In the YouTube and new confrontational television news era, the ancient Socratic art of debate is making a big comeback, particularly in India. For millennial parents who value the skills of communication and leadership, encouraging children to polish their debating skills has become one of the 21st century skillset tick boxes – Jayalakshmi Vaidyanathan “Jaw jaw is better than war war,” said Winston Churchill (1874-1965), former British prime minister who led the UK to a famous and improbable victory in the Second World War, and a great debater since his days at the elite Harrow School. In the YouTube and new confrontational television news era, the ancient Socratic art of debate is making a big comeback, particularly in India. Within the country’s progressive schools and colleges, debate is emerging as a popular co-curricular activity which develops children’s reasoning, argumentative, persuasive, conflict resolution and leadership skills. For millennial parents who value the skills of communication and leadership, encouraging children to polish their debating skills has become one of the 21st century skillset tick boxes. Popularity of the ancient co-curricular activity of ‘reasoning together,’ i.e, debate, is certain to receive a huge boost following the victory of a team of Indian students in the recently concluded premier World Schools Debating Championships 2019 (WSDC, estb.1991) held in Bangkok in July. For the first time in WSDC’s history, a five-member student team from India argued its way through topics ranging from international relations and economics to sports and pop culture, winning the champion’s trophy that was thus far monopolised by native English-speaking countries such as Australia — which has won the maximum titles — followed by England. Proposing the motion “This house regrets the glorification of soldiers as heroes,” Team India defeated Canada with all nine judges unanimously voting for it — a feat that the Chennai-based Indian Schools Debating Society (ISDS), which coached the team, says has not been achieved by any country in the past decade. Tejas Subramaniam, a class XII student of Padma Seshadri Bal Bhavan School, Chennai bagged the ‘Best Speaker of the World’ title. “Every year, carefully selected teams from over 50 countries compete for the World Schools Debating Championship title. This year, India shattered records by winning every round of the competition. This is no mean achievement as we began participating in the championships only 11 years ago. And as a non-native English speaking country, our team had to not just work on the content but also language fluency and style,” says Dhruva Bhat, a doctoral student at Oxford University, UK who coached this year’s India WSDC team. An alum of Harvard University, USA and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Bhat himself won the best speaker title at WSDC 2012 and 2013. Bhat believes there is resurgent interest in debates within the parent and students communities countrywide. “Clued-up contemporary parents are aware that communication skills i.e, the art of putting forward evidence-backed cogent arguments is very important for success not only in the workplace but also in personal relationships. Moreover,…
