What I learned from debating at school

Many of my weekends in high school were spent at debating tournaments against other schools in the area, although we would spent the entire Saturday morning and afternoon preparing and presenting speeches there was always something to learn and something to see in each debate. In these debates each team would have 3 speakers each with a speech of up to 7 minutes and a reply speech from both sides at the end of the debate so they can mention why they feel that they won the arguments enough to have won the whole thing, right before the adjudicators decide who won. After years of debating against different schools I must honestly say that a schools wealth plays a big part in who will win or lose.

My problem with the debates was that it was designed to include all schools from the area who were offering debating as a cultural activity and if the schools could actually get their students to the tournaments each time. For as long as the topic has been announced and the debate has not started, students may not use electrical devices or communicate with their coaches. The issue with the whole thing is that different schools from different areas means different students which means that while one school arrives with files filled with printed pages with statistics about different countries, events and leaders in the world, another school has brought an old dictionary along with an writing pad with random facts written in pen on the off chance that something on those pages has something to do with the impromptu topic that’s about to be discussed. I was fortunate enough to be at an average school without damaged floors and broken door handles as I saw with one of the schools on a debate we went to. It was obvious from the looks of other students faces that they didn’t want to be there, that pavements and green grass is their idea of a good school, not sand and desks with writing on them and I could honestly tell that it was the first time many of those students had entered a community like that by which I mean a suburb near a rural area. It was obvious that there was a large gap of materialism among the students even before they became adults, the fact that we were already at a debate meant we had to be in a mentality of being very opinionated and fact orientated which meant that there was already competition before the debate started and now there were two spaces between different groups, the space caused by having less work material which already puts them at a disadvantage and the space of being from a completely different walk of life than the students that had printers at home with a WI-FI connection.

Many students have learned from a young age that they need to work much harder in order to achieve more simply because there are those with the means to be something simply because of what their parents had started and left to them while others have to start at the very beginning with parents who were probably in the same situation of being disadvantaged and could probably remain there for the remainder of their lives. But what i have learnt from growing up in a village is that every parent has the power to make their children far better than them by merely deciding that the child must not spend adulthood in the community which means that if a child grows up in a an area, goes to school in that area, graduates and then goes to college in that same area then you as a parent has decided that the area is a worthy habitat for that child. While you may not be able to leave the area due to financial limitations there are many things that can be done to protect the child from a lifetime of locking every door in the house.

I suppose these competitions are made this way as a way of being fair and in all honesty the wealthier students have every right to use the resources at their disposal but i have learned that the side with the most information will almost always win as they have more facts to work with and more content to offer the adjudicators. while unfortunate it expresses the whole natural law which says that the fittest will always survive which means that the other schools might have only  been there to participate so individual students could receive awards from their respective schools.