Education Debates

Hey everyone. It's James here from consensus. Welcome back to another video. This one's one of our brief explainers. This one's about education debates. In this video, I'll be going through the idea of education debates, how common they are, and just a bit of background. I'll also go through three of the most common principles that we see used as arguments in these debates. And this is both for affirmative and negative. Then I'll go through some of my favourite education debates and how they kind of pan out as well as just some final thoughts for you to take in, if you're preparing for education round that's coming up.

So just a quick overview of what an explainer video does. These videos are about 10 minutes long. We’re responding to questions we get from the consensus community. And basically what I do is we kind of take one idea and we try and kind of dispel it down into a little bite-sized chunk for you to kind of consume at your own leisure. If you would like something short up, then you can always go and check out one of our explainer podcasts. And they're about 5 minutes long and you can listen in happiness without having to look at us. So that's always a benefit for some people as well.

All right. Let's have a look at education debates. These are quite simply some of my favourites, not just as a coach, but also as an adjudicator. I think that generally speaking, when it comes to education, kids have a better handle on how it plays out. And that's most likely because they are students themselves and they have a good understanding of how to characterise and how to look with a little bit more nuanced than we do in some of the other areas. That said, there's a degree of nuance that you need to be aware of that can only be really unpacked if you understand some of the broader principles. So I'll go through those now.

The first principle I'm going to have a look at, which is common in education debates is quality of education. So this principle basically says, what are we doing in schools to try and make sure that people have the best strategies in order to learn the most amount of stuff? So like school fulfills that purpose, you know, that is that we want people to learn from it, we want people to kind of take those skills and be able to apply them as good citizens later in life.

In terms of quality of education, we might look at issues like how much time we spend in the classroom or what kind of policies might improve the quality of our teachers, and what's taught in schools and what's prioritized in schools in terms of what the society actually needs. So just like some brief examples might be in terms of quality of teachers, whether we pay them more based on the results, thinking in terms of, you know, dedicated classroom time, whether we study one subject over another subject. And these kind of things affect the quality of education.

Now, the next important principle we're going to go through is duty of care. Now, duty of care is a really interesting thing. Most parents and teachers understand what duty of care is, but for kids, duty of care is basically the responsibility that something takes over something else. So that is the responsibility for its welfare. So in schools you might have a duty of care to look after kids in terms of how they're feeling. You can definitely have a duty of care in terms of kids and how they're, you know, their actual physical welfare. So that's why we have things like playground duty, for example, and those kind of duty of care requirements. We need to balance out between what the school has to do, what teachers have to do, and of course, what parents have to do, because parents, you know, they have a real big responsibility to look after their own kids as well.

So this argument or this principle is all about drawing the line between where school's role starts and finishes and where parents roles start and finish as well. So arguments that you might see there are about the welfare of students, their mental and physical health, how happy they are and the steps that schools might take. So that might be like, whether we need stricter bullying policies, whether we need CCTV cameras like security cameras in schools, whether we should be able to in a more interesting version of duty of care might be like, whether we should be able to search students bags to try and make sure that there's like less welfare concerns about what they're bringing to school.

So these kind of things would fit under the duty of care environment. And you can see how the duty of care questions are often separate but can impact on the quality of education. So you might think that, hey, look, we don't necessarily think that searching a kid's bag is going to impact their math results, but in some ways it could. It could have a have a, you know, an impact on how safe they feel at school. Right. And equally so, we don't necessarily think that teaching kids particular of things in the classroom might have direct results on all of their welfare. But there are certainly some subjects where it could. So things like teaching mental health and resilience in schools might have a direct effect on the kind of quality of education and also on the welfare of those kids.

Okay, let's have a look at some of the obvious tensions between those two things. And obvious tension basically says sometimes those two principles compete. And what I mean by that is that sometimes they encroach on each other's territory. So schools are pretty crazy places, as you know, and students are pretty complex. And so when we're actually looking at trying to balance out these two principles, if you've got a topic that can affect them both, we need to decide which one to prioritize and why.

