Being able to impress "flow judges" has zero bearing at being able to persuade anyone else. Which it would seem would be the one useful thing you would want to come out of a debating community.
If we need a new format, I suggest an "Obama" debate style. The man clearly understood the policies and their implications, but spoke in a way that moved people deeply at an emotional level, and came away inspired instead of pissed off at their enemies. God, that seems like such a long, long time ago.
But, for what it's worth, high school debate programs are more properly speech and debate programs. Tournaments do include indirectly-competitive events such as oratory, in which competitors give a ten-minute freeform speech and the rhetorical qualities you seem to value are encouraged and rewarded. Debate is just one aspect of the activity.
Basically, this. Everyone's got an opinion on what should win a debate round. Until you ask them to spend Friday evening - late Saturday evening in high school classrooms listening to the 5+ debates on the same topic. Then suddenly their opinion doesn't seem so important to them anymore.
Very frustrating.
Because logical analysis and research skills are valuable, and it's a good way to teach those skills.
(It's also a good way to teach presentation skills, by the way. Thinking on your feet at 100 wpm is much easier if you've been doing it at 400 wpm for a few years.)
Also, perhaps even more importantly, many students seem to really enjoy it.
> given the importance of argumentation as a social skill
I think you've mistaken argumentation for rhetoric and persuasion, which are related but different skills.
It's perfectly possible to make strong arguments at a rapid pace of delivery. Reading a mathematical proof at 400wpm shouldn't make it any more or less correct.
In fact, in practice, there's a strong positive correlation between delivery speed and quality of argumentation in high school debate (although this is not causal and mostly has to do with the fact that "speed is a rough correlate to ability inasmuch as it's an early product of commitment" as another poster put it).
> One wonders what outcomes might result from (say) having an adult judge and 12 jury members drawn from the student body.
Judges of high school debates are adults (or, at least, high school graduates). The only debates judged by students are "pre-junior-varsity" rounds.
That doesn't explain why it's extracurricular.
I'm trying to be brief as I've made several comments in this thread already and don't want to swamp it with my own opinions. In a nutshell, I don't think the quality of argumentation matters if ordinary people can't keep up with it.
I could have removed all between-word spaces from this comment (eg to fit within some arbitrary character count limit) and it would still be comprehensible to most readers, but at the cost of significant extra work.
There is a not-insignificant additional participation cost and time outside the regular school day to participate; that being said, in some schools speech/debate has (at least historically) been "curricular" in that it satisfies core English requirements, rather than being either a pure elective or exclusively extracurricular activity.
> In a nutshell, I don't think the quality of argumentation matters if ordinary people can't keep up with it.
Quality of argumentation doesn't count in debate if the audience can't keep up with it (either in "real life" or high school debate). "Ordinary people" are an abstract concept; the audience always consists of actual people, who vary from any particular concept of "ordinary" in different ways.
I don't understand what you're trying to say :( Do you mean it should be required curriculum? Or just an activity? (If the latter, FWIW football and board games club are also extracurricular. The term really just means "something done in association with school but outside the classroom" these days.)
> I don't think the quality of argumentation matters if ordinary people can't keep up with it.
The goal is to educate the student.
Also, students learn to present slowly and persuasively, then speed that up. It's not like they're talking quickly day 1. Many top policy debaters also do well in e.g., extemporaneous speaking, which is much more presentation-oriented. It's not an either-or.
I've found that debate formats which emphasize persuasion/rhetoric tend to only teach persuasion/rhetoric, whereas formats that emphasize evidence and logic (even o the exclusion of rhetoric) tend to teach all three. (Just not always at the same time.)
> but at the cost of significant extra work
IME the extra work to move fast, once you have the basics, is not all that significant. Plus, smart beats fast.
In that 9th grade course, the teacher was the judge, with students' input. There were no speed reading games, as the debaters were not trained hobbyists in deception: It was a matter of putting out the best argument to defend your position.
To be clear, there are no "rules" in debate except that the judge gets to decide who wins, and perhaps the amounts of speaking and prep times allotted each team. There is no scorekeeping other than W or L on the final ballot. One might reasonably expect that the human element would force debaters to "keep it real", so to speak - speed-reading through a bunch of obviously-bullshit argumentation that a policy will lead to half a dozen different global nuclear wars is not something that most people would find convincing, after all.
What's actually happened is that debaters have built up an elaborate metagame, debating with their own terminology and conventions that have grown obnoxiously opaque to the uninformed viewer, and they've been enabled to do so by some unfortunate realities of the debate environment.
Since it's hard to find normal people willing to spend their Saturdays sitting in a high school classroom listening to teenagers role-play as politicians, debate judges are frequently sourced from within the community - they'll be former debaters, or debate coaches from a different school. Debating for a "flow judge" ("flowing", in debate jargon, is how argumentation is tracked on paper) is a very different thing than debating for a "lay judge", and the debate techniques described in the article are vastly less prevalent in the latter case. Most hardcore debaters, however, prefer to have a flow judge - it enables them to use their entire bag of tricks, and frankly is more fun.
This ends up allowing the craziness of the debate metagame to perpetuate by a couple means - for one, it means that schools hosting debate tournaments are pressured to supply flow judges for as many rounds as possible, especially for important finals rounds (if they don't, students won't want to come back, and tournament registration fees are important part of a debate team's funding). Secondly, it alienates lay judges, who often come out of a round feeling "unqualified" to render a decision, overwhelmed with anxiety about being forced to assign a winner and a loser among teams who might as well have been speaking a different language. Finding a layperson willing to judge policy debate more than once is really rare.
So the problem really isn't that the rules encourage degenerate behavior, it's that flow judges do by continuing to award wins to that bullshit. And in the context of policy debate, I don't even know if I'd call this a problem - we enjoyed our made up rules just fine, and if you wanted something more down to earth you could just move to LD or PF styles.