OMFG (Gone Wild)

Well, it’s illuminating.

The comments thread following the Smilin’ J follow-up post on VBD has shed much light on some issues surrounding LD, almost all of it inadvertent. I didn’t read the thread that closely, but I didn’t have to. You don’t have to either. And what have we learned from these comments?

First of all, VBD is, theoretically, a website for and about high school students. But high school students are sadly lacking in this thread, with one or two exceptions. Mostly it is the young people, primarily college students, who ought to be doing something else with their free time who are posting. Even if they are dedicated coaches planning to enter secondary school education when they graduate, they simply need to have something better to occupy their brains than monopolizing a thread on a high school website on which they spin endless screeds explaining their understanding of this or that philosophy. Go to a movie. Read a good book. Please. It is bordering on the pathetic to see the level of commitment by these college students to posting in this forum. There aren’t that many of them, but they are omnipresent. These people are not setting a good example of, shall we say, the intellectual college life. Nor are they in fact living what I would term an intellectual college life. There is no rounding to their education. They appear to be locked into a high school existence from which they cannot escape, and an inherently sophomoric approach to that existence that may be cementing the inescapability.

Secondly, the level of demonization of Smilin’ J is remarkable, considering that his influence on the activity is small and, agree with him or not, is entirely motivated by good intentions. What did he ever do to these people to rouse them so much, when most of what he says has been said many times by others? I suspect, and there is some evidence for this, that he dropped these people when they themselves were debating, or he dropped their present-day students, and they still hold a grudge. But even in cases where that is not true, the level of discourse is embarrassing. Debate in an educational context ought to be inherently respectful with differing points of view presented clearly, without calls to personality. Name-calling and sour grapes and broad attacks simply do not, as noted in my first complaint above, set a good example. And these people are presenting themselves as debate coaches? I don’t want to be in the same room with them, and I pity the students who are forced into adjudications from such self-impressed, poorly mannered people, whose only claim to superiority, which they never stop making, seems to be their vast knowledge of the philosophy they have gleaned from their Pomo 202 course last semester.

All of this underlines one of the chief problems many of us have been pointing out with LD today, which is the corrosive nature of the college judges slash assistant coaches on the activity. They have brought to it materials inappropriate to the educational age group, claiming that these materials are progressive when in fact they are simply beyond the understanding of anyone who is not first versed in the basics of elementary philosophy, and—hello?—most 14-year-olds haven’t had that much time in their short intellectual careers yet to reach that point. And they have so much time on their hands that they are ubiquitous, spouting all this material at the drop of a hat in forums that, frankly, are not theirs to control. Let the high school kids have VBD. Guide them occasionally if you feel a need to do so, and certainly explain yourself, but let them learn something from the Smilin’ Js of the world. If you must post, do so respectfully, no matter how you personally perceive your adversary. Be no more rude than you would expect a debater in a round to behave. Please.

Overall, it’s a sad commentary. And not unusual. My experience is that most public forums are, sooner or later, hijacked by the loudest people with the most time on their hands, to the exclusion of other, usually more more valuable opinions. So it is with VBD. Too bad.