What should be the purpose of speeches and debates and what it actually looks like

Have you attended speeches and debates in schools or colleges as a competitor or even as an audience? How was your experience? Maybe in this article I would be challenging the age old process of such extra-curricular activities because honestly, my experience has been horrible. And I think majority population’s concept of speeches and debates is highly messed up. We would be discussing, how “thirst” for academic excellence has killed authenticity.

Let’s start with speech and with the question “why such a thing even exists where we have go over the stage and speak something?”. It exists so that each and everyone of us can get equal opportunity to present our own point of views. It’s an open territory, where everyone is allowed to present their opinions. That is the sole purpose of why things like speech programmes are conducted, but what actually happens? Let’s be honest, no one, absolutely no one, is interested in the quality of speech, rather interested in quantity of the speech, includes even the jury. Fluency and length is given priority over authenticity. I understand fluency is important for effective communication of language and hence opinion, but what’s the point of fluency if the whole content is a mugged up display. I am not interested in listening what a random guy has uploaded on google about what he thinks about “unemployment in India” or “independence day”, because that’s what speakers do most often. But honestly, I don’t blame them much, because we live in a society where winning prizes is celebrated way more than sticking to originality. That’s what parents think as well, “prepare, such that you will get the first prize.” This is the toxic competitive environment we grow up in, where the idea is to beat, not grow. How can you expect your child’s intellectual growth when he/she is programmed to such compete and win algorithm. Rather children should be appreciated for coming up with their own views of the topic, it might lack fluency( because obviously you haven’t mugged up everything to vomit in front of the audience), it might even be a distorted view but at least it’s authentic, not necessarily new or unheard but the speaker is telling his own heart and brain and supposedly not someone else’s.

Let’s talk about debates. Let’s analyze “what is the purpose of conducting such an event where two students have to present ideas from a completely opposite standpoints such that, even their position in the topic is decided by jury”. Let us understand the psychology that goes behind. We humans, tend to have some biases. And we force our biases to form our interpretations. For instance, you might have biases about political ideologies or administrative policies. In speeches, speaker is allowed to present his biases but debates have an advantage over speech where both sides of the coins are presented and both the biases of the situations are given equal priority and debaters are supposed to not present their own personal biases. And what’s it’s advantage? Let’s take for instance, two debaters are debating over political ideologies of left and right. And suppose the majority of the audience lie towards left in political spectrum. Their biases never allow them to introspect the other side of the situation. A fair debate would give them a complete new perspective to think about. But what happens in reality? Debaters think, the purpose of them debating, is to fight with each other, somehow dominating the person right in front of them. And debates end up as some quarrelling competition where two persons are yelling at each other for no good reasons.

For the record, I didn’t state that taking help from all different sources is wrong. You are free to do so. You can collect data to give details to your side of story, but interpretation of the data shouldn’t be ideally borrowed.

This how the whole culture of extra-curricular activities is polluted. And then people ask, why India is lacking behind creativity and all that. The answer is, the child never really got a chance to use his creative potential. I personally, rarely participated in any of these competitions as I never want to be part of a reward seeking propaganda where mediocrity is celebrated over elegance.

Speaking of solutions, I would say, take the responsibility that was supposed to taken by elders. Start building your own interpretations, for that, you might have to consume plenty of data, go for it. For the age we are living in, availability of data is never a problem. Form opinions but never take them for granted. Present your point of views to people. And always be open for critics, you have to be welcoming to criticism to come your way. Taking all of this into consideration, rethink about your opinion and restructure. That is the learning process, there’s no shortcut to that. It’s always learning, unlearning and then relearning.

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