Theory: Clash, Fairness and Education in High School Policy Debate
TL;DR: All have their benefits: Fairness is an impact filter, Clash is an ironclad I/L to everything and education is the biggest terminal impact.
Fairness
Fairness is only an external impact so much as if one teams wins a major fairness claim, it mitigates the offense the other team can access. if the aff wins the neg’s FW is totally unfair and makes the aff lose every debate, I don’t care how amazingly educational those rounds are because there will be no one left to experience them. Fairness is terminal defense to education impacts, arguing that more people w/ less education is better than basically no-one with good education.
Clash
Clash is THE internal link. The team that is winning a clash impact is almost certainly winning my ballot. It best access the big terminal impact, as while other types of education impact may be “you limit out types of education”, clash talks about how a team limits ALL EDUCATION in the round, by avoiding direct argumentation and finding some contrived way to win. One is bad, the other ruins debate. It can also access a bunch of other impacts or internal links like research production, advocacy, ground, predictability, argument refinement, etc.
Education
Education is the terminal impact. When we leave debate, the best thing we get better at isn’t rhetorical skills, or research, or anything else. That’s for extemp or PF. The unique benefits are policy debate are both broad, critical education and a hyper in-depth, year-long crash course in the controversy of the lit. Arguments need lit and lit needs controversy, so policy debate will always find the nexus controversy of the topic and make it a major focus of the season, more so that any other type of debate. By the end of this year, I will have education is basically every NATO intervention, issue that impedes cohesion, tradeoff disadvantage, leader who hates it, ways it can solve extinction and possible policy around it. I will also get in-depth education on everything to NATO’s transphobic policies or actions, how NATO relates to race, gender, post-modern theory etc. I will be able to off the top of my head give a well-developed, well-warranted speech for either cap good/bad, explain how an alternative can or can’t solve, or how realism or 10 other theories can or can’t explain IR. That is the value of policy debate.