Re:How critical theory is radicalizing high school debate
by ang_cire on Sunday July 30, 2023 @03:08PM
(#36934803)
Which is how you get exposed to new ideas. Learning how to argue for something you don't agree with means actually learning about that thing, in depth.
You will not learn more in a 40 minute debate round than you will in the hundreds of hours you spend *preparing* for debate rounds (which is something that many other forms lack in comparison to policy).
If it's my job to argue the GND is bad, I have to actually learn what the real tenets of it are, because otherwise I'm not going to find evidence to counter their impact and solvency claims. Likewise, if I have to argue it's good, I have to learn what its tenets are in order to find evidence supporting what it can accomplish, etc. (Just using GND as an example, obviously you aren't assigned advocacies in policy)
While this is definitely the overall goal of teaching debate, it's not clear to me this is actually how policy debate in school should operate in order to teach that. For one thing, I think other events actually do this better. Policy's structure is really meant to force you to defend an evidence-based position in depth. Basically inherent the format is that at least 50% of the time you won't agree with it.