The Fallacy Wing · with a timer and a judge

Why we need debate brought back.

by Sean McKendry · a coach

We taught a whole country to argue online — badly. Meanwhile the thing that actually teaches good argument has been quietly cut from school after school. Debate isn't a club for the gifted kids. It's citizenship, practiced. Bring it back.

Debate is the Fallacy Wing with a scoreboard. You don't just spot the foul — you get scored on it, live.

What debate actually is — the rules

Forget the cable-news yelling; that's the opposite of this. Competitive debate (here, cross-examination / policy style) has real, strict rules:

Two teams, one resolution. Affirmative argues the resolution; Negative argues against it — and you're often assigned your side. You learn to argue what you might not even believe. That's the whole magic.
Constructives → cross-examination → rebuttals. You build your case, then you question your opponent to their face, then you close. No new arguments in the rebuttals — you finish what you started.
You must clash. You have to answer their actual argument. Straw-man it — rebuild it weaker and knock that down — and you lose. Imagine that scored in real life.
Dropped means conceded. Every argument is tracked on "the flow." Miss one, and it carries straight through against you. You can't dodge; you can only answer.
Evidence beats assertion. You bring receipts ("cards"). And the judge votes on the arguments made — not their own opinion.

Cousins worth knowing: Lincoln-Douglas (one-on-one, values over policy) and Public Forum (accessible, current events). In Michigan, the house that ran this was MIFA — the Michigan Interscholastic Forensic Association.

The clock (national policy / NSDA standard): 8-minute constructives · 3-minute cross-examinations · 5-minute rebuttals — eight speeches, four cross-ex periods, plus timed prep per team. A full round runs about 90 minutes. ("8-5-3" — the coach's memory was right.)

Times: National Speech & Debate Association policy format. Michigan’s MIFA may run its own variant of the times and events — confirm specifics with the league.

The McKendry Debate™

⚑ The house format · the coach's own

One-on-one, modeled on Lincoln-Douglas — values and principle, not policy plans — but built the coach's way, with cross-examination given room to breathe. Cross-ex is the skill that matters most: thinking on your feet, pinning a claim, asking the one question that ends it. So it gets time, not a stopwatch.

The round · 10 · 5 · 5 · 10

Constructive — 10 min. Each side lays its full case — a clean ten to build it right.
Cross-examination — 5 min. Each side questions the other, face to face. Long on purpose — this is where debates are won.
Rebuttal — 5 min. Each side closes: what stood, what fell, why you won.
Prep — 10 minutes total per debater, spent however and whenever you want across the round.
Then the public votes. Who won, who lost — the room is the judge, not one chair.

Why these numbers: cross-ex at five, not three, because it's the hardest and truest skill; ten minutes of prep because thinking should beat speed-reading; one-on-one so nobody's benched for lack of a partner; and the public scores it, because a room that watched is harder to fool than one judge in one chair.

The format is the curator's — The McKendry Debate™. (A trademark on the name; you can't patent a debate format, and this house claims only what's real.) Full credit to the lineage: Lincoln-Douglas, and MIFA — the Michigan Interscholastic Forensics Association — the foundation it grew from. Built by the coach; then, the rule holds, put to a vote.

⏱ Open the live clock (10·5·5·10) — OBS-ready →

🥊 Practice solo — Debate Yourself (the master debater drill) →

Why it's the cure

Look at the public square. Straw men, whataboutism, dropped questions, confident nonsense with no receipts — the exact fouls in the Fallacy Wing. Debate is the only classroom that scores you against all of them at once, on the clock, in front of a judge. It teaches three things a democracy can't survive without:

Argue both sides. When you've had to defend the position you hate, you stop seeing the other half of the country as stupid or evil. You see an argument. That's the antidote to the whole sickness.
Attack the idea, not the person. Ad hominem doesn't just lose you points — it loses you the round. You learn it in your body.
Lose with grace. You get out-argued, you shake hands, you get better. A person who's learned to lose an argument honestly is a person who can change their mind. We are starving for those.

My opinion — labeled — and then a vote

⚑ Opinion · the curator's, not the house's

Debate class should be mandatory. Not an elective for the few — a requirement for the many, the way we require the things that make a person. We teach kids to read and to add; we should teach them to argue well — to clash without cruelty, to check a claim, to lose and learn. It might be the single highest-leverage class we don't require.

But here's the part that makes it honest, and it's the most debate thing I can say: I won't impose it. Leave it up for a vote. I'll make the case as hard as I can, then I'll do the thing the whole activity teaches — let the room decide, and respect it if I lose. That's not weakness. That's the rule.

The dream's alive in Lansing

One coach, one mission: keep this thing breathing where I'm standing — the 517. Debate gave a lot of people their voice; the least we can do is hand it to the next ones. If you ran the flow, judged a round, or had a coach who changed your life — you already know. Sister rooms: The Fallacy Wing, The Debate Pass.

— the curator's own coaching story (program, years, the kids) goes here, in his hand —
Where the house stands. The rules above describe competitive debate in general terms the house can stand behind; the precise speech times and MIFA's current events are left blank for the coach to fill and verify, because we don't print numbers we didn't check. MIFA is the Michigan Interscholastic Forensic Association. The call for mandatory debate class is the curator's opinion, clearly labeled — and offered to a vote, not imposed. No invented credentials. The one rule holds: no lying.
Go Debate™

Stop reading about it. Start now — solo, on the clock.