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Columnist: Debate Skills Not Always Valuable

From http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/benefits-of-selfjustification-and-winning-at-all-costs-are-amatter-of-debate/2007/08/03/1185648142486.html

Benefits of self-justification and winning at all costs are a matter of debate

Lisa Pryor
August 4, 2007

When reviewing life stages it is easy to wonder, "What on earth was I thinking when I did that?" Falling into this category are such things as feathery haircuts, loser boyfriends and stints with the Chippendale Trotskyist Liberation Collective. For me, the thing I scratch my head over is all the years I spent debating.

Debaters and public speakers are a strange lot. While normal teenagers spend Friday nights roaming parks and setting fire to wheelie bins, these nerds end the week in frigid classrooms, making passionate pleas about terrorism, school uniforms, carrots and sticks. The audiences comprise little more than three parents, a reluctant sibling and a bored adjudicator, waiting for the whole thing to be over so they can get stuck into the supper provided by the host school, which always seems to include caramel slices, triangle sandwiches and orange cordial.

I was reminded of this bizarre subculture when I attended the finals of The Sydney Morning Herald Plain English Speaking award on Monday. This is a big week for the talking sports. Yesterday was the grand final of the Premier's Debating Challenge. The youngsters who make it to the final stages of these competitions are precocious and impressive. But as I think back on my own experience as a debater, I wonder whether these competitions do them any good.

There are a few things about these nerd sports that niggle.

First, debating is a gateway drug. It can lead to more worrying forms of competitive speaking, like mooting and mock trial. Young people might think they have got things under control, but before they know it they might find themselves forging careers as pompous barristers.

Second, debating makes teenagers insufferable arguers. They develop skills that they can then misuse to hoodwink their parents, learning to say things such as, "Well, my failure to get home by curfew might be the topic of this fight we are now having at the front door, but what is the real issue?" Or "Isn't this just a slippery slope, Dad? If you ban me from going to the Slipknot gig this week, what's to stop you banning me from going to church fellowship next week?"

Third, debating warps thinking. The American education and human behaviour writer Alfie Kohn, who describes himself "only half in jest, as a recovering debater", explains this problem in his book No Contest: the Case Against Competition. "I was a big-deal debater in high school, and it took me years to unlearn the toxic messages I learnt from that activity. I learnt that there are exactly two sides to any issue, and that either position can be defended if you are clever enough, that no view is more right than any other, and I developed an adversarial posture. In debate training, you are trained to win, to pummel your opponent, to selectively use evidence to defend a given position. Sure, I acquired good research and speaking skills, but I am not sure it was worth the cost."

Debaters become masters at self-justification. In later life they are capable of taking any conclusion that suits them and arguing backwards to explain why they are right. They can justify anything from taking a job in private equity to cheating on a spouse to refusing to take the garbage out.

I think the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of debating is that it is really the art of bullshitting. Bullshitting is dangerous but it is also one of the most valuable skills in modern life. In spite of its weaknesses, it is a sport worth participating in. It teaches young people powerful Jedi mind tricks and it is then up to them to have the strength of character to use these powers for good rather than evil.

But let's not imagine that talking sports have anything to do with truth and knowledge. To illustrate this point, consider a story of legend in university debating. In a preparation room, a team has just minutes to prepare arguments in support of the proposition "That we should abolish the Senate".

The most brilliant member of the team regales his colleagues with a spirited, nuanced and compelling case for ridding the world of the menace that is the Senate. Before they step out to meet the opposition, he turns to his team mates and asks: "Okay, one last thing. What is the Senate?"