ISDA Debating – Round 1 vs Ravenswood

J. G. Nicholas

Last Friday, Ravenswood hosted Shore on topics related to education and schooling, and our debaters were victorious in three of six debates in our first outing of the season.  

Fighting valiantly but ultimately going down in their first ever official debate, our Year 7s negated the topic ‘That languages should be compulsory in high schools.’ While their speech, structure, and confidence were impressive for their level of experience, the team needs to hone their rebuttals and order, the most important points must go first. Despite the loss, this was an impressive start to the season for the Year 7s, and they should be congratulated. Negating the same topic, our Year 8 team came away victorious in a narrow win, a great victory and launchpad for success down the season.  

The Year 9s could smell victory, but went down in a narrow debate that could’ve gone either way, negating ‘The government should limit the fees that private schools charge.’ The boys effectively elaborated on their ideas, but our substantive ultimately took a back seat to their rebuttal, limiting the depth of their case. Both sides lacked understanding of the status quo, that schools are ‘non-for-profit organisations’ and where school fees are actually spent. Despite strongly arguing the lack of benefit to low SES students under their opponent’s model, the Year 9’s struggled to recover from their earlier lack of substantive, and credit to Yukai Yan for his stand-out performance.  

Suffering the same fate as our Year 9s, the Year 10s went down negating the topic ‘That work experience should be compulsory for all students.’ The boys attacked the vulnerable mechanisms in their opposition’s case well, leveraging their extensive knowledge of current affairs to provide a number of good examples that strengthened their case. Unfortunately, the Year 10s couldn’t overcome the surgical precision of Ravenswood’s manner and aim to improve their clarity of speech and arguments moving forward.  

The night was punctuated by successes from both Senior teams, the As and Bs victorious negating the topic ‘That High Schools should aggressively support career pathways outside of university education. e.g. Trade apprenticeships, TAFE, culinary school etc.’ The Senior Bs, composed of Daniel Kang, Ramon Zhang, Max Kim, and Ethan Tan were given the win in a dominant performance that saw the better team come out victorious.  

A significantly weakened Senior As side, missing stars Aaron Rucinski and Jimmy Nicholas demonstrated their class in a clinical victory against a strong Ravenswood side, with notable performances from Lachlan Hunt, Blake Fite, and nightwatchman Michael Kwak. Pouncing on the affirmative model’s limited benefits to stakeholders and lack of understanding of the status quo, the A’s perceptively highlighted the harms to low SES stakeholders in the keeping of their ambitions low and discouraging university. The debate ultimately came down to three main issues – the effect of aggressive support destigmatising some jobs that don’t require tertiary education, job shortages and how it would affect these areas and equality of education. Winning the second two clashes but losing the first, there were some overgeneralisations made on both sides with greater specificity of targets, jobs or effects not fully explained but it was a great start for the Senior As this season.  

Next week, we host St Catherine’s for our first home debate of the season. While all teams have something to work on in Round 2, our strong start to the season, coupled with home-turf advantage will make all teams a force to be reckoned with this Friday.