In Defense of Competitive Speech
Robert Crawford, Pine Eagle H. S.
 
For some years, the financial woes afflicting Oregon schools have worsened.
Until recently, most schools have been able to stretch their increasingly
scarce resources and make do without major reductions in their offerings to
students-a fact which has encouraged some factions to push for still further
cuts. But now, without question, the crunch has come-and with no relief in
sight, districts across the state are being compelled to shorten their
instructional year, cut staff and services, and eliminate programs of
unquestioned value.
 
One of the programs threatened in many districts is competitive speech. And
why not? Speech is not a high-profile program, attracting excited taxpayers
every weekend to sit on stadium cushions and watch their money at work. Even
in the best of times, many taxpayers wouldn't see the point of spending good
money so that students could travel to other schools to read poetry, orate
on the benefits of legalizing marijuana, or debate issues which aren't in
their power to resolve. So in a time of general sacrifice, shouldn't such a
program join Water Polo and Popular Cinema on the chopping block?
I believe it should not. I believe that competitive speech, far from being
expendable, is central to the educational mission of our public
schools-preparing students to be functional participants in a democratic
society.
 
Speech instruction offers development in the skills of rhetoric,
interpretation, and debate; competition hones those skills. That much is
fact-what is open to question is whether it is important to develop those
skills and to offer the opportunity to hone them in competition. Both
history and a rational assessment of the world today tell us it is not just
important, but vital.
 
Rhetoric is the art of using words effectively. It has been considered an
indispensable part of a well-rounded education since the dawn of recorded
history. Nearly 2,500 years ago, a young Athenian named Demosthenes put a
pebble in his mouth to practice speaking around it, so he could master a
crippling speech impediment. He mastered his disability, and went on to
become one of the most famous orators of all time. This point of this story
is not that public speaking was invented 2,500 years ago-the point is that
public speaking was already a long-established tradition even then, complete
with clear and powerful expectations of the speaker. Rhetorical skills were
central to both the direct persuasion of the public and the conduct of
useful debate among leaders-and thus were absolutely essential to the
functioning of the earliest democracies.
 
The importance of oral interpretation goes back much, much farther even than
that, into the dim prehistoric past. Linguistic scholars know that humans
have possessed the written word for only a tiny fraction of our total
history-and that for the vast period before the written word, there was only
the spoken word to define a culture and its inheritance. Accordingly, there
was almost no one more valuable to a people than its bards and story-tellers
and actors. These were the folk who carried forward from one generation to
the next a people's religion, its history, and its values-who, with their
ability to bring passion and life to mere words, were simultaneously
creating and perpetuating the cultures to which they belonged.
Clearly, rhetoric and interpretation-and standards of excellence in
each-were once essential aspects of the fabric of human life. Have they
become less essential in America, somewhere along the way? They were still
essential here in 1863, when Lincoln stood to rededicate a nation's courage
after the shocking carnage of Gettysburg. They were still essential in the
1930's, when Franklin Roosevelt summoned an exhausted country's will against
the Great Depression. They were still essential in 1961, when John Kennedy
called upon us to serve our country, and launched the programs that put
humanity into space and computers in human hands. And throughout, the
interpretations of entertainers from Mark Twain to John Wayne to Denzel
Washington have defined America for herself and for the world, driving
evolutions in behavior, language, and attitude that shape society itself.
And now? Any literate observer of contemporary society will guess that in a
random audience of a hundred American adults today, half or more would greet
a reference to Demosthenes with blank incomprehension-though fifty years
ago, anyone with an eighth-grade education would have recognized his name
instantly. A substantial percentage will not understand the reference to
Gettysburg, except as part of the phrase "Gettysburg Address." Few will be
aware that Mark Twain was as famous for his lectures and readings as for his
books. For many, such words as "rhetoric" and "carnage" in this document
will be mysteries whose meaning must be gathered from context or ignored.
Very, very few will perceive that citing famous names is a standard
rhetorical device-one which may be used or misused in the pursuit of an
argument.
 
