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"Agora Speakers International is a worldwide nonprofit association of passionate volunteers devoted to helping people develop their public speaking, communication, critical thinking, debating, and leadership skills."
Debating was present in the Agora Speakers declaration of purpose since its very inception. Still, until now, it has been neglected in the educational materials, and with the second iteration of the Educational Program and the Agora Guide, it's time to address this.
There's a growing body of research showing the huge benefits of debating as an educational tool:
- Debating enhances critical thinking, much more than public speaking alone (Allen, Berkowitz, Hunt, & Louden, 1999), (Howell, 1943), (Hill, 1993), (Greenstreet, 1993)
- Debating is the most effective activity on college campuses for teaching research skills.
- Debating provides significant benefits for people entering careers in all sectors (Center, 1982) (Hobbs & Chandler, 1991)
- There's a clear relationship between debate participation and improved writing and listening skills.(Mezuk, Bondarenko, Smith, & Tucker, 2011), (Peters, 2009), (Huseman, Ware, & Gruner, 1972)
- There's a very high correlation between debate participation and attainment of leadership positions in society (Keele & Matlon, 1984), (Union, 1960)
- Experienced debaters have much lower verbal aggressiveness scores in general life (Colbert, 1993)
- Debating drastically reduces (as much as three times) the dropout probability in schools (Anderson & Mezuk, 2012)
- Debating is one of the most endorsed activities by former participants. In fact, it enjoys almost unanimous (99.26%) endorsement from students, higher than any other educational activity. (Parcher, 1998)
Many debate contests and debating rule systems exist, most of them based on parliamentary systems and parliamentary procedure (especially the British Parliamentary Procedure). Usually, they proceed in turns with a strict order of what and when can be said and when new arguments and evidence can be introduced. However, in the fast-paced world of today, we must also take into consideration other forms of debate, especially those happening on TV, radio, or similar media, where the action is much less ordered and fast-paced, or those debate-like situations that also are much more flexible, such as court proceedings or business negotiations.
Debating also has its problems. A notable paper by professor Nancy Tumposky (Tumposky, 2004) argued that debates tend toward dualism, persuading participants to view issues as having only two positions and focusing them toward the question of winning or losing. Additionally, several studies suggest that debates' adversarial nature is not natural to the way females and certain minority groups think and communicate.
The proposed debate rules try to strike a delicate balance between:
- Not making the meetings excessively long
- Serving an educational purpose
- Being as realistic as possible
- Developing skills that can be used in a broad range of real word debate or debate-like situations.
- Not creating a bad atmosphere in the club.
- Allowing debates to be more than zero-sum sections in which one team wins and the other loses encouraging consensus building.
Point (1) is the easiest to achieve by altering the requirements that all meetings must have a minimum set of roles so that clubs can choose to have a completely classical meeting, or a debate-only meeting, or a mixture of both if time allows. There will be a requirement, though, to have at least four debates per year, with the VPE being in charge of organizing them. A debate is expected to last between 30 and 90 minutes, depending on the number of teams and the time the VPE allocates to each section.
We should be wary, though, of turning Agora clubs into debate clubs, as this is not the goal. This is a danger because debates tend to be funnier and more exciting than prepared speeches so that they can generate certain "addiction". Debates should complement and extend the existing educational program, not replace it. Also, we should remember that the goal of Agora debates is mainly educational for the members that participate in them.