The numbers talk

We chezzed it up last night, and talked a little bit about recruitment, the time for which is now, vis-à-vis the Middle School (which sounds like the school the Hobbits go to). And we looked around and saw that there were exactly three debating Sailors. In my office at the DJ, I have a bunch of pictures of fleets past, and each one has maybe three or four kids from each year. We never set sail for a season with less than a dozen, and often there were more. Now there’s two freshmen and a junior.

Dire straits, indeed. We could, potentially, go out of the debate business. Thank goodness the Speecho-American Sailors remain strong.

A lot of the reason for this is the simple pendulum swing, the ebb and flow of interest in the school community as a whole. But when I look at all the people who have started on the team lately and then dropped out, I realize that, for all practical purposes, it is LD itself that has shooed them away. Contemporary LD, that is, LD as it is practiced hereabouts, LD rounds that they watched when the novices were encouraged to audit a varsity round, or LD rounds that they get trounced in, when sophomores hit seniors in random rounds and couldn’t even flow what was said, much less figure it out.

Let’s make an argument that LD, as it is practiced at the so-called highest levels, is the best possible version of LD vis-à-vis pure debate. That is, if you were going to design the activity and what should go on in a round, this is what you would design. I’m willing to grant that (although I don’t personally believe it). Today’s LD is as good as it gets. Okay, fine. The problem with this version of LD, unfortunately, is that it is extremely high maintenance, absolutely necessitating participation in intensive summer camps and requiring a dedicated staff of private or assistant coaches during the tournament season. And it is conducted in such a fashion that only those who are a part of this high-maintenance process of dedicated coaching can understand what is happening in the round. It is not that the participants are being secretive; far from it. They’re all proselytizers at heart, which is why they got into debate in the first place, and they’re as likely as not to want to bend your ear with their theories and paradigms. They publish their thoughts regularly, they critique ad nauseum explaining their thought processes following a round. This is not a closed cabal, in other words, insofar as admission truly is available to anyone, provided they are willing to participate at the necessary level of intensity.

But that’s the thing. That necessary level of intensity, even if it has arguably made LD as good as it gets, is inherently a turn-off to most people. Most students, when faced with something they feel that they should understand but that they can’t, find other ways to exercise their intelligence. Smart young novices see what is going on and a lot of them decide that it’s just not worth the effort. And it is absolutely true that the effort needed to succeed in LD in 2012 bears no relationship to the effort needed to succeed a decade or more ago. Back then, you could go to institute one summer, but if you didn’t, you’d catch up. Lone wolves could succeed at tournaments by scoping out the activity for themselves, not by hiring a battery of private coaches. People might talk fast, but you could pick up the style after a tournament or two, and the speed bore no relationship to the speed today. And the content of the rounds themselves was predictable based on the nature of the resolution: the odd debater who didn’t argue somehow what the resolution was about was, indeed, an odd debater. People actually affirmed or negated the resolution, in front of an audience that was not limited to former debaters. No one wanted to try to persuade an untrained parent judge back then any more than now, but a trained parent was a reasonable audience that a debater could handle if the debater were any good, and there were plenty of trained parents that started out when their kids were novices and learned what to do and learned it pretty well. Like me.

I blame LD for the size of my team. I’m moving over to PF, which certainly has its flaws, because at least those flaws are flaws that are not detrimental to attracting and retaining membership in a debate team. The flaws of LD, on the other hand, are detrimental to attracting and retaining membership in a debate team. Even granting LD its excellence, it is like policy with its particular excellence: virtue had better be its own reward, because when all is said and done, that’s all you’ve got.

I offer no solutions for this, if one perceives it as a problem. The numbers will speak for themselves. The more I go to tournaments where they’re breaking down the doors to do PF and we’re able to make room for them because of the ever dwindling size of the LD fields, the less I’ll care. We have, fortunately, a general debate activity. Maybe it’s not as pure and good as LD and Policy, and maybe it too will go down the road to perdition, but for the moment, it’s doing the job of grabbing the attention of a large contingent of high school students who are interested in adding forensics to their intellectual bag of tricks.

Thank goodness.