Recently, I have recently attended a debate, title says it all, it is undeniably a golden opportunity for me to experience what real and professional debating was like. The debate was held in the British debates' style, where 2 teams sat opposite to each other and the two groups took turns to make their speech to voice their own opinions.
What confused me was, the debate started with a side making their speech and suddenly the one competitor from the other panel stood up and said: "Sir" while putting his arm forward. I guessed the purpose was to object to what the speaker was saying and questioning him about his views.
Basically, this debate was to "warm up" Team Singapore to get ready for the international school debates held overseas. The opposing team, Team Alumni, are ex-competitions of such competition. Topic was - do family members have the right of deciding to end another family member who has terminal disease.
Team Alumni supported the fact, saying JOY is Quality of life, if someone's life is full of pain or misery, there is no point of living it. However the other side expressed that family member might make mistakes in decisions, living is JOY, the JOY of being alive, and "once you are dead, you will never ever come alive again".
Examples opposing this were notion were:
A California man woke up just 20 minutes before his scheduled death!
The other side said that that case was "very rare".
This intense debate when on and on, but to the students dismay, they were no results of which team was the victor. Certainly a great experience, definitely will attend more debates.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment