Performance Debate
Discussed at Drum's digs.
As a former debater--and one with lots of awards for it, too--I can tell you that debate is largely a crock of sh*t anyway...so in some ways this doesn't (as it were) strike me as being very surprising.
Debate does help one develop one's reasoning skills, but it tends to be so bad for one's intellectual character that I'm not sure whether it's any better than a wash. Don't get me wrong--I loved it in high school. In fact, it was pretty much the only part of high school for which I was not, well, high. If not for debate, I'd have probably gone nuts. And debate scholarships helped me out the first few years of college, so, again, I do owe it something. But by my sophomore year I was already outgrowing it.
The activity fostered a bunch of seriously bad intellectual habits and characteristics that it took me a long time to get rid of. For example, it encourages participants to think of discussion in terms of argument, and argument in terms of winning and losing, and that in terms of persuasion. It also encourages participants to get really good at being dialectically sneaky--good, that is, at tricking listeners in such a way as to conceal errors in the speakers' reasoning. It also encourages participants to exaggerate the strength of their own arguments, and to exaggerate the weaknesses of those of others.
As for the case in question--well, there's almost always been a bit of drama (in the sense of put-on) in debate anyway, so, given my current rather lukewarm attitude toward the enterprise, I guess this crap seems to be more-or-less similar in kind to the stuff that already goes on. Which would make it no big deal.
But, on the other hand, it does constitute a development that differs significantly in degree from the other dramatic hoo-ha in debates. So I'm not particularly happy about this attempt to further erode the line between the forensic and the dramatic.
Well, that's my fast take on it, anyway, FWIW.
Discussed at Drum's digs.
As a former debater--and one with lots of awards for it, too--I can tell you that debate is largely a crock of sh*t anyway...so in some ways this doesn't (as it were) strike me as being very surprising.
Debate does help one develop one's reasoning skills, but it tends to be so bad for one's intellectual character that I'm not sure whether it's any better than a wash. Don't get me wrong--I loved it in high school. In fact, it was pretty much the only part of high school for which I was not, well, high. If not for debate, I'd have probably gone nuts. And debate scholarships helped me out the first few years of college, so, again, I do owe it something. But by my sophomore year I was already outgrowing it.
The activity fostered a bunch of seriously bad intellectual habits and characteristics that it took me a long time to get rid of. For example, it encourages participants to think of discussion in terms of argument, and argument in terms of winning and losing, and that in terms of persuasion. It also encourages participants to get really good at being dialectically sneaky--good, that is, at tricking listeners in such a way as to conceal errors in the speakers' reasoning. It also encourages participants to exaggerate the strength of their own arguments, and to exaggerate the weaknesses of those of others.
As for the case in question--well, there's almost always been a bit of drama (in the sense of put-on) in debate anyway, so, given my current rather lukewarm attitude toward the enterprise, I guess this crap seems to be more-or-less similar in kind to the stuff that already goes on. Which would make it no big deal.
But, on the other hand, it does constitute a development that differs significantly in degree from the other dramatic hoo-ha in debates. So I'm not particularly happy about this attempt to further erode the line between the forensic and the dramatic.
Well, that's my fast take on it, anyway, FWIW.
posted by Winston Smith at
2:26 PM
1 Comments:
The comments are even more interesting. Some are excellent, most sink into name-calling and caricature.
What I like about debate is it enforces an agreement on the meaning of terms. This is also crucial for what we might call discussion, or its highest form, dialogue.
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