WHY DEBATE?

Study after study demonstrates the positive effect that competing in high school debate can have on our nation’s youth. Students that participate in high school debate enhance their skills in writing, reading, critical thinking, persuasion, and research.

• A 1999 quantitative study by Allen, Berkowitz, Hunt and Louden shows a strong correlation between improvements in critical thinking from students that competed in high school debate in comparison with students that merely took public speaking courses.

• Competitive debate has also been shown to help economically disadvantaged students. Numerous Urban Debate Leagues have been set up that bring debate to inner-city schools. Many UDLs fund inner city teams to attend The Glenbrooks, a national tournament hosted by the debate teams of Glenbrook North and South. We have representatives from the Chicago, Atlanta, New York, and Minneapolis Urban Debate Leagues.

• A 2004 study done by University of Missouri Kansas-City professor Linda Collier shows significant improvements in test scores for reading comprehension amongst high school students that competed in debate.

• A 2004 article in USA Today cites debate as one of the leading activities that CEOs from Fortune 500 companies are impressed with when hiring candidates for employment.

• Debate teaches leadership skills. Many famous individuals, such as Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Stephen Breyer, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former Presidents William Clinton, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, and hundreds of Congressmen have been competitive debaters.

Michael Mazarr, former editor of the Washington Quarterly, former President and CEO of the Harry Stimson Center, and professor of National Security Strategy at the US Naval War College has this to say about his competitive debate experience:

“Competitive debate is thus a marvelous source for a host of skills, tools and habits that our educational systems work hard to inculcate in young people. And best of all, this learning happens naturally, organically, as a by-product of the debaters’ desire to succeed—they seek out these forms of learning as means to the end of their success as debaters. My understanding of education theory is that education performed in this way—gathering information in order to solve problems and accomplish tasks—is often the most effective and lasting form of learning. At every step of my career—in research institutes, as a Capitol Hill aide, as a Navy Reserve intelligence officer, as the president of a think-tank, and now at a school for mid-career military officers and government officials—the skills I developed in competitive debate have vastly overshadowed every other aspect of my formal education in preparing me for success.”