I wish higher education or the arts or social media were the open forums of intellectual debate they seemed to be when I was younger. But personally it seems clear after devoting decades of my life to all three that they aren't and fundamentally can't be for some reason or reasons. Open to the hope that they still can be though of course.
Even when I was a freshman I remember knowing that I was going to college to learn how to survive in 21st century western human society. And it felt that way both when I was an engineering student and an art student. Learning post-modern double-think and new-speak (half-joking terminology) seems like it was a huge part of that survival education for life both in and outside academia. Also learning how to stay human on an introspective personal level while participating in broken hypocritical institutional machines seems to have been a big part of what I was absorbing. Very angsty but it feels like it worked in retrospect and I made it a lot further than I thought I would.
That is you have a "debate" in high school where you have to fight hard to defend a position that you don't personally believe in. I am also sick and tired of "debates" staged to legitimize illegitimate viewpoints such as "God created the world in 6 days" and Immanuel Velikovsky's crackpot theories.
I like identifying debate as a dirty word, or at least one to be very suspicious of. Reminds me of a Chomsky quote I'll never find again about how the acceptable parameters of a "debate" can be infinitely more important than the debate itself. Who defines them, what they are and how those parameters are enforced. (queue matrix soundtrack)
Fighting hard to defend a position you don’t personally believe in is an important part of learning that there are meritorious arguments for positions you disagree with; which is itself a foundation for learning to engage productively with others.
High school debate was foundational for the person I became as an adult, because I learned that nuance isn’t just something we pretend exists; it is a very real and very important part of learning to communicate with others. I won many rounds of debate arguing against my own beliefs because I was able to distance my feelings and come up with a compelling argument anyways.
That said there is something for understanding a domain well enough that you can explain all of the major points of view around it. I got strong-armed by somebody on the bus into talking about the high price of gas, the war, January 6th and similar topics and after I got off I was praised by another passenger for being "incredibly diplomatic" for acknowledging the position of Vladimir Putin and Trump supporters while explaining why a No Fly Zone isn't a realistic policy.
There's a big difference between that and fighting for a POV I don't believe in.
If Debate Team were the fast track to being a literal Nazi, I'd think higher education would have less of a pronounced left-leaning bent.
More likely, learning to steel-man arguments is a fast track for understanding people unlike yourself and being able to spot opportunities for compromise or win-win solutions.
Is it just me, or did you just ghost-edit your previous comment, adding everything after the Nazi citation? I don't mind grammatical or even minor wording fixes, but changing the entire tone of a comment typically requires an 'edit' flag so that readers aren't misled/confused.
> That is you have a "debate" in high school where you have to fight hard to defend a position that you don't personally believe in.
This is just a slight "twist" on the Ideological Turing Test. It's important to understand even positions you don't believe in, and devising strong arguments for a position is a good test of understanding.
Of course competitive/formal "debate" has other well-known problems; most notably, the artificial requirement to address every single element of the opposing argument in your response incents gish-gallop arguments.
Even when I was a freshman I remember knowing that I was going to college to learn how to survive in 21st century western human society. And it felt that way both when I was an engineering student and an art student. Learning post-modern double-think and new-speak (half-joking terminology) seems like it was a huge part of that survival education for life both in and outside academia. Also learning how to stay human on an introspective personal level while participating in broken hypocritical institutional machines seems to have been a big part of what I was absorbing. Very angsty but it feels like it worked in retrospect and I made it a lot further than I thought I would.