Teaching High School Debate Differently

High school debate's worst case scenario

Friday was my last day of regular classes for the school year. It feels good to get across the finish line of a really difficult year. Going online presented a lot of challenges, especially when I had to teach debate over Zoom. My school's schedule has the year divided into five "mods," and the last mod has been completely under quarantine.

I did competitive debate for four years in high school and four years in college. It's an activity that gave an extremely withdrawn, nerdy kid a great deal of confidence in public speaking. In college it allowed me to travel to Ireland and fall in with a great group of friends. My mom was my high school's coach, and so this meant getting to spent a lot of quality time with her. One of our assistant coaches, a local college student, turned me on to philosophy, which I had never read before. My college coaches were wonderful people too, and I learned a lot from them.

It was a very good experience overall, but by the time I was done I realized that the whole enterprise was about playing games with rhetoric and not about actually changing the world for the better. In fact, too much immersion in debate can breed a certain kind of cynicism. I remember when we did a public debate on campus and my philosphy professor, who I greatly admired, attended and said the whole thing was "sophistry." That got me thinking abou the true nature of what I was doing, and whether it was the best use of my abilities.

When I parted ways with debate I was ready. After awhile, however, I missed the high I would get from the frisson of a hard-fought round. When I switched from being a college prof to a high school teacher I thought debate would be an interesting and enjoyable thing to introduce to my students. My school preaches progressive education, meaning that the learnign should be student-focused and geared toward exploration. Debate, when done well, certainly fits the bill.

However, I was also aware of how debate can so often work at cross-purposes with a progressive mindset, especially with learning for life. The world of competitive debate is so insular and byzantine that competitors rarely talk in ways that make sense to ordinary human beings. Policy debate, where competitors read evidence so fast that they can't be understood and keep trying to prove that the affirmative team's case will cause nuclear war, is the most infamous example of this. But even in other formats debaters talk too robotically and pepper their speeches with jargon because the judges are members of the same closed system. It's not necessarily a great education for learning how to engage in public discourse. At its worst its a training ground for new Ben Shapiros.

I really believe it can be if done well, however. When I taught my class I set about focusing on educating my students for life rather than competitive debate rounds. Since the school doesn't have a team, I could ignore the latter imperative. We used the Public Forum format, which is easy for the students to learn and allows for a range of resolutions. Each topic we debated was chosen by the students. The main topics ended up being the death penalty, cannabis legalization, and gun control. I maybe would have liked some less obvious topics, but they all allowed for lots of back and forth and an ease of entering into the topic.

For the last week of class I had initially planned on doing a parliamentary style debate on something related to the school. The more relaxed format would allow the students to branch out more and the topic would allow an emphasis on passion and humor. (There is nothing students are more poised to debate than their school's rules.) However, with the protests over George Floyd's death going on, a silly debate like that seemed pretty inappropriate. Instead I had the students all do their own speeches presenting what would have been their opening case for various resolutions related to the situation. If my class was supposed to be educating them for life, I thought it best to let them choose the position and build a case for a position they truly cared about, instead of just being assigned a side.

I was really blown away by the results. The speeches actually gave me a lot of hope, considering how hard the students worked in a short period of time, and how articulate they were in their calls for change. Considering the state of the world right now, high school students should be learning debate so that they can participate and make their own mark in the public sphere. If they come out of it thinking that the truth is immaterial to any debate, or that they have mastered a bunch of rhetorical tricks to win arguments, what have we actually taught them? The world has enough bullshit as it is.

How College Debate Explains Ted Cruz

Beto saying Cruz was "working for the clampdown" is the kind of pop culture reference I would have made in a 1990s debate round, and so I tip my hat

Ted Cruz does not have the kind of personality that puts people at ease. Successful politicians must first and foremost be likable, not inspire Zodiac killer memes. Nevertheless Cruz stands at the heights of national politics.

What explains this?

The keys to Cruz’s combination of effectiveness and creepiness can be found in his time as a college debater. I have insight into this obscure world, where I competed for four years for a much less vainglorious university than Princeton. When I read an article in the New York Times in 2015 by Jason Horowitz about Cruz’s time on the debate circuit I suddenly realized why I found his uncanny affect and florid rhetorical style so eerily familiar. 

