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PostPosted: Sat Nov 23, 2002 9:52 pm 
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From an actual Debate Club; in fact this comes from the National Forensic League (I so love telling people I'm only a junior and I'm already in the NFL), the national organization for scholastic debate. Not that I want you to do anything even remotely like that here...the rules are needlessly arcane and the procedures fairly worthless, so instead I thought I'd just toss out the resolution that we're debating for November and December and let everyone chew on it...

"Resolved that: When in conflict, academic freedom in U.S. high schools ought to take priority over community standards."

In debate you're supposed to either negate or affirm the resolution, but I don't really care if people want to straddle the fence, go off topic, or whatever. I also realize that this isn't going to mean much to non-Americans...sorry about that; the "in the U.S" is a new thing that they're adding to all the resolutions this year. I'm not a fan. I guess you could look at it as an issue of academic freedom vs. community standards in any public school, instead.


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PostPosted: Sat Nov 23, 2002 10:04 pm 
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Agree. Its counterproductive to society as a whole to let small communities retain an almost xenophobic exclusion of ideas that are 'not approved of' by the people. That creates a steaming sespool of memes, in which new ideas rarely come in and because of community consensus are usually not retained, no matter their academic or intellectual appeal.


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PostPosted: Sun Nov 24, 2002 9:22 pm 
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In real life, I'm inclined to agree with the resolution. On the other hand, this is the Debate Club forum, so I hope no one minds if I disregard personal belief and play the devil's advocate just for the mental exercise...

Now, it's true that here and there you do get some pretty xenophobic communities, and they're the ones that tend to have pretty radical views. But on the other hand you have to admit that academic freedom does allow for some pretty flaky teachers to teach some weird stuff, and that there's technicalli nothing wrong with a teacher, under the affirmative position, telling kids that homosexuality causes AIDS, or something similarly untrue. And that's really just as bad as having a xenophobic, stagnated community.

That said, let's ditch the extreme examples, because on either side we can say that there are going to be some pretty negative consequences in the really far-flung cases. The more moderate ones, though, we can weigh a bit more fairly. Now, I'm no law student, but my inclanation would be to say that community standards would generally be represented in the local and to a lesser degree state school boards, and that there's a Constitutional obligation to heed those wishes as follows:

The 10th Amendment delegates to the states powers not specifically granted the national government or denied the states by the Constitution. State constitutions in every state to some degree grant the regulation of academic standards, procedures, curricula, etc. to the state school board, who is also granted the right to delegate these to the local boards. If the local boards do in fact represent community standards, then, I have to say that there's a constitutional obligation to say community standards ought to be valued above academic freedom...either that, or argue that the Constitution isn't really an accurate judge of the value of something.


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PostPosted: Sun Nov 24, 2002 10:01 pm 
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Ignorance breeds ignorance. Only being open to new ideas and allowing all sides of an issue to be presented to people can the aforementioned extreme example be avoided.

I'm arguing that at some ill-defined point, it becomes a slipperly slope. Since the point is ill defined, I say we do not allow it.


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PostPosted: Tue Nov 26, 2002 12:18 am 
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A repetition of my above argument: at some ill-defined point on the affirmative side of the resolution, academic freedom becomes a slipperly slope whereupon teachers begin presenting controversial ideas and eventually wind up arguing that all students should abandon the material world and go live in small communes in the mountains. The students aren't really equipped to sort out the good ideas from the bad, especially after a few generations, and the consequences are just as bad. So, again, let's not look at the extremes.

Unfortunatly, that's all I can really say, since there's no response at all to my argument that, if the Constitution is valuble, we have to value community standards first.


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