Why are you so committed to English debate?

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Two reasons

There are two main reasons I have stayed involved with English debate.

The first has to do with English education.

I want my students to be able to do more than say what they think in English. I want them to be able to listen to what someone else says, think about it, respond, and keep the exchange going.

In English debate, you have to listen to opinions that differ from your own and answer them. You think about what is happening in society, and you exchange views under an agreed set of rules.

Learning English on one hand; listening, thinking for yourself, and talking with others on the other. Debate lets you do both at once. That, to me, is where the educational value of English debate lies.

But if that were all, I doubt I would have stayed with it this long.

The second reason is a fairly personal one. What English debate gave me, I want to pass on to the next generation.

A classroom, a library, and the place I lived

I have always liked reading.

One reason I chose my university was its library. The collection was split roughly half and half between Japanese and English, and I wanted to spend my student years reading a great deal in English.

After I enrolled, I took a part-time job at that library — shelving books, checking them in and out at the counter. For someone who liked reading, being surrounded by English books at work was a pretty happy arrangement.

For the first stretch of university, my life was a circuit of three points: the classrooms where I had lectures, the library, and the place I lived.

I was not good at talking to people, or at being inside a large group.

I think the stories about the war that I grew up hearing from my grandmother had something to do with that. She was repatriated from Manchuria, and she lost her younger brother in the fighting in the Philippines. His remains never came home.

Before he was conscripted, that brother had worked as an engineer at an aeronautical research facility in Mitaka. After the war, the university I would go on to attend was built on that site. I remember my grandmother visiting the campus for the first time, walking the ground where her brother had once worked, clearly moved.

Having grown up with those stories, part of me suspected that human beings, once gathered into groups, are capable of doing terrible things.

Even setting aside anything that grand, I simply did not care much for a life full of socializing.

The early 2000s, when I was a first-year student, were a slightly different time. It was not unusual for an English teacher to take a first-year language class out drinking partway through the term.

Everyone else seemed to be enjoying it. I was not, much. Given the choice, I would rather have been reading alone than sitting at a drinking party.

It is a Christian university, I would think — couldn’t they bring back Prohibition?

So circling between the classroom, the library, and the place I lived was not, for me, a bad way to live.

Meeting English debate

Around that time, through a class, I got to know someone whose manner was not unlike my own.

He was competing, so I went to watch — an ESUJ English debate tournament, in October of my second year.

A few months later, through someone who had been in my first-year language class, I started turning up at debate practice.

For me, meeting English debate was a string of coincidences like that.

To the triangle I had been circling — classroom, library, home — one more point was added: a place where people gathered and did something together.

I was not very good at debate

I was never especially good at English debate.

I joined the club properly rather late, and I never had a distinguished competitive record. At tournaments I often judged rather than spoke. Still, I kept practicing, and as a Whip Speaker in particular — the role that pulls a team’s arguments together and closes the case — I gradually became able to deliver a speech.

But what mattered more to me was not getting better at debate itself.

There was a place where people met regularly. There were seniors, peers, and juniors doing the same thing. We practiced together and talked about what was going on in the world.

For someone who had mostly been reading alone, I made friends.

That, I think, was when I first understood what a school club actually is.

I had been wary of people gathering. Now I found myself thinking that there were things people could do precisely because they gathered.

In English debate, no one has to end up holding the same view.

If anything, it starts from the assumption that views differ: you listen to your opponent, you answer, and you exchange words within a set of rules.

For me, English debate was an activity for learning English and argument, and at the same time one that changed how I saw the business of doing something together with other people.

I still like reading alone. But through English debate I learned that gathering with others has an appeal I had not known about.

I wanted my seniors to praise me

After graduating, I stayed involved with English debate.

My reasons at first were not especially admirable. I think I wanted the older students from my university days to praise me.

“Koyossi (my nickname) isn’t much of a debater, but he works hard at everything else.”

Somewhere in me was the wish to be told something like that.

Running tournaments, making materials, teaching younger students, spreading debate at schools — part of why I kept doing those things was surely the simple desire to be recognized by the people I had once worked alongside.

But the years passed, and most of the seniors and peers I debated with have left debate behind.

One other person is still at it. He, too, came to English debate by a slightly odd route.

In a university swimming class, in a pool barely a meter deep, he somehow began to drown, and a member of the English debate club happened to pull him out. That was how he ended up dropping by the club.

It is nothing like how I started, but then again, I started because I went to watch an acquaintance compete.

Maybe a coincidence is a perfectly good reason to start debating.

And I am still at it, too.

What was left, more than winning

In Book 2, a set of materials I wrote, I said that even if you enter a tournament and the result is disappointing,

what your teammates give you is worth more than a gold-plated trophy.

I still believe that, more or less.

Of course, if you enter a tournament you want to win. When my students do well, I am glad.

But after years of involvement with high school tournaments, after saying “congratulations on the championship” over and over again, I came to feel that results alone were no longer what I was after.

Doing well at tournaments is not all a club is.

Meeting regularly and practicing together, noisily and cheerfully. Getting a little better at English. Talking about what is happening in society and learning things you did not know. Saying what you think and listening to what someone else thinks.

Watching the students ahead of you and thinking about your own path and future. And making friends.

Those are the things English debate gave me.

I don’t want English debate to belong to only some people

So these days, more than increasing the number of students who win championships, I want to increase the number of people who try English debate at all.

Schools with long-running programs accumulate motions, arguments, materials, and practice methods internally. That is the result of years of work.

But I do not want that to turn debate into something where only certain schools carry on and newcomers cannot find a way in.

If it ever came about that only students at a limited set of schools did English debate, that would not be what I am working toward.

You don’t have to win tournaments.

You don’t have to be good at speaking in front of people. You can be timid. You don’t have to enjoy loud crowds. You can prefer reading alone.

You don’t have to be especially good at English, or good at debate from the start.

Meet once a week, even, and try speaking in English. Think about what is happening in the world. Listen to a view unlike your own, and try answering it.

And as you go on meeting the people doing the same thing, that can become a place that matters to you.

English debate gave me a place like that.

So now I would like to make a few more such places for the middle school, high school, and university students who are like I was.

That is why this site makes the materials and practice methods I have built over the years available in a form as many people as possible can use.

Even without enough materials or an experienced coach at your school, you can start English debate. And you can keep at it not only to win tournaments, but to use English, think about the world, and talk with people.

I would like there to be more places where that is possible.

The educational reason I began with, and this personal one — looking back, the two are connected in me.

That, I suppose, is why I am still so committed to English debate, and why I built a site called Eigo Debate no Kyoshitsu, The English Debate Classroom.