> Which raises the interesting question of why it's an extracurricular activity in the first place
Because logical analysis and research skills are valuable, and it's a good way to teach those skills.
(It's also a good way to teach presentation skills, by the way. Thinking on your feet at 100 wpm is much easier if you've been doing it at 400 wpm for a few years.)
Also, perhaps even more importantly, many students seem to really enjoy it.
> given the importance of argumentation as a social skill
I think you've mistaken argumentation for rhetoric and persuasion, which are related but different skills.
It's perfectly possible to make strong arguments at a rapid pace of delivery. Reading a mathematical proof at 400wpm shouldn't make it any more or less correct.
In fact, in practice, there's a strong positive correlation between delivery speed and quality of argumentation in high school debate (although this is not causal and mostly has to do with the fact that "speed is a rough correlate to ability inasmuch as it's an early product of commitment" as another poster put it).
> One wonders what outcomes might result from (say) having an adult judge and 12 jury members drawn from the student body.
Judges of high school debates are adults (or, at least, high school graduates). The only debates judged by students are "pre-junior-varsity" rounds.
Because logical analysis and research skills are valuable, and it's a good way to teach those skills.
That doesn't explain why it's extracurricular.
I'm trying to be brief as I've made several comments in this thread already and don't want to swamp it with my own opinions. In a nutshell, I don't think the quality of argumentation matters if ordinary people can't keep up with it.
I could have removed all between-word spaces from this comment (eg to fit within some arbitrary character count limit) and it would still be comprehensible to most readers, but at the cost of significant extra work.
There is a not-insignificant additional participation cost and time outside the regular school day to participate; that being said, in some schools speech/debate has (at least historically) been "curricular" in that it satisfies core English requirements, rather than being either a pure elective or exclusively extracurricular activity.
> In a nutshell, I don't think the quality of argumentation matters if ordinary people can't keep up with it.
Quality of argumentation doesn't count in debate if the audience can't keep up with it (either in "real life" or high school debate). "Ordinary people" are an abstract concept; the audience always consists of actual people, who vary from any particular concept of "ordinary" in different ways.
I don't understand what you're trying to say :( Do you mean it should be required curriculum? Or just an activity? (If the latter, FWIW football and board games club are also extracurricular. The term really just means "something done in association with school but outside the classroom" these days.)
> I don't think the quality of argumentation matters if ordinary people can't keep up with it.
The goal is to educate the student.
Also, students learn to present slowly and persuasively, then speed that up. It's not like they're talking quickly day 1. Many top policy debaters also do well in e.g., extemporaneous speaking, which is much more presentation-oriented. It's not an either-or.
I've found that debate formats which emphasize persuasion/rhetoric tend to only teach persuasion/rhetoric, whereas formats that emphasize evidence and logic (even o the exclusion of rhetoric) tend to teach all three. (Just not always at the same time.)
> but at the cost of significant extra work
IME the extra work to move fast, once you have the basics, is not all that significant. Plus, smart beats fast.
I believe the poster is saying it should be core curriculum. I know debate was an elective in my high school (optional course to fill a categorical credit - but not after-school).
In that 9th grade course, the teacher was the judge, with students' input. There were no speed reading games, as the debaters were not trained hobbyists in deception: It was a matter of putting out the best argument to defend your position.
Because logical analysis and research skills are valuable, and it's a good way to teach those skills.
(It's also a good way to teach presentation skills, by the way. Thinking on your feet at 100 wpm is much easier if you've been doing it at 400 wpm for a few years.)
Also, perhaps even more importantly, many students seem to really enjoy it.
> given the importance of argumentation as a social skill
I think you've mistaken argumentation for rhetoric and persuasion, which are related but different skills.
It's perfectly possible to make strong arguments at a rapid pace of delivery. Reading a mathematical proof at 400wpm shouldn't make it any more or less correct.
In fact, in practice, there's a strong positive correlation between delivery speed and quality of argumentation in high school debate (although this is not causal and mostly has to do with the fact that "speed is a rough correlate to ability inasmuch as it's an early product of commitment" as another poster put it).
> One wonders what outcomes might result from (say) having an adult judge and 12 jury members drawn from the student body.
Judges of high school debates are adults (or, at least, high school graduates). The only debates judged by students are "pre-junior-varsity" rounds.