Civic education in competitive speech and debate.

• Author: Hogan, J. Michael
• Position: INTRODUCTION

A lot has happened since March 15 2016, when the U.S. Senate passed a resolution marking "National Speech and Debate Education Day" (S. Res. 398, 2016). In one of the most contentious and polarizing presidential campaigns in U.S. history, we witnessed a striking demonstration of the decline of public argumentation and debate, as demagoguery became normalized within the political mainstream. Meanwhile, congressional debates have become even more partisan and unproductive, while so-called "debate" shows on cable TV and talk radio have become little more than forums for "fake news" and other forms of propaganda. No wonder the American public has become more polarized, suspicious, cynical, and unwilling to support reasonable compromises on tough issues like immigration and gun control (PRC 2014). Meanwhile, more and more young people have given up on politics altogether, convinced that the political process is "both morally bankrupt and completely insulated from public pressure" (Mindich 2005, 6).

The need for a revival of civic education in America has never been more obvious. In what Paul Krugman (2014) has dubbed a New Gilded Age, declining measures of our nation's "civic health" (NCoC 2010), along with our increasingly shallow and polarized public discourse, have raised alarms that we are living in a "diminished democracy" (Skocpol 2003), even a "democracy at risk" (Macedo et al. 2005). For the speech and debate community, however, the democratic crisis in America represents an opportunity to remind our fellow educators and the broader public of the important role that speech and debate training can play in preparing young people for responsible and engaged citizenship. Indeed, the democratic crisis in America reflects an opportunity to restore rhetorical studies in general to the center of the liberal arts.

Speech and debate, of course, have been at the heart of the communication discipline since the founding of the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking in 1914 (Gehrke and Keith 2014, 3). And long before that, a rhetorical tradition dating back to the ancients treated training in the techniques and ethics of speech, argumentation, and debate as the foundation of civic education. America's founders were well schooled in that classical rhetorical tradition, as were the great debaters of the so-called "golden age" of American oratory: Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and others. Then came the Gilded Age, when powerful special interests stifled democratic deliberation--and the study of speech and debate declined.

During the Progressive Era (1900-1917), educational reformers, led by former debaters like Woodrow Wilson, revived the classical rhetorical tradition. Meanwhile, spellbinders, muckrakers, and political activists championing a variety of causes revitalized debate and deliberation in the public sphere. Confronting what John Dewey would later call the "problem of the public," Progressive reformers experimented with a variety of educational and civic innovations designed to improve "the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion" (Dewey [1927] 1991, 208), including community forums and Circuit Chautauquas (Gentile 1989, 68). Out of these efforts came many of the educational programs and institutions that still educate for citizenship today, such as student government, student newspapers, and of course debate and forensics programs (Hogan 2010, 438-440). The Progressive Era also inspired a revival of interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching in rhetoric, debate, and civic deliberation. In departments of English and in newly formed departments of speech communication, scholars trained in the classical tradition developed courses in public speaking, argumentation and debate, and the history and criticism of great speeches. Their goals were the same as those of the ancient Greek rhetoricians: to provide students with the knowledge and skills they need for engaged citizenship in a democracy.

Today can take inspiration from the Progressive educational reformers and reinvent and reinvigorate the study of speech, debate, and civic deliberation. We need to teach students to be a responsible public advocates, and we need to equip them with the tools they need to be more critical consumers in the "marketplace of ideas." Engaged citizenship requires not only information literacy, but also historical, civic, cultural, and digital literacies. In today's civil society, students need to be trained in the classical conception of deliberation as a process of collective inquiry into the facts, assumptions, values, and opinions underlying public debate over...