I guess we could ask if LD needs rules. We made that assumption a priori, and maybe that was mistake.
There are a number of possibilities. First, that there should be clearly defined rules of engagement. Second, there should be no rules of engagement. Third, a middle position, there should be some rules, or the rules need not be clearly defined, or some combination of the two.
Given that LD is an academic competition between strangers, conducted under the auspices of a national league implicitly charged with creating academic standards (NFL is strongly involved in scholarship programs, merit acknowledgments, etc.), the first possibility, that there be clearly defined rules, would seem to fit into this understanding of the activity. Education, while often free form, is a goals-based business. We want students to learn stuff. How they learn is subject to different approaches, but that they should learn is inarguable. In addition to classroom work, secondary education offers a variety of extracurricular pursuits, some of which are competitive. One can certainly do athletic things that are non-competitive, for instance run daily on the track for 3 or 4 miles to stay in shape, and this is a perfectly wonderful thing, and it may make you smarter by making your body stronger and your brain more receptive, and a school might even reward this activity, or support it with trainers so that students learning to run don’t hurt themselves by, say, not stretching first. Similarly, you can argue with people all you want to, from morning to night if you’re a disagreeable enough human being. You can argue with your parents, you can argue with your teachers, you can argue with your friends (a quickly diminishing number, no doubt, if all you ever do is argue with them). You don’t need rules for this, although a little helpful advice might not hurt (e.g., lay off when the person you’re arguing with is holding a meat cleaver). However, once you begin to run competitively, or argue competitively, rules seem to make sense. By definition, competition means that you are pitting people against one another for the purpose of rewarding some measure of success. Rules clarify what that measure of success is. In running a mile, for instance, the rules are pretty straightforward. We all start at the same time, we don’t take any shortcuts, we don’t bop the runner in the aisle next to us with a rolling pin, we don’t hop on a motorcycle halfway through. As I say, pretty straightforward, but rules nonetheless. Because of these rules, we get a clear winner at the mile mark.
In arguing competitively, we have a harder time measuring the winner because we don’t have anything as simple as a mile marker with a tape that one person breaks first. (I wish we did.) But we do have the aim of making the competition fair for the competitors, in running and in debating. In debate, the more one knows about what is expected in order to win, the more one can direct one’s efforts toward that win. A set of rules outlining what needs to be done, and the format in which it should be done, provides that information of what one has to do to succeed. Academic debate has a special burden, because of its academic nature, of providing not merely competition but education as well, much as sports activities in an academic environment are more than strictly competitive (they create healthier students and a more engaged student body, both very valuable in the management of young scholars). When the New York Giants play, it’s strictly for money and entertainment. When the Hen Hud Sailors play, it’s for something else altogether.
The benefits of clearly defined rules in the scenario presented above is obvious. If there are no rules of engagement at all, there is no way not only of determining a winner but of preparing yourself to become a winner. The academic goals of the activity are more in that latter bit—preparing yourself—than in simply winning. Preparing to debate means learning all about a subject area, studying different lines of thought on a particular problem, perhaps studying philosophers and theorists who have written on that subject in the past and applying their thoughts to the issue, etc. If debate were merely about winning, we’d still need to do all that, but we would traffic even more in the specifics of rhetoric perhaps to the detriment of content (e.g., critiques of resolutions, where once a student has grasped enough of, say, Nietzsche to run amorality off-case, that student can run that same amorality off-case against virtually everything and never learn much except that Nietzsche was a self-contradicting albeit fascinating and literate fruitcake, plus enough of a particular resolution to apply fruitcake analysis to it). Rhetoric, insofar as logic is concerned (not to mention presentation) is important, of course, but not to the exclusion of content if we accept that the point of high school LD is to learn about the content and not the container.
As for the third overall possibility about rules, the idea that rules should be vague or few is much closer to no rules whatsoever than to a better way of handling rules. The fuzzier we are in establishing goals, the fuzzier our approach to reaching them. Simply apply what I’ve been saying above, but in a fuzzier way.
So why, then, do people suggest that rules are problematic? The chief reason seems to be that rules somehow limit the activity. That is, they tie their claim down to the existence of a (mis)conception of what the activity ought to be that can never change, and that therefore harms the activity by not allowing its natural evolution. There is certainly truth to this supposition, that the activity won’t change much, and probably some truth in its underlying concern, that the activity could be improved. But the suspension of or dispensation with rules isn’t the solution to this possible tendency for the activity to, for lack of a better word, stagnate. Rules can be changed. Once upon a time baseball didn’t have a designated hitter. Good change, bad change? Beats me, but I can’t imagine a sport more bound by rules than baseball, but even there those rules aren’t static. (Speaking of which, those rules seem to help the umpires decide if a player is safe or out, or if a pitch is a ball or a strike, in a uniform way, rather than allowing each umpire to publish his or her strike-out paradigm before each game.)
So, we argue that there should be rules, because they will enhance the academic aspect of the activity as well as clarify the competitive aspect of the activity. As we said yesterday, those rules should come from the NFL.
What rules, exactly? I’m pretty sure we’ll start examining them tomorrow.
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