When I was a sophomore in high school, a new teacher decided to organize a debate team. I was one of only four or five students who expressed an interest. Little did I know how much that expression would mean to me in the next 60 years.
We gathered and he explained that debate involved two persons arguing for or against a proposition with other teams taking the opposite position. The topic each year was selected for high school debaters by a national committee so that all of the teams could do their research on the same subject. I cannot remember all of the topics, though one of them was a government-sponsored universal health coverage scheme. We ordered workbooks and looked for other sources, hoping to find some authorities that the other side had missed.
As our teacher put it, the first affirmative side speaker would explain the reason for the proposition. The first negative side speaker would explain the inconsistency of the proposition, its lack of logic, and justification. The second affirmative would go into details about how his or her team’s proposal would meet the needs of the proposition. And the second negative would attack everything said by the other team. Those were 10-minute talks. Then, we would have 5-minute rebuttals, with the negative side going first. After that, if we were in a tournament, the judge would decide which team had done the best job.
Our high school teacher only stayed a year. So, no more debate. But when I got to college, I tried out for the debate team and made it. The ground rules were the same, but the level of scholarship, research, and rhetoric was much higher. Our coach insisted that we argue either side, and he would assign us at random so we had to be equally ready.
Most of the others on my college team were either pre-law students or pre-theology. The same was true of most of the college teams we met in exchanges or tournaments. We drove to other schools or tournament sites in the coach’s car, bunked in the cheapest dormitories or other housing, and ate in the college cafeteria or campus greasy spoons.
Some coaches trained their teams to present legal briefs, speak tersely, flip out references, and cram more words into 10 minutes and scornfully ignore the other team’s counter arguments. Our coach held that debate was a form of speech, that the judge should be treated as an audience, that we could use humor, explain our points, and challenge the other team to explain their brief references.
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