Posted on 10/07/2015 12:01:03 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Prisoners participating in Bard College initiative to provide them a liberal arts education beat Ivy League students who won national title only months ago
Months after winning a national title, Harvards debate team has fallen to a group of New York prison inmates.
The showdown took place at the Eastern correctional facility in New York, a maximum-security prison where convicts can take courses taught by faculty from nearby Bard College, and where inmates have formed a popular debate club. Last month they invited the Ivy League undergraduates and this years national debate champions over for a friendly competition.
Ive seen how debating skills win the argument for rehabilitation in jail Zehrah Hasan Read more A three-judge panel concluded that the Bard team had raised strong arguments that the Harvard team had failed to consider and declared the team of inmates victorious.
Debate helps students master arguments that they dont necessarily agree with, said Max Kenner, founder and executive director of the Bard prison initiative, told the Guardian. It also pushes people to learn to be not just better litigators but to become more empathetic people, and thats what really speaks to us as an institution about the debate union.
The inmates were asked to argue that public schools should be allowed to deny enrollment to undocumented students, a position the team opposed.
One of the judges, Mary Nugent, told the Wall Street Journal that the Bard team effectively made the case that the schools which serve undocumented children often underperformed. The debaters proposed that if these so-called dropout factories refuse to enroll the children, then nonprofits and wealthier schools might intercede, offering the students better educations. She told the paper that Harvards debaters did not respond to all aspects of the argument.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
What’s this then, prisoners beating Ivy League students??? What’s the world coming to???? I hope the injuries were not serious.
Sincerely,
Emily Litella
The boy king’s alma mater.
no evidently the prison/bard team regularly debates and wins at a number of schools including West POINT
A couple years ago the standards for debate judging went out of the window.
Take a look at our nation’s ‘top debaters’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8
“Russ Cargill: There’s a couple of things they don’t teach you in Harvard Business School, one is how to cope with defeat, the other is how to handle a shotgun, I’m going to do both right now.”
Russ Cargill is the head of the EPA in the Simpson’s movie.
I remember this. It seems that being coherent is not required to debate anymore.
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