The great debate

April 10, 2006 | In late March, when the 64 teenagers gathered at the World Individual Debate and Public Speaking Championships in Lakeville, Conn., were asked to debate the topic "Resolved: This house believes in abstinence before marriage," their silver tongues promptly deserted them. Kiran Dhillon of Winnipeg, Canada, argued, "Mr. Speaker, sex is the reason people are raped!" Judah Taub, of Jerusalem, was overheard saying, "The reason why youth have sex today is because of their instincts." Shakir Rahim, of Vancouver, boldly stated that "sexual intercourse is being more widely practiced in society than ever!" (He also added that "not having sex is beneficial because of the negative ramifications that accompany sex at this time.") But my favorite bit of wisdom, again from Taub, was surely, "Let's look at the cycle of life: childhood, school, marriage, children. The question about sex is, where along that line do you slip it in?"

Where do you slip it in, indeed? In the midst of researching a book on oratory in America, I was attending my first WIDPSC as an adult -- I had competed three times as a high schooler, back in the early 1990s -- and although I am now a married man, being there took me right back to my sex-deficient high school days. The WIDPSC is a tournament for private schools, and private school campuses never change; the Hotchkiss School, where this running of the tournament was held, is straight out of "A Separate Peace," with its tennis courts, lacrosse fields, wooded acres, brick buildings, and grizzled teachers walking attractive dogs. The regular Hotchkiss students were on spring break, but the world-traveling debaters who took over the campus were a reasonable facsimile, all tweed and tartan, tweaked with slight international touches -- yarmulkes on the Israeli boys' heads, Pakistani flags pinned to the Pakistanis' lapels, school patches on the English boys' blazers.

Debaters are famously competitive. The year I competed in the college world championships there was an international betting pool -- run by those sporting Australians, of course -- on who would win. So a month ago I called some coaches I knew to ask who was favored to end up in the finals on Sunday. Having gathered this intelligence, I knew which preliminary rounds to watch early in the week and which students to keep an eye on. Among the favorites was Caroline Chen, the Hong Kong-born Hotchkiss debater, who deployed her English accent to devastatingly charming effect. And Steven Kryger, a forceful Canadian whose boyish curls were at odds with his cocksure delivery and who nearly convinced me that the American government should fight heroin use by buying up Afghanistan's poppy product to convert it into morphine for palliative care in the Third World.

But early on, I sensed the potential for upsets, because everyone was so well prepared. These kids took their avocation more seriously than we had in my day; they had read up on their sport, dissected it, theorized about it. "In terms of Canada, western Canada heckles more," explained Andrew Rusk, a soft-spoken junior from British Columbia who originally took up debating because a teacher thought it would improve his poor spelling. (I didn't follow the logic either.) "In England," he continued, "they're a bit more logical, and they're more concise, in part because of their shorter speaking times. They get to the heart of a point and knock it down quicker." Sprawled on a sofa in between rounds, Eyal Goldstein, an Israeli debater, summed up an important bit of debate wisdom and did so in perfect vernacular English: "It's like, in debate, the first person who says 'Stalin,' 'Hitler,' or 'Mussolini' loses." Sebastian Osborn, a patrician-looking American with a surfer's drawl, concurred. "The first thing I was taught in debate was, don't mention the Holocaust," he said. "If you have to talk about genocide, use Rwanda."

Yes, this was an oft-repeated maxim: The famous villains of history are bad debate examples, because they get overused and lend themselves to bathos. But back when I competed, I had no theoretical apparatus; the best I could have done to explain national differences was to say that the English wore those nice double-vented suits. The kids I met this year were a lot more sophisticated. As I sat through the preliminary rounds, I worried that many competitors were a bit too smooth -- well-rehearsed but passionless.

I was delighted, then, when some of the least studied debaters "broke" -- to use sporting parlance -- into Sunday's final rounds. Who would have guessed that Israel would have finalists in impromptu speaking, interpretive reading and persuasive speaking? The Israelis were, after all, the devil-may-care comedians who had nearly persuaded one of the tournament directors that the Jewish faith required them to ritually smoke a nargila -- that's "hookah" in Hebrew -- every Wednesday. And who was this Eric Levitz kid, the worst-dressed competitor, proudly slovenly, this American with a full, fuzzy beard, an upstart from the small Kingswood-Oxford School in West Hartford, Conn.?

Next page: Underdog Eric Levitz single-handedly revived the art of the insult