PF's road to perdition

Look at the comments on yesterday's post.

I wonder if PF really will go the path of previous debate activities. A couple of things need to happen.

First of all, we need to eliminate all the lay/parent judges. As long as virtually all the judges in a given pool are practically straight out of the cabbage patch, there is little likelihood that competitive debaters will be tempted to get too inside baseball. There’s no future (and no ballot) in it. Can this happen? Can we transform the judging pool? I look back to LD in, say, 1995. There were graduates, but no real breed of assistant/private coaches. There were coaches. And there were parents. Today, it’s primarily graduates and assistant/private coaches (at least in the most preferred category). I remember strolling over to LD land last year from PF land, and all my friends, coaches of star debaters, were sitting around doing nothing…

Keeping the pool lay will require some unconscious commitment on the part of the community in general, but the inertia of using parents—they’re cheap, they’re easy to train at the present level of the activity, they’re inherently interested in what their kids are doing extracurricularly, they provide built-in chaperones—will be hard to unseat. It could happen though. Tab rooms will have to commit to the same inertia: put all the judges who can’t do anything else into PF. All those judges are, pretty much by definition, intelligent adults. PF was built to influence intelligent adults. So far, that is all good.

Secondly, we need to build up a solid structure of institutes, staffed by former debaters. One of the big reasons that Policy and LD are so inside baseball is that they have enough time on their hands to go inside baseball (i.e., summer vacations), and a willing crop of college graduates to help them along with it. Will we have a system of PF camps across the continent before long? As sure as the girl scouts sell cookies… But these camps aren’t particularly dangerous without the following point.

Thirdly—and this one is something we haven’t talked much about yet, but eventually we’ll get to it—before PF can go inside baseball, there has to be an inside baseball. LD didn’t really know what it was until the value/criterion paradigm was invented (which happened after LD was invented: LD was values debate, whatever that was; the V/C answered the question). When we talk in the back room about the problems of PF, one that always comes up is that no one has really figured what it’s about yet, in the meta sense. If no one ever does, we’ll be okay. If someone pins it down, it gives the folks at the institutes something to feed on, and the path to perdition will begin being paved.

There may be a tendency for any activity to eventually start gazing at its navel, and start confusing its navel for the rest of itself, but there are also brakes that can prevent it. I’m willing to bet that the parent-judge nut won’t be cracked for quite a while. That’s our best hope. Because there will be institutes, and those at those institutes will do their best to earn their keep by creating some sort of mystical lore worth paying for. That’s certainly what the Policy and LD institutes do now. They teach you all the stuff you coach doesn’t even understand, and thus you’ll win like it’s going out of style, because you’ll know all the latest techniques, and you’ll know what debate is really all about.

We have to check back in in about ten years, and see where we are.