I worry a lot that we are raising kids to be argument illiterate and I don't think this is entirely new. The skills of having good arguments seem to be in short supply. There's lots of wonderful work being done thinking about how we implement debate pedagogically. So the one great advantage of a debate club at schools is it requires no equipment. It's cheap actually. And so there have been experiments like in Broward County in Florida where every school I think rolled out this program in public schools.
When Bo Seo was 8 years old, his family moved from Korea to Australia. He did not speak a world of English. At school, to deflect attention from his inarticulacy, he became an agreeable wallflower. But that all changed when Bo’s fifth-grade teacher introduced him to competitive debate. Bo was hooked, and in the years to come, he’d not only win two debate world championships but also go on to coach the Australian national team as well as the Debating Union at Harvard, where he earned his undergraduate degree and is currently a law student.
Earlier this year, Bo published his first book, “Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard,” which was chosen by our curators as one of the year’s eight best works of non-fiction. In today’s episode, Bo sits down with one of those curators, Adam Grant, to share time-honored techniques for getting your point across, changing minds without hurting feelings, dealing with bullies, and knowing when to shut up.
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