Debating Matters website

Debating Matters, Kent Heat
Institute of Ideas schools debating competition,
Canterbury Christ Church University College, 5 November 2003

Richard Swan, Harvey Grammar School

The Kent Heat. No wonder they call it heat.

Impeccably organised. First thought, last thought. It may seem a strange place to start, but it is unspeakably important in making a day like this successful. Attendance at an Institute of Ideas event is an assurance that schedules will be kept to, people will be in the right place at the right time, and you won't need to keep looking at your watch and wondering how things are going to be squeezed into an ever over-running timetable.

As a result, you can sit and concentrate on what's going on. And what a lot's going on! The day is stressful for all the other reasons - extremely close debates, impressive performances by a host of young people, errors caused by youth, inexperience and nervousness. Rather touchingly, there is a naïve earnestness that makes the world seem suddenly changeable, as if idealism and a vision of the big picture can compensate for the cloying detail that drags reality down into a quagmire of compromises and equivocation.

The audience, the judges, the 'experts', are pulled around, puzzled, inspired, confused, aggravated, provoked, stimulated and drained by a battering of argument and counter-argument. Logic, lapses in logic, closely focused examples and wild generalisations, all have to be dealt with somehow - assimilated, exposed, challenged or pursued as the occasion serves and opportunity presents itself. It's not neat, it's often not pretty, it's frequently not glorious, but like most wars, it's surprisingly compelling.

The roller-coaster of the rounds, the Byzantine quirks of the structure that means you don't know who's going to be in and who's going to be out until you've interpreted the rules three times, so that you can win a debate and then be eliminated, the Baroque torture of a pattern that means you can save your best team until last, only to find that there isn't a last; by the end of the day you feel as if you've been dragged through a wringer backwards and then pitched out to dry.

We won, of course. Except there wasn't a single of course anywhere in it, from losing the first debate to losing nearly every speech afterwards, but making up for it in the close quarter combat of the floor wars, grinding through the devastating exposés of the critics, and finally emerging clutching trophies like some survivors of the ruins of Troy. What the other teams felt like, I can't imagine.

And I was only the teacher.

Presumably, as with all battles, we'll feel better tomorrow, when we look back at the wreckage and realise that we came away with the spoils. Well done us. Great day, great experience for all concerned, impeccable organisation. First thought, last thought.