Debate education, like debate in most democratic/capitalist countries, is set up poorly because it is set up in opposition to a way of thinking and judging. As any first year debate student can tell you, you can’t win a debate by setting up your position as “Don’t do what they want to do.”
The debate culture that most debate educators have set up through their tournament-oriented, skill-development model is one that is attractive because it is not the daily, typical way that people debate.
Keep in mind the majority of argumentation theorists around the world gave up this form of modeling debate after World War 2, opting instead to base prescriptive modes of debating and arguing on what people do regularly in their daily lives. Building from, not opposed, to the ways people engage disagreement, choice, and incommensurate narratives of experience are the ways that theory and practice have gone in argumentation outside of tournament-centered pedagogy. Still, this is often presented as a wish, a normative practice that stands in opposition to the natural “bad reasoning” that people tend to do.
Debate is a vital epistemic practice that is a necessary part of the human practice of thinking through words. It has to be in there. In other words, it’s a feature not a bug. We keep treating it at every turn as a bug in the software instead of an essential part of the human program of thought.
What we need from a debating culture is a debate practice that doesn’t stand in opposition as its starting point, but stands in support of good options.
Debate at its best is an exploration of what we know and how we know it. It is an art of and for exploring good choices to ensure which one is better in this context, in this moment. Debate is a practice of learning about good feelings and ideas. It’s not a practice of heightened intelligence, or a practice of finding the best evidence, or a practice of making the best decision in a choice, or a tool for proving that an option or choice or way of thought is bad. It’s none of these things.
Debate is baked in given how prevalent confirmation bias is to our modes of thinking and given how eager we are to share our ideas about what should be done the minute we figure them out. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber point this out in their book The Enigma of Reason, where their research indicates that human thought, judgement, and reason is designed to occur in groups, where people can push back on what’s presented. This pushback, and this engagement of ideas in a back-and-forth communicative environment is how human knowledge is meant to be iterated and reiterated as conditions change.
Whatever models we teach and practice should be formalized expressions of what people do naturally in reason, not stand in opposition to it. Any model of debate that bolsters itself as being “better than” everyday debating is a suspicious model, most likely crafted to generate benefits other than giving us familiarity and practice with the modes of human engagement on ideas that are a part of being human.
A desirable debating culture is one where debate, as a practice we set up and do regularly on various ideas that are not necessarily associated with a big, time-sensitive decision, must be advanced based on what it provides to us and for us, not what it isn’t. Debate itself should be a good that we compare against other discourse forms because they are also good, and in this situation and context debate is well-warranted because of what it provides to our feelings, thoughts, and knowledge about an issue.