In that context, then, is speech still important? 
To say that it is not is to suggest that because fewer and fewer Americans
are capable of basic calculation or lucid writing, we should abandon
mathematics and composition. Competitive speech is one of the very few
realms in which it really matters for students to understand classical
references, basic history, manipulation of an audience, and the uses of
persuasive technique-they'll get thumped by their competitors if they don't.
And do these things matter very much in the society our students will join
upon graduation? The society for which we are supposed to be preparing them?
I believe that while literacy and its oral expressions receive less
encouragement in our educational and cultural lives than they once did, they
are absolutely as important as they have ever been. The power of speech-the
ability to use words to dramatic effect-is nowhere more evident than in the
present debate over whether or not the United States should go to war
against Iraq, or in the many, many debates over where America is headed
economically, politically, and morally. These are issues of unsurpassed
importance in the daily lives of millions upon millions of people, and they
are being decided to a considerable extent by the power of public speaking
in all its manifestations. The ability to speak well continues-and will
continue-to be an essential part of any American's ability to participate
effectively in anything resembling our traditional democracy.
 
Perhaps even more important for the average person-who admittedly may never
stand up to address large numbers of people-is the ability to recognize what
is being done when other people stand up to do so. A careful education in
the skills of rhetoric and interpretation prepares us to do more than
exercise those skills-it prepares us to recognize when those skills are
being exercised, and temper our responses accordingly. If one has no idea
what the ad hominem argument is, or a statement of false cause, or slant
wording-if one has never been educated in the ways of effectively assuming a
character for an audience-then one's vulnerability to those techniques is
the same as it was for the mobs who rioted through Roman streets two
thousand years ago. Ignorant people today are as easily stampeded as
ignorant people at any point in history-and like their predecessors, must
eventually pay the price of that ignorance.
 
An ignorance of rhetorical devices, coupled with the ignorance of history
and geography and science and mathematics we already dread, produces a
citizen whose vote is worth less than nothing-a citizen easily controlled by
calculated appeals to his emotions and his fears-a citizen identified by
Thomas Jefferson as the worst possible danger to a democracy. In fact, it is
entirely possible to consider Oregon's present dilemma as a failure of
education in the very skills speech emphasizes-haven't we gotten here, to
some extent, because Oregon's voters have listened uncritically to the
clever rhetoric of people who promise we can have things, but not pay for
them? Because we cannot see through misdirections as old as politics?
In a very real sense, the question before us is whether we intend to further
America's downward spiral into public ignorance and the vulnerabilities it
creates-or to arrest that spiral as best we can. We can acquiesce in the
development of greater and greater numbers of the citizens Jefferson
feared-or we can dig in now, and do what we can to reverse that development
by maintaining competitive speech in our state.
 
The question may be raised: "Why 'competitive' speech? Why not just
emphasize speech skills in our classrooms, and let it go at that?" 
It's a legitimate question, certainly-but as a society, we seem to
understand the value of competition very well when it comes to basketball,
or football, or volleyball. We understand very well that basketball
undertaken for a P. E. grade, or for an intramural trophy, is not basketball
at its best-and for the same reasons, speech undertaken for a grade, or for
an intramural competition, does not produce the same motivation or the same
results as competition between schools. 
 
I would never argue that we should drop competitive athletics. As a longtime
coach, I recognize their value to our young people and to our society. But I
would point out that schools were competing in debate and rhetoric and
interpretation, busily declaiming against one another to hone their
students' skills, long before they were playing football games-and that the
skills so honed remain more central than football to the mission of those
schools today. I would point out that competitive speech offers the benefits
of competition to large numbers of students who are never going to wear the
home team's uniforms on the athletic field-but who nonetheless matter a
great deal to their parents, their communities, and the future of their
country.
 
It would be unthinkable for most public high schools to drop competitive
football or basketball-but it ought to be more unthinkable still to drop
competitive speech. Unlike basketball or football, competitive speech matters even to those
of us who do not know it matters.
 

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