Right. So schools also have a responsibility, for example, to try and not only teach our students in the best way possible, but try and make sure that all students are being taught in the best way possible. And this includes students from different backgrounds and different areas and with different values. It also includes schools that have different varying levels of access to resources.

So all of these things play out and simply saying, look, we think that teachers should be able to, you know, teach mental health classes in schools might look like a really good idea on the surface. Right. But there could be some schools where the biggest concern is literally a problem with the math syllabus. There could be some schools where there's just not enough time to do all these things. And we could say, look, schools really need to address, you know, those mental health concerns in different ways, through school counsellors and stuff.

So it's just important to realise that those two principles can compete and that often in debates, we look for the best outcome that we can get between those two principles. So what trade-offs can we have between those two things.

Broadly, the final thing I'm going to look at is the role of school in general. So that is the role of the government when we look at education. So I mentioned this before, but these are questions like what values should be taught by schools and what values should be taught by families? And we have things like whether schools should teach things like religious ideals or whether schools should teach things like respect for each other or whether those should be the province of the family. And those kind of big principles are really interesting to get in and involved with. And they can be applied to almost every education debate.

So we're just going to move into some of my most favourite topics now. I'm going to just quickly go through them. The first one is a year 5 and 6 topic, but I just love it. I mean, it's “That we should ban homework.” The reason I love this topic is because it might seem simple, but it really has broad effects in terms of like you know the way that if we looked at homework on a more nuanced level, the way that kids are affected by it. So it's not just about saying, oh, we chew up all their time and, you know, we could use that time for other things. It's also talking about, you know, what families have parents that can help them with homework and what kind of resources. And is this equitable and is this fair.

And those kind of things are really important because the only time that the government can actually really make sure that it's being as fair as possible is in a school environment. So anything that you do outside of that school environment means that it comes up with ideas where it could be less equal. And that's particularly interesting to me. I'm looking forward to someone actually using those arguments.

We've also got, you know, these two topics. The first one that I really like is that students should be able to select their teachers. This is like a contentious idea, but I like the idea of kids sitting down and going, I would like Mrs. Robertson, you know, this person, I really enjoy that person. And we talk in this debate about whether kids have the ability to distinguish between their wants and their needs. And this is a really fun way to look at education as well. More power to kids and whether that's actually a good thing or whether that's just a strange idea.

And thirdly, that debating should be compulsory at school. I might be a little bit biased when it comes to this particular topic. But I think it's really interesting to look at the nature of the things that we teach and whether it's net positive or harmful for students and students of different backgrounds.

Let's just have a look at some common mistakes to wrap up this video. The first one is that people trying to make education arguments forget that it's a universal thing. So we need to talk about all different types of students, and that's about characterisation and stakeholders. And we really can get a lot of impact of that done when we look at education debates.

Secondly, try and remember as a part of that that students don't all act or do things the same way and that their backgrounds change is what they'll do. And it's up to you as a debater to describe that background and then say why they act differently to the norm.

Thirdly, try not to catastrophize elements of welfare. What I mean by that is don't go crazy in terms of saying that all people are going to be homeless if we ban homework. It's just unlikely. But try and make sure that these things are reasonable, that these things are fair and these things could happen at a school. And if they're more likely to happen than to not happen, you'll find that it's generally more persuasive when you put those arguments forward.

Finally, just remember that education is one of the most common types of debates, and it's great to prepare with teachers, it's great to prepare with parents, but also that if you spend more time preparing education debates, you'll see that these types of debates spill over into other rounds as well. So it might be things like a media round which includes an idea about media in schools. So you might see in the media round something like, That kids should learn the news or current affairs or politics at school. And all of those things mean that your principles of education can be applied in another area. So that's why they're really important to get a handle on. And that's why these principles are, you know, really eternal when it comes to actual debating practice.

So that's it for me. If you'd like to kind of request a topic to be discussed in one of these brief explainer videos, just get in touch with us at info@consensuseducation.org.au. Looking forward to hearing from you guys. Cheers.