The concept of the debate is central to critical thinking and democracy. The etymology of the word is from the Latin battere, meaning to fight. The ancient Indian ritual of the Shastrartha , where religious ideas would be debated, or the Graeco-Roman tradition of debating ideas in the Agora (marketplace) and, later, in the senate, gave rise to a tradition that is deeply embedded in the Western epistemology of how ideas are presented and defended.

Without a free environment where positions can be challenged, we quickly run into a tyrannical state of affairs where there is no freedom of speech and those who have the last word are not necessarily those with the best ideas. Indeed, as the great Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper argued, the open society is one where ideas will be falsified (in other words, every effort will be made to dismantle them), and if they can stand that test, resist all the possible criticisms that might be made, if theories and beliefs can argue away counter positions fairly and logically, the should stand and be venerated. 

Public debates such as those run at the Oxford Union, or presidential debates, are hallmarks of this idea. In many schools there are debating clubs and classroom debates with highly structured protocols to habituate young people into this manner of building and testing knowledge claims.

However, there are some problems with debating. The first is the aggressive, testosterone-heavy climate that is created by this way of engaging in discourse. The emphasis is not on listening for the sake of understanding, but competitive listening for the sake of answering. Debates are about attacking your interlocutor’s position, exposing his/her/their ideas, often through ridicule. This creates a potentially unpleasant and childish oneupmanship.

The second problem is that, since debating is premised on the zero-sum notion of winning and losing,  the conclusion will rarely be a synthesis or agreement, one will not walk away with the feeling that the majority of people are satisfied with the outcome, but rather that one camp has triumphed over another.

Matthew Lipman, the philosopher and pedagogue from Columbia Teachers College who developed the practice of Philosophy for Children in the 1960s, preferred the term discussion, because the emphasis is not on fighting and winning but on listening and agreeing. He wanted young philosophers to be caring thinkers, who would express humility and compassion instead of self-seeking displays of virtuoso oratory at another’s’ expense. 

The whole point of a discussion is to construct, not to destroy, to build and not to tear down, to come together and not to place one idea, forcefully, over another.

So next time you think of holding a class debate, why not turn the table on that and opt for a discussion instead, where we are not in some sort of arena where sarcasm, showing off, talking down at others and drowning out another person’s point of view are celebrated and, instead, we build together, we make compromises if needs be, we aim to come away with a unified position, in short, we discuss.

It is surely this way that we will be able to work together on the planetary challenges facing us in the sustainable development goals, in partnership and collaboration, in and through discussion.