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Teachers around the world are discovering that debate offers a powerful tool for enlivening their teaching
and energizing their students. When students engage in debate, they take an active role in their education,
and subjects which once may have seemed dull and abstract come vividly to life. In preparing to debate a controversial
question, such as “Can capital punishment be justified?” or “Should NATO have intervened in Kosovo?”,
students undertake a wide range of learning processes. They ask themselves what these questions mean to them
personally; they research the social, political, ethical and historical contexts in which the issues are situated;
and they learn to see complex problems from widely different perspectives. Because this learning is geared toward
a specific purpose - performing well in the debate itself - students have added incentive and a clear goal to
work toward. And when teachers use debate, they act as more than dispensers of information to a classroom
of passive students. They become facilitators of a learning process that enables students to become more deeply
and more actively invested in their education.
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