'The Five': High school debater warned not to mention Trump
'The Five' co-hosts react to reports students are being forced to censor themselves at school debate tournaments.
A national debate organization replaced a debate topic because organizers believe it forced students to confront arguments that are not aligned with their beliefs about social justice, according to a document reviewed by Fox News Digital, but it rejected the notion that it was eliminating the topic altogether.
The National Speech and Debate Association's Competition Rules Board received feedback from the Black/African-American Coaches’ Caucus that one of its debates titled "'Resolved: Civil disobedience in a democracy is morally justified,' was putting new students in a position to argue or listen to arguments that are not aligned with their own beliefs about issues of social equity and justice, especially in the context of protests against racism and police brutality that have occurred across the world in recent years," according to the Competition Rules Board's Meeting Minutes from last May.
The new debate topic recommended was "Resolved: In the United States, national service ought to be mandatory," according to the minutes.
James Fishback, founder of Incubate Debate, which hosts no-cost, merit-based debate tournaments for middle-school and high-school students across the country, was critical of the decision.
A national debate organization's decision last year to replace a debate topic recently resurfaced. (Brittany Murray/MediaNews Group/Long Beach Press-Telegram via Getty Images)
"The NSDA (formerly known as the National Forensics League) and high school debate changed my life," he told Fox News Digital. "Sadly, I no longer recognize this organization. With the NSDA, there are no more debates, just one-sided ideological games where students are punished when they disagree with progressive orthodoxy."
Fishback, who was a national high school debate champion, volunteer NSDA debate coach, as well as a former NSDA member himself, started Incubate Debate as an alternative to the ideological echo chamber that "traditional" high school debate has become in recent years.
In a statement to Fox News Digital, Amy Seidelman, Assistant Executive Director, National Tournament Director of Operations for the National Speech & Debate Association, said that an area of concern related to the topic was the fact that it "had not been updated for nearly a decade, having been introduced in 2013."
She said there was also concern that "the civil unrest of the summer of 2020 around the Black Lives Matter movement made the ensuing debates personally damaging for students and difficult to make educational for beginners as intended when the topic was first introduced a decade earlier."
However, Seidelman stated, "In early 2023, the NSDA’s Competition Rules Board of experienced educators engaged in a robust conversation on this issue. That Board decided to introduce a new (still optional) novice topic that addressed civic duty in a fresh way that offered broad scope and reach. The snapshot of those meeting minutes does not capture the nuances of this conversation. To state that any topic was eliminated as if the NSDA would exclude it from future topic consideration, or would somehow prohibit coaches and other community members from debating it, is patently false."
Fishback said he gets emails from students, parents, debate coaches and school board members every day asking to join Incubate Debate amid frustration with the decisions of the NSDA. (iStock)
She concluded, "As evidenced by the new suggested novice resolution on mandatory national service, the NSDA does not want students to shy away from having tough conversations and immersing themselves in topics that engender passion on both sides. That is the nature of debate and we will continue to be a vehicle through which tens of thousands of students across the United States engage in this time-honored tradition."
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Fishback said his organization, which serves as a foil to the NSDA, has tripled the number of students it serves in the past year alone.
"Every day we get emails from students, parents, debate coaches, and school board members asking us to join," he said. "They are sick of the echo chamber that the NSDA has become. We are firmly non-partisan."
"We believe that students deserve a platform where they can speak their convictions and be exposed to the widest range of viewpoints," he added. "We're working hard to make debate great again."
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