The future of debate looks bright thanks to Canada's high school world champs
Few Canadians have a bigger stake in the future of civil discourse than Angela Li, 18, and Matthew Anzarouth, 17, two of the best high school debaters in the world.
In early rounds at the World Schools Debating Championship, a 68-country tournament hosted this year by Mexico but held online because of the pandemic, their five-member Team Canada dispatched Zimbabwe, Serbia, Greece, Denmark and the United States. Then they survived elimination rounds with Slovenia, Malaysia and Singapore, before besting Sri Lanka last Monday to take the top prize.
Congratulations Team Canada, winners of the first ever Online WSDC! And also to Sri Lanka, the runners-up. More at https://t.co/nDDlid1Wp8. @WSDCdebate @wsdccanada @amxdebate #onlinewsdc pic.twitter.com/4Tq4x3yIln
— SchoolsDebate (@schoolsdebate) August 3, 2020
Li, who graduated from University of Toronto Schools and is set to study economics and computer science at Harvard after a gap year, said competitive debate has made her more open-minded.
“The more I debate, the less opinionated I actually become, because I realize there is so much more I need to understand and learn about the world,” she said in an interview.
It is a curious sentiment, given the times.
Outside elite high school debate circles, the future of argument looks increasingly bleak, and its loudest practitioners the least open-minded. On social media and in politics, debate has been diminished through bitter scorn and wild paranoia, knee-jerk team thinking, frivolous distrust of legitimate authorities, clueless trust of illegitimate ones, and bad faith reasoning backed by viral factoids whose popularity is in inverse proportion to their truth.
One way these high schoolers show grown-ups how proper debate is done is by sticking to a respectful structure, with an emphasis on paying considerate attention to the other side. It is the mirror opposite of the gross pantomime of arguing on Twitter, and unlike most political candidate debates.
Team Canada won their pro/con debates despite, in some cases, being assigned the trickier side. There were propositions, for example, to designate non-residential urban areas for drugs to be sold and consumed (Team Canada was assigned the pro side); to replace human judgment with computer algorithms in criminal sentencing (con); that opposition parties should boycott elections if they are not free or fair (con); and to impose criminal liability on people who fail to assist others in danger when doing so would not put themselves in danger (con).
For early rounds, the teams get to prepare and research. But for elimination rounds, they must work off the top of their heads, with whatever facts they already know, and an emphasis on strategic argument. Li said they divide labour like lawyers preparing for trial. Some work to structure their main argument. Others play devil’s advocate to anticipate the other side and have rebuttals ready.
“We try to make sure our case anticipates some of those claims,” Li said. “I think generally, most of the time, yes, we get it right.”
Anzarouth, who is returning this fall to Lower Canada College in Montreal, said a win-lose debate structure like this can seem similar to the “polarized, dichotomous world of politics.” But the exercise can also be instructive because it forces debaters to consider the other side in its finest light, and to critically rationalize their own side. Formal debate “allows you to disassociate the game of debating from the real world but still draw lessons from the process,” Anzarouth said.
He described a “balancing act” between the abstract and the specific, and how background knowledge and memory of precise detail is important, but not enough to win the day if it is divorced from deeper analytical argument.
“Examples can’t win a debate in the same way that deeper analysis can,” he said.
The grand final debate topic was something of a curve ball, not the typical dry policy proposal. The proposition was that a talented, middle-class person in their early twenties should choose a job they are passionate about over one that pays a lot of money for long hours. Canada was assigned the con.
“Our argument was that it is not a good idea to lock yourself into passion at a young age when you don’t have experience pursuing it in a marketplace,” Anzarouth said. Trying to monetize passions could even dull them, he said, and stability is a safer prospect that could provide free time for those passions.
Li conceded that, against the pragmatic Canadian side of the argument, Sri Lanka could play up the romanticism of the proposition and use “powerful rhetoric that tugged at the heartstrings,” for example by lamenting the potential geniuses who are diverted from their passions by the lure of money. Canada’s rebuttal to this was that it should not be considered any less noble to provide for yourself and your family.
“It demands debate skills more than it demands particular knowledge,” Anzarouth said. The main argument is obvious, and the challenge is to add specificity and new perspective to what Li described as “a very universal question that most people face in their life.”
Neither were entirely certain whether they were arguing against their own personal beliefs, or whether they would apply the same logic to their own lives.
“I think I’m still as of now not completely decided which side of the coin to fall on,” Li said. She is aiming for some flexibility, ideally with passion and money.
Anzarouth acknowledged he has been comfortable and privileged, and hopes to pursue passion. “In an ideal world, you’d get both,” he said, convincingly.
