Competitive debate in the United States information
Debaters from High Point Central High School pose with their championship trophy in 1965
Competitive debate, also known as forensics or speech and debate, is an activity in which two or more people take positions on an issue and are judged on how well they defend those positions. The activity has been present in academic spaces in the United States since the colonial period. The practice, an import from British education, began as in-class exercises in which students would present arguments to their classmates about the nature of rhetoric. Over time, the nature of those conversations began to shift towards philosophical questions and current events, with Yale University being the first to allow students to defend any position on a topic they believed in. In the late nineteenth century, student-led literary societies began to compete with each other academically and often engaged in debates against each other. In 1906, the first intercollegiate debate league, Delta Sigma Rho, was formed, followed by several others. Competitive debate expanded to the secondary school level in 1920 with the founding of the National Speech and Debate Association, which grew to over 300,000 members by 1969. Technological advances such as the accessibility of personal computers in the 1990s and 2000s has led to debate cases becoming more complex and to evidence being more accessible. Competitors and coaches have made efforts to reduce discrimination in the debate community by introducing new arguments and recruiting debaters from underprivileged communities.
There are a wide variety of competitive debate formats, including the 2v2 Public forum debate, the 1v1 Lincoln–Douglas format, and the 2v2v2v2 British Parliamentary. Regardless of format, most debate rounds use a set topic and have two sides, with one team supporting the topic and the other team opposing the topic. Teams work through a series of speeches presenting their cases, responding to their opponent's arguments, and defending their case. Participation in competitive debate has been associated with positive outcomes for competitors across a wide variety of metrics, including standardized test scores, civic engagement, and future career outcomes, but has been criticized for forcing participants to defend positions they may not agree with and for its inaccessibility to laypeople at its highest levels. Notable former debaters include U.S. senator Ted Cruz and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
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