Recently, there was a TV debate show—“the Arena”. Local students from the top schools such as Raffles Institution (RI) and Hwa Chong Institution (HCI) debated with the United World College (UWC) and they have been defeated in the arena. The margin of victory for the UWC was impressive.one example of the score is: 94 to 6. This thus led to the issue of: Are local students bad debaters?
At one glance at the scores, it’d be rather unbelievable that the top schools in Singapore actually lost so badly to the foreign college, UWC. It’s rather shocking. However, if one has watched “The Arena”, one might be really impressed with how well the foreign students from UWC have debated in comparison to local students.
One of the guest judge at The Arena finals commented that “the UWC team had a lot of charisma—they had stronger presentation skills and their personalities shone through…it was necessary to have strong personalities. A strong personality makes it easier for people to agree with you when your point is made.”
In my opinion, I think it’s somehow related to the environment that the foreign and local students are studying in and how the students are being taught. The education system in Singapore is more restricted as compared to that of international types of education. Students in international schools are encouraged to look at different points of views and they obviously do have a more flexible thinking than local students. Local students are used to school cultures that somehow don’t show great diversity as international schools. This affects their personal development and hence their personality.
In conclusion, I do not think that local students are bad debaters. They do have the capability to be good debaters. And we cannot purely judge their ability by the scores. It can be improved by having more exposures to foreign students like those from UWC. I believe that with more exposure and interactions with the students from international schools and the chance to experience school cultures like that of international schools, our local students can develop stronger personalities. With that, their confidence level will rise and their potential would be unleashed.
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1 comment:
yupp. i do agree that it scores are not the only criteria for determining the debaters's capbaility. it may be true that we lost, but it is due to the way the marks are allocated.
singapore's education is just in a way that is more deisadvantaged to debates, but i believe, with ample pracitsees, we are still able to put up a good fight.
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