On the last day of TOC there is a breakfast where a number of people speak about the value and values of debate. Not much of what they say applies to the event that we are at that point concluding. Put another way, we do debate (and all forensics) as a means to an end. We do it for the educational and social benefits. We do it to make a better world. We do it to teach ethics and justice and morality.
At the TOC, none of that matters. TOC is all about the competition. That might not be so bad if all those educational/social/ethical/just/moral thingummies were implicitly upheld within the competition. They’re not.
TOC is about itself. For one thing, most people in the general debate population don’t debate the way TOC debaters debate, at least in LD (and, I understand, in Policy). JWP, the founder of the tournament, clearly pointed out that one of its goals was to allow people to debate at a tournament the way they’d been taught at institutes, which was not their weekly norm. There’s nothing wrong with that, but keep in mind that the percentage of debaters who go to summer camps is fairly small. I don’t impugn debate camps. There’s all sorts of specialized summer camps out there for high school kids, and debate camp is no better or worse, no more or less elite. Lots of people can’t afford the things I can afford, which doesn’t stop me from doing them, although the knowledge of this does, presumably, establish within me a social conscience and a moral drive to do what I can to improve the situations of those whose situations need improvement. I’m lucky, and other people are not so lucky. It’s the old birth lottery. I strongly believe that it should be a goal of society to ameliorate the situations of those who are the least privileged. But that’s beside the point. The thing is, only a small number of debaters get camp training, which by and large is TOC-focused. All the camps are run by folks with TOC experience as coaches, staffed by instructors with TOC experience as debaters. If I’m going to hire for my camp, what other criterion do I have other than competitive record? Visibility on the TOC circuit means better staff; how else are high school seniors recruited? Their manifest teaching skills?
So, the camps are run by TOC folks, united by their TOCness. Logically, therefore, they teach to the TOC, that being the only test there is to teach to. Parents spend the camp money on the promise that the students will become more competitive. Doing well at bid tournaments should be the result of being more competitive. Camps whose attendees go forth and get bids, run by staff who have already bidded up, are the ones that succeed. I have no doubt that VBI, for instance, does a great job, and I recommend it to my own students. They come back home the better for it. They make a lot of new friends and learn a lot about a certain kind of debate. So far, so good.
TOC-style debating is a number of things. One of these things is that it is fast. It can be riddled with jargon. It often includes theory. It is seldom strictly about the resolution. It is all of those things that work to make it obscure and “special.” Some people suppose that being obscure and special is somehow better than being clear and simple, perhaps because they’ve worked so hard to acquire the obscure material. If they are talking about a complicated idea, according to this logic, they need to sound complicated. To which I reply, e=mc2. I read a lot, and I read a lot about complicated things. The best writers are the ones who make complicated things simple, not the ones who make simple things complicated. What has happened to LD, in the TOC arena, has happened. So be it. My point is that it hasn’t happened in the LD world in general, or at least not so much. It’s really hard to run any sort of critical argument if you’ve barely been exposed to critical arguments. Theory has some great uses, but it’s not in the everyday debate vocabulary. The inclination of the average unschooled debater/coach is to look at the resolution, figure out some reasons to affirm it and some other reasons to negate it, and try to sort them out. To figure out some reason why the aff is more topical than the neg to run an RVI, for instance? Not so great an inclination.
Although I have my opinions, I don’t contend that TOC-style debating is any better or worse than any other style. I merely contend that it is a style, and is unique to the TOC. That is the first premise of my position.
1 comment:
1. I continue to think that you're leaving out a major motivation for debate beyond the purely extrinsic (whether educational or competitive): it's an art form, and a good debate is a beautiful thing.
2. I strongly disagree with your claim that "TOC-style" debate makes simple things complicated. Rather, I think it exposes the degree to which we tend to drastically oversimplify complicated things. Kritiks wouldn't be successful if society had already come to terms with all the presuppositions of our political process. Theory wouldn't be successful if debaters and coaches had already come to terms with the presuppositions of our argumentative process. And both tend to rely on a huge amount of uncertainty about what adjudication means and how the speech-act of signing the ballot works. These things are simply part of what it means to debate, and not cognizing them doesn't make them go away.
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