Academic Skills

Debate improves three fundamental academic skills that translate very easily into a variety of learning environments. Debate teaches critical thinking, research, and presentation skills at profound levels. The ability to analyze and evaluate arguments and ideas carefully is vital in an information age. Few instructional methods teach comprehension, analysis, and evaluation as well as debate. The competitive motivation to do well while debating encourages students to think more clearly, research thoroughly, and prepare their remarks carefully. Once students have learned these fundamental skills, they become more proficient in another academic settings.

Competitive debate also increases knowledge of content. Debaters annually research thousands of books, academic journal articles, government documents, think tank reports, magazine and news articles on such broad topic areas as juvenile justice reform, anti-discrimination policy, environmental policy, trade issues, military commitments, and foreign relations. If students debate for four to eight years, they learn a great deal about public policy analysis, politics, economics and social issues.

Personal Development

Debate also affords opportunities for personal growth in several ways. First, debate improves self- esteem and self-confidence. The ability to stand up and offer your opinion backed by strong evidence and argument improves one’s willingness to engage in conversation. It makes you less afraid to learn. It makes you more sure of yourself when you know that you can research a question and develop an answer. Win or lose, debating improves self-confidence.

Second, debate provides the opportunity for positive interaction with peers. Debate provides students with an opportunity to live together at debate institutes, to engage each other in social and personal issues in a safe and encouraging environment, and to know students from different schools, neighborhoods, and cultural backgrounds. The synergistic effect on students is to broaden their opportunities to know students other than themselves while working together toward a common goal. A graduate of the Emory National Debate Institute once described the experience by saying, "While working on an argument together, I learned that we have a lot more in common than we have differences."

And finally, debate teaches students to understand the opinions of others. In modern debate, students engage in switch-side debating. They have to debate both sides of the same resolution. This aspect of debate alone makes the activity worthwhile, for students must come to learn their opponents’ strongest arguments. They must learn these arguments both to defend them and to argue against them. Debate teaches students to appreciate the opinion of others and to disagree with others with respect.

Conflict Resolution

There is growing evidence that debate reduces the tendency to react violently to frustrating situations. Much of the inexplicable violence we see today is born of frustration. Words provide a better way of relieving that frustration and resolving disagreement than fists, knives, or guns. Beginning studies of competitive debate and violence suggest that several features found in violence reduction methods coalesce with the skills debate teaches. These studies point in a direction that would lead us to believe that debate teaches conflict resolution skills, improves usable vocabulary, improves self-esteem, and helps students distinguish argument from personal attack. Each of these skills would lessen propensity toward violence.