January, 2023
By Jason Carbajal, Staff Reporter
On January 20, 2023, on the campus of West Lake High School, a clash of ideas took place. The debate discussed whether justice would or would not require open borders to allow people to travel from country to country with no repercussions.
The contestants needed to have at least two arguments, one with the positives in having open borders and the other against the negatives in why we should not. To prepare for the debate, the debate team split up into two groups, one would write about going for open borders and one going against, but how do you write a debate, and when did Collegiate get a debate team in the first place?
The structure that debate follows is called the Lincoln-Douglas style. The format is as follows: you need three arguments that need evidence to back them up, opened by a quote from a philosopher related to your topic, has to counter someone else’s claim (a rebuttal), include a segment called crossfire where both debaters can ask questions about the opponents debate to look for weaknesses, then there is cross examination where you look at the opponents evidence for more weaknesses, and the final statement, the conclusion to the argument. And there is a trick where if a debater is able to prove that their claim goes ignored, it will lead to extinction,this means that the opponent’s argument could lead to the death of a species, then that debater wins automatically.
The debate team was created at the beginning of the year and was limited to only upperclassmen. That Saturday, one of KIPP Austin Collegiate’s representatives was our former student council president Raul Suarez. He went into the debate with confidence and nervousness with hopes of winning, but high hopes can only do so much, as out of the three debating turns, he only won one. When asked why KIPP participated in this debate, he stated: “To further prepare the debate team next year as well as to prepare the next president and to get practice to win next year.”
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