Lerner: The High School Debate

Lerner, in his essay, establishes himself as a graduate of a high school debate team looking back on his experiences in public speaking. He begins by demonstrating the way that high school debate is an extremely stressful environment that looks almost cultic to the untrained eye. The prime example of this perceived cultic activity would be the spread; a style of debate focused on presenting more arguments in the allotted time than the defense could possibly refute. Lerner, while spreading during a debate, says that he would briefly gain access to a state of mind where his words would come to him as an extension to the construct of the English language rather than the material he was trying to argue. After debates came wild parties which
were marked by all the usual activities (smoking, drinking, drugs of all sorts, and sexual exploits), but also by violent tendencies of the self-proclaimed ‘wiggers’ of the group. Often times, the white, suburban, middle class children of the debate club would actively participate in urban African-American gang violence against rival schools on account of ‘shit talking’. As an extension of this cultural appropriation, Lerner began to rap battle. This was a way for him to take his prowess as a debater into a ‘cooler’ realm. While rap battling, Lerner accessed this higher power of harnessing the English language as he had during debates. Finally, in Lerner’s college years, he had experienced poetry read in a very fast pace, which also reminded him of the debates that he had taken part in throughout high school. This was a radical shift in view for Lerner, as he had always seen poetry as the polar opposite of debate. Lerner, with his extensive experience in using the English language as a fluid tool throughout his high school and college careers, now begins to criticize the trend of separating morals and policy in American politics. It has taken such a hold in the cultural scope of things, that it has prompted a sponsored event in high school debate where the goal is to use morality as a weapon rather than a contest of language. Lerner takes the last moments of his essay to generalize the entire Republican party into a group of low-intelligence, cowardly, and hateful individuals who routinely ignored diction in favor of plain speak, and encourages America as a whole to learn how to speak.