In which we blast MSTOC

I do not necessarily have mixed feelings about debate in schools before high school. There’s a great video with Jonathan A that expresses all the excitement of working with younger kids, and the benefits to them in their education. On the other hand, when I saw on my tabroom.com front page yesterday that the Middle School TOC registration was open, I just shook my head in despair.

I gather that one really doesn’t qualify for MSTOC; one just signs up for it. It is, like the TOC, in Kaintuck. Which means that parents who can afford it will be able to send (and probably accompany) their 11-year-olds to a national tournament. And we need this in the debate community because…why?

The VCA knows my opinion of the TOC, and I get the impression that half the people who attend it share that opinion. The organization originally existed to promote a certain level of competition that other national tournaments did not promote. You had to perform well in tough situations a number of times, thus demonstrating that you had the right stuff on a regular basis. A variety of parameters were set for determining the toughness of those situations. So far so good. The problem is, decades later, the TOC, which was created to set a standard of high quality competition, has been overwhelmed by all the negatives that fierce competition can lead to.

First of all, the debate world has sorted itself into circuit and non-circuit. On the one hand, students/schools will travel the country, virtually every weekend, at high cost, to attend the circuit tournament du jour. One big reason that TOC is dominated year after year by the same schools is that they can afford it. They can afford the travel expenses, and they can afford the coaching that often includes a little army of sub-coaches. I don’t begrudge rich programs spending their own money, but do we really think that this in any way, shape or form benefits debate as a whole? Most national tournaments strictly limit numbers, so a big program is still only sending 3 or 4 kids into a division halfway across the country. If there’s a hundred LDers on the team, and maybe we rotate all the hot slots from weekend to weekend so that our best dozen or so (and I’m being generous here) get to travel (because since the goal is the TOC, and you need a strong debate CV to qualify, so going to one big tournament a year won’t hack it), another 90 or so debate schmegeggies are left back home, not debating. They are certainly not with their coach, who is in the back of the room somewhere ten states away. By the same token, debaters who are on the TOC path disdain non-TOC tournaments. In fact, there are whole programs that disdain non-TOC tournaments. There’s a whole long and complex story here, but the thing is, woe be the tournament director who just wants to offer some debate to students in the region who are not TOC-hungry. First of all, too many students identify themselves as TOC-worthy, even though they don’t know a disad from a cronut, and turn their noses up at the events where they might have some good competition and learn something. They might even have to convince a judge who doesn't necessarily agree with their style and approach. Oh, the horror! Shouldn't all public speaking be aimed at people who already agree with you? Sigh. Second of all, when a program starts to decide where to spend its money, a tournament without bids falls to the bottom of the pack. How many tournaments can we all name that have been eviscerated by the once-shadowy TOC advisory committee by being stripped of their bids? I’ve been on that committee. A good tournament that deserves lots of bids is a tournament close to a member of the committee; a non-worthy tournament is one is the X region, where X is anywhere else, with "anywhere else" being defined as having too many bids already. The TOC committee invented fuzzy math. A simple formula of numbers and states, which was once the guideline, would be fine. A simple formula of asking a Star Chamber to pass judgment is not so fine. Think I’m being harsh? Want a list of the tournaments that used to be strong that are now begging for people to show up?

The TOC specifically is to blame for only some of this. It’s the idea of the TOC that is the problem. Is there a coach on the face of the earth who can’t go on at length about all the benefits of debate? Do any not agree on face that competition is the necessary evil for achieving most of debate’s benefits, that the actual debates per se, and the actual debating per se, is the least of it? Yet it is the coaches who promote the TOC mentality. It’s the coaches who pick the tournaments students attend, and who pick which of the students attend them, if there are restrictions of any sort. It’s the coaches who allow their circuit-level students the vile luxury of not being required to attend non-circuit tournaments, who don’t require their best debaters to judge at novice tournaments rather than gallivanting around from week to week somewhere else. Honestly, the serious TOC-level debater is one hell of intellect. They wouldn’t be there otherwise. Are they putting that intellect into furthering that debate resume so that they get into the right college (which they probably would have gotten into anyhow) or into training their novices and junior varsity and giving something to the debate community as a whole by attending the tournaments in the region that originally provided nourishment for that debater?

It’s all on the coaches.

Anyhow, without a national circuit—which seems an unlikely prospect at best—middle schools will never suffer the worse problems of these problems. But there is no doubt in my mind that a middle school national event, and training students for that event, will result in simply making matters worse for the TOC mentality in the high schools. I see little or no educational benefit to it. And if there is no educational benefit, then, well, what’s the point?

///