Prison Debate Pits Inmate Team Against Students | Hacker News Reader

Prison Debate Pits Inmate Team Against Students

nytimes.com

13 pointsrobg7 comments

Strange format for debating. In Canada, every debate event my team went to had all teams taking Pro/Con on every argument; we also had to (and this may be a commonwealth element) switch between parliamentary and cross - Depending on how well you did, you would end up arguing both sides of a point two-three times.

There was never a "You will have to win a debate by taking just one side" type of debate - I've always thought that representation on television was just a simplification, and that, debate teams in the United States have to take both sides as well. (Though perhaps Parliamentary debate style wasn't required)

I have to believe a good portion of the HN audience has had debate classes/tournaments in High School - what was your experience? Had to argue both sides?

In my experience with high school level debating (in Australia), teams were randomly assigned only one side of the argument, and each speaker spoke only once.

I never liked it at all, because I couldn't deal with the idea that I might be forced to argue something which I didn't honestly believe to be true.

Those with fewer qualms joined the debating team and mostly wound up in law. I wound up in science.

Whenever possible, I try to debate on the side that I /don't/ believe to be true. I find that debating 'my side' of the argument is harder since I take my points as self evident and don't back them up as well.

Debating the other side means that you have to consider the argument on an intellectual level, not an emotional one. I think keeping yourself intellectually honest by forcing yourself to carefully examine the arguments that you don't personally believe is great for scientists.

It's also handy, because the other team tends to bring up points you're very familiar with as their arguments.

I've debated at a few of the big university tournaments in Canada and the format was always British Parliamentary or Canadian Parliamentary. In either case, your team debates one side of a given resolution. In BP it gets really fun, as you have to not only present a consistent case, but also back up the other team that's on your side. (For non-debaters, BP has four teams, two government, two opposition.)

What I found unusual in the article is that the teams knew the resolution in advance. In BP, you're usually given the resolution, and then 20 minutes or so to work up your arguments. In CP, one of the teams will introduce the resolution, so they can prepare, but the other team is working on the fly. Obviously the judges take that into account.

[Edit, I also debated primarily in Ontario/Quebec, so I'm not sure if this all holds true back west.]

I did debate in high school. Specifically the Policy debate variety. And yes, depending on the specific tournament, you had 3 or more rounds, and an even balance of affirmative vs. negative sides.

This sounds like this is more of an exhibition than a tournament.

Interesting... when I did high-school debating (in Canada), we never argued both sides of the same resolution. I did Parliamentary style almost exclusively though, but did make it to various Canada-wide and North-America-wide tournaments.

Were you perhaps out on the West Coast? I heard there was something of a schism in style there, and as an East-Coaster myself I never really met a lot of people from out West at the tournaments.

British Columbia, 1986-1987, Went to the Provincial Finals in the Grade twelve, mostly, I suspect, because I actually managed to get to all the preliminaries and score enough points. The people (a lot of them from private schools) at the at the finals were really, really good. Our poor teams from Kamloops, and 100 Mile house didn't know what hit us.

We actually had both approaches to debating in terms of advance preparation, one time we knew in advance, and so had time to prepare (My high-point in those debates was using the text from Catholic Doctrine that demonstrated abortion was acceptable if the purpose of the operation had some other principle medical reason - hard to do if you haven't had a chance to do the research in advance), but we also had one in which we showed up without knowing the topic in advance - the rationale I thought, at the time, (or had been told) was so that we didn't have to do even _more_ studying around mid terms. Maybe it was just a debate format.

We definitely switched back and forth (sometimes with just a 5 minute break in between) between the Pro/Con on each topic - though the way to weasel out of actually doing that was the way it was done by the debaters cited by the OP in the prison - they didn't argue against providing education to Prisoners directly, they argued against the entire educational structure.

We also switched from Cross Examination to Parliamentary throughout the debates, and some significant time was spent on what was an acceptable level of "Heckling" during Parliamentary, and what would be scored down as abusive. I recall in the finals one effective debater absolutely devastating her opponent with "Point of information - I'd like to note that the honorable member opposite has his fly down." :-)

[Oh, and just to make things insanely difficult, there were a few round thrown in that were in _french_ (And this is in British Columbia) - I'm not sure how you got selected into that round, presumably some bilingual competence was a pre-req]

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