Ten years after

I've been with debate eleven or twelve years, but there's no rock band called Eleven Years After that I'm aware of, and by their titles, ye shall know their blogs... So, what I've seen in 10 years:

Phase One -- Everybody reads Mill and Locke. This is a good thing, because high schoolers can, in fact, read Mill and Locke, and perhaps enjoy them, but certainly understand them absent any enjoyment. If you want to create a class of philosophers, start them there.

Everybody runs Mill and Locke. This is not due to intellectual vacuity, but because they apply to most of the resolutions, which tend to revolve around the role of the individual in society.

There are weasel cases out there. Favorite example is the topic mentioned by Noah, about voluntary organizations. The rez obviously refered to country clubs; one school, Weasel High, ran Exxon as a voluntary organization, and proceded to apply straightforward discrimination slash civil rights arguments that were unassailable. The only problem? They were irrelevant. Weasel High, it turned out, always did something like this. Their coach explained to me that, yeah, he knew it wasn't true, but if the opponent bought it, you won, and if the opponent didn't buy it, you just stepped back into truer VOs. Great strategy. That's why I think of them as Weasel High.

And there were plenty of speeders. Regular judges learned to judge speed, or else debaters learned to slow down for irregular judges.

Phase Two -- later that decade. People got tired of Locke and Mill and the topics became more parochial and specific. Natural ebb and flow, I'd say. But to debate these topics, you had to do parochial and specific research. Capital punishment, for instance, ended up hinging, first, on the ability of both sides to moot the other's body count (pro had DNA, neg had recidivists, with about equal body count). Then you could go on to, well, not Locke and Mill, really. You studied Supreme Court decisions and read about penology.

There were lots of topics like this. Most of them, actually, except the NFL Finals topic, which was always something like communism, good or bad? To argue these topics, you needed evidence. So, LD went through its Bad Policy period. People had evidence, but poorly cut by even novice policy standards, seldom conforming to evidentiary requirements if one was going to offer the evidence for examination. People played with policy terms but really didn't understand them, so mostly you got LD without an identity of its own.

You also got plenty of weasels. Not necessarily Weasel High, but debaters or teams who thought they could cleverly elude the real issues with something akin to the Exxon approach. Great strategy. That's why I think of them as weasels.

You needed even more speed, and if you were a Polician manque in front of a parent, you might have well just have handed the round to your opponent.

The positive side of all of this was the ever-changing topics really did change, and you always had to go in and explore new areas. I think that's one reason why the coaches were voting for these topics. We had nothing against Mill and Locke, but we wanted new ideas charging around in our own brains.

Phase 3 -- today.

We are confused by our trees, ye forestless folk. Here's what hasn't changed: most LD is not the so-called national circuit. There are thousands of LDers out there. They don't travel very far or very often. They are, I would imagine, getting most of the benefits of the activity. If they're lucky, they'll go to a big tournament near them once in a while, and swell the ranks. It has probably been ever thus. Included in this are traditional programs that go on year after year developing debaters who last for a couple of years, get lots of benefits, and move on. Adolescents have a habit of doing that. (So do I, but I've often been accused of arrested development.)

Meanwhile, a handful of schools are well-endowed enough to go to lots of big tournaments. They also hire good teachers to work with their teams, and they have good results. That's nice for them. They are barely a blip on the screen, compared to the vast number above. They are honorable. They probably also have well-funded football teams, and that is honorable too.

Then there is a small culture of university academics running a small number of teams with a high profile. These academics, trained in the (to me) jejune area of critical theory, apply CT to today's topics. There is also a small number of former debaters who are attempting to achieve the TOC bids that eluded them as high schoolers, and they use their way too many years of debate experience to craft positions that are the modern weasel so they can vicariously achieve those lost bids through their puppets. And there's a handful of essentially coachless but brilliant debaters who seem to have absolutely no lives other than this activity, and have the bids and the portfolio of cases to prove it.

The influence of these small groups is magnified by the perception of "national circuit." National Circuit is that elusive realm of the really good debaters, the theory goes, the paladins and ronin who travel week after week wherever the bids may lead them. They have developed, again in theory, a whole new set of positions, a new approach to debate that is somehow better. It is, of course, the amalgam of second-rate critical theory and weasel kritiks that is fun once in a while but is hardly the reason LD exists in the first place. Or why LD exists now. The magnification is through, you guessed it, the glorification of these debaters through Hellinahandbasket.com. Once we start treating them as something special, the perception is that they are something special. My fear is that the narrow lives of these special debaters is perhaps harmful. No offense, guys, but you're not special. It's nice to think you're special, it's nice to be lauded on a website, but even if you're far from being a weasel and are running Mill and Locke, I hate to tell you this, but IT"S ONLY HIGH SCHOOL DEBATING, BUB.

And that's all it is. If the only lesson you learn is how and when to run a K, you've wasted a lot of time. If you've only learned to be friends with other people who can run a K, worse yet.

Anyhow, the topics seem to be improving, at least in theory (in practice, the wordings are a little lame, but that's always been the case). I think the coaches in the great gray army that isn't national circuit are interested in cycling back to basic philosophy again, simply on the old rotational basis. We've all gotten tired of faux policy.

And the critical theory and K crowd? They may be merely a blip on the screen, but they will remain a blip on the screen, and in some areas, a meaningful one. Caveman is nothing less than a longterm project to train my team in the vapidness of these positions, and not an attempt to train them to run them.

God forbid.

And Noah wonders why I never cared much about national circuit?