Trying Ideas On

If you haven’t yet seen John Warner’s piece debunking the idea that debate is central to the college experience, check it out. It’s well worth the read.

I come to questions about debate with some history. My dad taught debate for decades. I taught it for a few years. The Girl was an active debater for several years. I served for years as a tournament judge and on one memorable occasion as a substitute coach. With a background in political philosophy and all that time in and around debates, you’d think I’d be a huge champion of them.

Not really. At least, not as they’re often conducted.

When TG was in junior high, she joined the debate team. The Jersey Shore Debate League features grades six to eight. The culture of the league was wonderful: it was all about helping kids build confidence as public speakers and improve their research skills. Showboating was frowned upon; the point was to make the best arguments you could. TG quickly became the star of her team, due mostly to an almost scary ability to boil down an argument to its essence quickly. But the league was only peripherally about winning. It was really about helping students develop skills and confidence. We both loved it. She commented later that after doing debate tournaments, class presentations were a breeze.

When she got to high school, she joined the debate team there (and I signed up as a tournament judge again). But the entire culture was different. At this level, it wasn’t about building kids up anymore. It was about sophistry. It was about winning. Where the junior high league was supportive, the high school league was cutthroat. She quit halfway through her freshman year and never looked back. I couldn’t blame her.

To my mind, the ideal version of debate in a college setting is closer to her junior high experience than her high school experience. A really good college class—at least in subjects like the ones I’ve taught—allows students to try different ideas on and see how they fit. That necessarily involves some risk taking and some level of trust that the process of trial and error won’t be taken as revelatory of some sort of deep character flaw. Ideally, the best classes allow students to follow ideas wherever they lead, even if the students wind up surprising themselves.

In that setting, a certain kind of debate can be useful. It’s the kind that raises “have you thought of …?” objections, and allows the respondent to make adjustments as new arguments come to light. It’s something closer to an idealized scientific method, in which new arguments or facts give license for an ethical person to change their mind. (Admittedly, science as practiced doesn’t always live up to that standard—egos are real, even there—but as an ideal, it’s more than worthwhile.) The cutthroat style of debate, rife with sophistry and ad hominem attacks, shuts down exploration. It penalizes uncertainty and draws battle lines. Anyone who has followed American politics over the last few years has seen more than enough of that style and its costs.

One of my favorite teaching techniques, when we get to subjects on which disagreements are to be expected, is to have folks on each side give the strongest possible argument for the other side. It’s an uncanny experience the first time, but once students get the hang of it, they sometimes realize that what seemed obvious at first glance is much less so when they look more closely. They also realize that there can be distance between themselves and their opinions.

All this requires a high level of trust that nobody is going to record and post 30 seconds of someone trying on an idea that they later discard. And it absolutely requires that the kind of trolling that certain actors with agendas try to pass off as debate be shut down. Someone who marches into a class convinced that they already know the answers, and who just wants to pick a fight, isn’t really a student. They’re a plant. Students need room to experiment, to acknowledge arguments or facts they previously didn’t know or hadn’t considered, and to change their minds.

To the extent that provocateurs with agendas are trying to use the idea of debate as a cudgel, I have to say no. Moves like that shut down the learning process. To the extent that debate is conceived instead as the chance to pit different ideas against each other, I offer an enthusiastic yes. Students need room to try ideas on. Not all of them will fit. That’s part of the process.