minded people, tournament debate will be exactly what we don’t need: A system of events that give participants a way to show off what they already know, and judge others for what they don’t know. Without a practice of reconsideration and humility, tournament debate is not educational in a way that serves the creation of participants in democratic governance.