Learning to argue and persuade in a highly competitive
environment is only one aspect of life on a high-school debate
team. Teenage debaters also participate in a distinct cultural
world--complete with its own jargon and status system--in which
they must negotiate complicated relationships with teammates,
competitors, coaches, and parents as well as classmates outside the
debating circuit. In "Gifted Tongues," Gary Alan Fine offers a rich
description of this world as a testing ground for both intellectual
and emotional development, while seeking to understand adolescents
as social actors. Considering the benefits and drawbacks of the
debating experience, he also recommends ways of reshaping programs
so that more high schools can use them to boost academic
performance and foster specific skills in citizenship.
Fine analyzes the training of debaters in rapid-fire speech,
rules of logical argumentation, and the strategic use of evidence,
and how this training instills the core values of such American
institutions as law and politics. Debates, however, sometimes veer
quickly from fine displays of logic to acts of immaturity--a
reflection of the tensions experienced by young people learning to
think as adults. Fine contributes to our understanding of teenage
years by encouraging us not to view them as a distinct stage of
development but rather a time in which young people draw from a
toolkit of both childlike and adult behaviors. A well-designed
debate program, he concludes, nurtures the intellect while
providing a setting in which teens learn to make better behavioral
choices, ones that will shape relationships in their personal,
professional, and civic lives.
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