Where Theory Meets Practice: Cultural Issues at McGill's High School Debating Tournament

I’m exhausted, my voice is hoarse, I haven’t done any of my weekend homework… and yet I’ve never felt better. McGill’s 48th Annual High School Debating Tournament was a complete success and an absolute joy to attend – I served as a judge at the event on Friday night and through Saturday. We hosted students from across Canada and the New England States, all arriving with folders full of notes and stomachs full of butterflies, ready to argue about whether or not Iran has a right to develop nuclear arms. Although my second team of Friday evening was so late that we broke for the night at ten, happy declarations such as “With respect, Madame Speaker, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is as holey as Swiss cheese!” made it all worth-while.

Was I ever so cheeky? Probably. I hope so. It’s a wonderful thing to be at that age – cheeky. I hope that I have these kinds of students in my classes one day. I get the impression that they are a rare breed, though maybe with some coaxing and coaching we can winnow a few more keeners out of the masses. Even as I watched one girl struggle to pronounce, and ultimately fail to pronounce correctly, the name Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about six times in the same speech, or as I watched one overly-confident debater stare daggers at me as I constructively critiqued his delivery and a few badly-timed Points of Information, I admired them all for voluntarily subjecting themselves to the competition. It isn’t easy for a high school student to debate a topic rooted in something so foreign as Middle-Eastern politics, or something so abstract as the ethics of war.

That many of my debaters probably had not had any previous exposure to the history of the Middle-East conflict certainly ties into my response to this week’s readings. But I’ll leave that until later; right now I want to talk about one of the impromptu rounds. In impromptu debate, teams are given a resolution and ten minutes to prepare their arguments – and the one I want to talk about is a mouthful: Be it resolved that this House will favour socio-economically based affirmative action instead of racially-based affirmative action in American college admissions. I was surprised the debaters were being given such a contentious topic in an impromptu round, especially one that is based on an American policy with which many of the Canadian students would not be familiar. In truth, my teams struggled through it, and once it was over I expressed my congratulations and sympathies, citing the difficulty of the topic. We had a discussion about the issues, and then I spoke briefly about our policy of multiculturalism in Canada and the issues being discussed in the media these days, which I knew about mostly because of my studies in this class.

What was interesting to me what that the Opposition team was composed of two Black girls, and the Government team was two White students – a boy and a girl. I thought to myself, will this influence how the White team argues? Will the Black students try to take the moral high ground by virtue of their skin color? I looked up from my scoring sheet and watched them shuffle their papers in anticipation of the round, and the young lady on side-Government smiled and pointed at side-Opposition. “Public school!” she declared, nodding approvingly. The Black students nodded back. “Public school!” they answered, returning the smile.

“You all know each other?” I asked. But no. One team was from Toronto, the other from Winnipeg. What they were recognizing was their opponents’ lack of uniforms. “Aha. Is that where the battle-line is being drawn at this debate?” I asked. “Not by city, not by province or country, but it’s a public versus private thing?” And the students replied in the affirmative. The kids in the uniforms are arrogant, I was told. The publicly-schooled debaters liked it much better when they were paired with other ‘people like them.’

“It’s interesting, given the resolution, isn’t it?” I mused. “These days, is segregation more about economic class than it is about race, or even nationality?” The students looked pensive, and I got a few shrugs. “I guess we’ll find out. You need to convince me,” I said, and with that I started the debate by ceremoniously reading out the resolution and the debaters’ names, having no small difficulty with the unfamiliar phonetics of those on side-Opposition. Pronouncing the name Napande with French intonation caused a giggle, and remembering some advice from Helen Fox, I stopped and asked to be corrected… and then, naturally, I butchered her last name, too. It sounded so musical when she said it that I made the self-deprecating remark that I must be as tone-deaf in language as I am in music.

If the White students were in any way inhibited by debating the subject of affirmative action with a Black team, it didn’t show. They clearly articulated their side’s argument that racially-based affirmative action is unfair to White students who come from the same socio-economic disadvantages as Black students do. Side-Opposition made the argument that usually, the socio-economically disadvantaged students and those students who are members of an ethnic minority are one-in-the-same. The purpose of affirmative action, argued side-Opposition, is to compensate for historical and institutionalized racism, to remove racial stigmas, and to foster a diverse student body. After the debate, I told side-Government that they missed a good opportunity to refute the ‘racial-stigma argument,’ that they could have claimed that affirmative action actually propagates said stigmas by generating the perception that all minority students at colleges are there only because they are members of a minority. Napande and her partner, Shimby, nodded vigorously when I said this.

In general, side-Opposition seemed more familiar with the topic than side-Government. The one young man in the room rose to ask some revealing Points of Information such as, “How is it that Black students are disadvantaged in school, if they go to public schools just like White students do?” Side-Opposition had the answer, and voiced it with conviction, and indeed the Member of the Opposition’s answer to this question was the most articulate and successful part of her speech. I might go so far as to say that side-Government learned a lot from the debate, not just about how to debate, but about the issue itself.

This is a very embarrassing picture of me from my high school debating days. (You see how committed I am to your entertainment, Reader?) Most of you will recognize the name of the coach. I could have included his yearbook picture too, but I'm scared that doing that would jeopardize my grade in Policy Issues...

The other impromptu resolutions lent themselves to similar discussions about multiculturalism and tolerance. For example, the last round of debate I judged asked the debaters to resolve whether the House would “exchange citizenship for military service.” Interestingly, side-Government made the argument that encouraging immigrants to serve their country in peacekeeping missions would promote multiculturalism by forcing them to interact with other Canadians and embrace Canadian values. The young lady serving as Minister of the Crown even went so far as to claim that “immigrants tend to move to Canada and then just segregate into their own ghettos. This way, they will be socializing and at least, doing something positive for their country.”

It was difficult for me to tell how much of this idea was hers, and how much of it was ‘in-character.’ I found it peculiar that she worded her argument this way, rather than saying something like, “Newly-arriving immigrants bring skills into this country that the military desperately needs, such as translation services and technological know-how. We want to do everything possible to encourage these highly-skilled workers to join our military. If an immigrant is willing to donate these services, and in so doing make such a noble sacrifice for Canada, the least our country can do is recognize him or her as a Canadian citizen.” After the debate was over I brought the issue up, assuring the debater that I didn’t think she intended her remarks to sound discriminatory, but cautioning her to word her arguments very carefully when debating such a sensitive issue. In impromptu debate it is easy to let your words get away from you, because you don’t have a prepared speech. This is why it’s very important that you pay attention to the politics of what you’re saying. And besides, strategically speaking, I think my wording of the argument made for a much more appealing case. All the debaters agreed, and found it interesting that none of them thought to phrase the argument this way. “Let’s blame the media,” one of them said, half in jest. Everyone present then pounded their hands on the table, over and over again, which in the debating world is a way of expressing emphatic agreement.

I hope I had a future journalist in that room. Or a future debating coach who will pay it forward. As someone who had an excellent debating coach in high school, I can say with certainty that it makes all the difference in the world. I want to encourage my fellow student-teachers to consider coaching and supporting the debating team at their future schools. As I hope I have articulated in this post, debating seminars are an excellent venue for giving voice to many of the issues we are discussing in this class. And it’s fun. I mean, how often do you hear a high-school student compare a piece of international law to a dairy product? Really, these days you can’t buy that sort of entertainment.