The Washington Post recently ran a very thorough story on two debaters from the Baltimore Urban Debate League. It’s probably the best article I’ve seen on any urban debate league. It’s generally true that any press is good press, but too often news articles tend to have an undertone of “Can you believe these kids are debating?!?!!?” or resort to unfortunate turns of phrase such as, “learning to settle arguments with words instead of guns” (actually a paraphrase of First Lady Laura Bush talking about the Atlanta Urban Debate League).
It’s not even that those angles are false, exactly, but I find it very unfortunate when people choose to focus on these exclusively. Providing valuable educational opportunities to young people without access to them ought to be valued on its own merits, not simply because we are afraid of encountering those same young people in a dark alley. As the Post article puts it,
“But the biggest benefit of debate, according to the coaches, teachers and judges in the program, is that it engages underprivileged students, who are learning to study, think, write and present their ideas with the best of them. In the ’70s, when budget crunches forced urban schools to eliminate many “extraneous” programs, such as art, drama and speech, debate became the exclusive bailiwick of affluent private and suburban public schools. “For a long time, debate teams had looked very white and male, in coats and ties, like you’d expect,” says Spiliadis. “But we’ve changed the face of debate.””
The article mostly follows the two students at the J.B. Fuqua Urban Debate League Celebration in Atlanta that I wrote about a few months ago. I didn’t actually get to watch them debate, but I did meet them and hear some very good things.
Even better, there was an editorial in the Post Magazine the same day:
“Fifty-three years later, it goes without saying that we’ve made real progress toward equality, although it’s hard to argue we’ve arrived. Of course, today’s school disparities are said to be based on class, not race, however inexorably the two are intertwined. But putting aside the source of the problem, don’t you find it outrageous that so many children are consigned to inferior educations — and lesser lives — just because their parents can’t afford to raise them in a good public school district? And I, for one, wonder: Where are the Barbaras? Do these students not understand that they also deserve much better? Why don’t they raise their voices?
After reading today’s cover story by Baltimore writer Karen Houppert, which begins on Page 12, it occurs to me that you have to find your voice before you can raise it.”