Resolved: School does not prepare students enough for the future

Rebuttal Honestly I really like this debate. I thank my opponent for her interesting arguments. My opponent, it seems you are always narrowing down the future to one specific thing. From the beginning you did not disagree with my definition of the word “future” so assuming you agree, your statement cannot stand, and I will explain why. You stated that “If the resolution means (and indeed it can be interpreted this way) “Garfield High School does not prepare students Brandon and Kyle for any future involving employment or relationships with other people” then all I need to do is produce Brandon and Kyle and there we are.” Now remember that future means “time that is to be” and can therefore refer to anything. Notice what you said “for any future INVOLVING employment or relationships with other people,” emphasis mine. Hence you are narrowing down the future to employment and relationships and we all know that that is not the only future. I could have a statement like this “Garfield High School does prepare students Brandon and Kyle for any future involving singing and playing a musical instrument” and it can prove to be true. Why did I say that? Because the future is not limited to certain aspects of life, it relates to ALL aspects of life. The only way you could get away with this statement is if the future was only employment and relationships with others, which we all know is not so. And once a school can prepare a student enough for any aspect of life in time to come; it can be deduce that school does prepare students enough for the future. You tend to discredit my argument by making this point “How generous of me then to argue that this is not the most natural interpretation of your resolution. I think that most people would take it to mean school in general and students in general. This meaning allows exceptions either way. For instance, in the apple example, your friend could console you by saying in a general sense, “women don’t give enough apples,” even though I had just given him enough apples.” Now in your example you stated that “women don’t give enough apples, even though I had just given him enough apples,” in terms of my friend stating it generally. But what you should understand is that being that he makes a GENERAL statement doesn’t make the statement true. Why did I say that? Because you said “even though I had just gave him ENOUGH apples.” Due to that fact it does make the statement true. I could generally say that all women are prostitutes but does that mean that my statement is true? I could generally say all pastors are thieves, but does that mean that statement is true? You spoke about interpreting the resolution in the most general sense. Let us argue based on that interpretation, school in general, students in general. I am going to do something and I hope you understand it. Let us say that set A represent school in general meaning all schools. Set B represent students in general meaning all students. Set C represent Future in general. Let us take a subset from each set. Set E = {Garfield High School, Mountain View High School,} Set F = {Brandon, Kyle,} Set X = {employment, parenthood, to sing a song, to bake a cake, college.} Let us then make two statements containing one element from each set: P: Garfield High School does not prepare Brandon enough for employment. Q: Mountain View High School does prepare Kyle enough to sing a song. Let us daft a truth table for the two statements: P Q P ^ Q T T T T F F F T F F F F With logics, it states that a statement can be either true or false. When you put both statements together, it will then be “Garfield High School does not prepare Brandon enough for employment and Mountain View High School does prepare Kyle enough to sing a song.” The truth table for that statement will look like what you see above. Now what can we deduce? If statement P is true and statement Q is true then the entire thing is true. And according your argument, statement P would be true. Now we can conclude that statement Q can be also true, hence your argument does not stand. The only way you can win this debate is if you can prove that statement Q can only be false and employment was the only future and according to set X it is not so. So if we want to look at school in general or student in general please note that one exception can prove a statement false. Now you also stated “If you could produce one occasion when one student had been prepared for one particular future event, and meanwhile all the other students in the US were failing standard tests and so on, it would be very hard to get people to disagree with the resolution.” Now the issue is not whether students are failing standards test, but whether or not a school can prepare student enough for the future. Being that all other students are falling will be the burden of people looking at only one side of it, looking at the part of it and ignoring the other part. For instance if a school prepare twenty student to pass a test and only five pass and fifteen fail they will only look at the failing and say the school did not prepare the FIFTEEN enough. But what about the other five whom the school prepares enough to pass the test? So based on that fact you statement will always be true. And there can be other factors which can contribute them failing besides them not being prepared enough. I guess that concludes it for me and I think you may win over me to fact you have reliable source and I have none. However it was a good debate.