Competitive Speech and Debate: How Play Influenced American Educational Practice.

The authors identify competitive speech and debate as a form of play that helped democratize American citizenship for the poor, who used what they learned through the practice to advance their personal social and economic goals. In addition, this competitive activity led to the development of speech communication as an academic discipline and legitimized the pedagogy of game theory. Through a brief overview of the evolution of competitive forensics, an overview of the theory of play and its role in personal development and interpersonal and group interaction, and an explanation of the theory of forensics as a form of playfulness, the authors show the impact of forensics on the course of educational practices in America. Key words: debate as play; competitive forensics; game theorySystems theory tells us that the whole affects its parts and the parts affect the whole. This truism is most certainly the case when we examine competitive speech in American higher education during the twentieth century. Competitive speech-particularly debate-represents a form of high-level, intellectual play that involves critical thinking, skillful speaking, and a thorough knowledge of subject matter. The marriage of these skills produces a form of play that offers participants and observers an experience some consider thrilling, others believe daunting, but all think of as fun. Historically, debate competitions helped establish speech departments in colleges and universities. Once established, speech department faculties shifted their focus to theory and research, minimizing the competition they considered a form of play. By the end of the twentieth century, that, too, began to change, as secondary and higher education radically changed. Moreover, the change was, fittingly, reciprocal: debate changed educational systems, and educational systems changed competitive debate.We find the intrinsic qualities of competitive speech and debate, or what we will call forensics, of particular interest because of its role in the educational practices in high school and college programs. Forensics, for example, depends on research, relies on critical thinking, and requires the ability to speak and respond to questions. We use the term forensics to describe competitive speech and debate because forensic or legal oratory requires a third party to determine which of two positions is superior. Forensic oratory in the form of competitive debate constitutes a form of play in that a winner is determined after two teams present arguments for the benefit of a judge or audience. As the popularity of competitive speech and debate grew during the first three decades of the twentieth century, many organizations adopted the word forensics as a part of their name to reflect the nature of the activities they sponsored-the National Forensic League, the American Forensic Association, and the National Forensic Association, for example (Bartanen and Littlefield 2014). In this article, we argue that competitive speech and debate in the twentieth century became a form of intellectual play that made citizenship more democratic by altering the playing field for poor and socially disadvantaged individuals who used their forensics training to advance their personal economic and social goals; that this game-based activity led to the development of the discipline of speech communication as a distinct field of study; and that competitive speech and debate served as an exemplar of game theory. First, we offer a brief overview of the emergence and development of competitive speech and debate, then an overview of the theory of play and its role in personal development and interpersonal and group interaction. We follow these discussions with an explanation of forensics as a form of playfulness, and we conclude with a description of how forensics changed the course of educational practices in America.The Emergence and Development of Competitive Speech and DebateIn America, the use of debate to teach argumentation began in the colonial period, as communication scholar David Potter documents in his landmark Debating in the Colonial Chartered Colleges (1944). …