There are many different debate formats, both Cruz and I competed in parliamentary style (at the same tournament once, even). In “parly” teams debate a resolution provided only 15 minutes before the round begins. Debaters thus must be nimble, resourceful, and able to access personal knowledge in the absence of ready evidence. Such skills translate well to the world of politics.

The emphasis on persuasion over evidence can obviously lead to chicanery.  I once witnessed a team win a crucial round by saying that hospice care involves forced lobotomies. If a debater says something exaggerated or untruthful, but keeps hammering at it with absolute conviction, that person will go far. If their opponents spend all of their speaking time disputing the facts, they have de facto put themselves on the defensive, the surest way to lose a debate round. Cruz obviously learned these dark arts well. For example, he has had the audacity to claim he had nothing to do with a government shutdown he clearly instigated back in 2013. Or just look at his recent debate with Beto O'Rourke, where he claimed without a quiver of doubt that Martin Luther King would somehow be opposed to black athletes protesting against police brutality during the national anthem.

Beyond his dissembling, Cruz’s manner of speaking is unsettling because he is still arguing to a debate judge. Debate judges tend to be debate coaches or debaters who must be persuaded according to the game’s unwritten rules. Those judges only consider arguments made in the round, not their own common sense. They write down every argument made, meaning that “dropping” an opponent’s argument can lose a round. This encourages a shotgun approach where debaters blast opponents with too many arguments to answer. One way to deflect this strategy is to keep changing the subject when pressed, a strategy I have witnessed Cruz use more than once. In any case, this is not a way that normal people argue, and debaters who have been trained in the rules of the game like Cruz have a hard time breaking the habit.

Cruz’s oddest rhetorical ticks are also familiar from my college debate days. Debaters commonly pepper their speeches with pop cultural references to add levity and charm judges. Since we were huge nerds judged by huge nerds, the references could be obscure or maladroit. Cruz can’t help himself from making such allusions. Take, for instance, his assertion that the Republicans were like Bart, Homer, Marge, and Maggie Simpson, and the Democrats were like Lisa. I laughed when I heard this because it sounded like something straight out of a 1990s debate round, right down to the fact that The Simpsons is among that decade’s biggest cultural touchstones. (His statement about Beto O’Rourke bringing “tofu, silicone, and dyed hair” to Texas was just plain weird, though.)

Even Cruz’s campaign ad featuring a “humorous” song putting down Beto O’Rourke because of his name makes sense as a college debate strategy. The parliamentary debate format tried to mimic aspects of debate in English Parliament, including witty put-downs of one’s opponent. If the jokes landed, judges would accept mockery of opponents. This is an aspect of college debate that tripped Cruz up, and he still seems to have a hard time sticking the punch line. Just recall his characterization of O’Rourke as a “Triple Meat Whataburger Liberal.”

However, O’Rourke ought to be prepared for someone who can bend the facts with absolute conviction, distract with shotgun blasts of rhetoric, and change the subject whenever caught in a tight spot. Cruz’s time as a college debater may have made it difficult for him to talk like a normal human being, but it also gave him powerful abilities that other politicians crave. Based on the first debate, it seems that Beto figured out how to keep from getting distracted and kept pushing his message forward.

On the debate circuit we used to joke about people we called “lifers.” They loved debate so much, they just couldn’t give it up after graduation, so they became coaches or perennial judges. In the case of one such lifer we used to joke with him by tapping our arms like heroin user preparing a vein for an injection. Their lust for debate was as intense as a drug addict’s need for junk, a compulsion rather than a choice. Sometimes these debaters, like Cruz, would come back and compete at the Worlds tournament while they were in law school. (That was the tournament at Princeton, in 1995, where I also competed.) It is obvious that Cruz is a lifer in his own way, but instead of judging rounds he is continuing to compete by other means in the political realm. The same arcane approach that makes him so off-putting is paradoxically the key to his success, and one key to understanding how to defeat him.