"When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser," Socrates said. This quotation is a favourite of a friend of mine who is a native English-speaking teacher (NET) colleague and fellow debating coach.
It is a proverbial piece of wisdom which has come to haunt us in Hong Kong in the light of recent civic events. Yet it underscores the importance of debating as a tool of communication, civil discourse and rational argument.
The good news is that debating has been taking off as an extra-curricular activity and a topic of study for Hong Kong students. This is in many ways a by-product of the drive towards the New Secondary School Syllabus (NSS).
Debating is one of the elective subjects in NSS English. Some schools have elected to teach debating units which are, in the final analysis, used to answer questions for English language papers in the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education examination.
These units have also become a part of the school-based assessment programme. For practical assessments, it has been both instructive and heart-warming to see inter-class debates in English taking place on real topics of concern to Hong Kong in the classroom.
This would have been unthinkable back in 1998 when NETs first arrived in Hong Kong, and the syllabus was much more rigidly constrained.