Debate Is Preparing Students for Careers That Don't Exist Yet

One of the strangest things about school is how small its picture of adult work still is. You spend most of your childhood moving through clearly defined subjects: math, English, science, history, maybe a world language. Eventually somebody asks what you want to be when you grow up, and the answers usually fit into equally tidy categories: doctor, lawyer, engineer, teacher, accountant. And let’s be honest: no kid dreams of being an accountant. No offense to accountants.

We give kids a bizarrely small menu when the actual economy is full of people doing jobs that don’t fit those categories, including jobs that didn’t exist when their parents were in school. People optimize YouTube thumbnails, moderate Discord servers, write email subject lines for toothpaste companies, design menus for food delivery apps, edit podcasts about cryptocurrency, build Excel dashboards nobody fully understands, manage influencers, sell Notion templates, automate someone else’s boring office job, consult companies on how to use TikTok, name new brands of protein powder, run newsletters about parking lots, and somehow make six figures explaining things on LinkedIn. Good luck explaining all of that through a list of college majors.

Even within traditional professions, the actual work is changing constantly. A lawyer who understands data analysis and automation has a different set of possibilities than one who does not. A teacher can now produce curriculum for thousands of students instead of thirty. A teenager can build software without being a professional programmer. Someone with expertise in a tiny niche can teach, consult, write, coach, or create content for people all over the world. Even the line between producing and consuming has gotten weird. For most of modern history, a company made something and you bought it. A newspaper published something and you read it. A television network produced something and you watched it. Now you watch videos and make videos. You use software and can build software. You read an article, respond to it publicly, remix it, teach it, or use it as the starting point for something you sell. Someone can spend the morning consuming information about a subject and spend the afternoon packaging what they learned into something useful for somebody else.

I don't think our traditional curriculum has caught up. Schools are very good at teaching students to complete clearly specified tasks. Here is the assignment. Here is the rubric. Here is the material that will be on the test. Do what you were asked to do and somebody will tell you whether you did it correctly. Work often asks a much less comfortable question: nobody is going to tell you exactly what to do, so can you figure out what would be useful? Being good at completing assignments doesn't necessarily prepare you for that. You need to find credible information quickly, learn unfamiliar subjects, identify problems, and explain complicated ideas. Then you have to persuade people, work with them, handle disagreement, and change your approach when something fails. Whatever you produce, you still have to explain why somebody should care about it.

That's a big part of why I think speech and debate becomes more useful as technology changes. Obviously debate teaches public speaking. That's the easy answer, and honestly one of the less interesting ones. A debater gets handed a subject they may know almost nothing about and has to become reasonably competent at it very quickly. One month you are researching nuclear weapons. The next you are reading philosophy. Then water policy, antitrust law, artificial intelligence, space exploration, education policy or whatever else the topic happens to be. Nobody gives you a textbook containing everything you need to know. You have to go find it. Then you have to do something with what you found.

Which arguments are worth developing? How do you explain them to another person? What are the obvious objections? When an argument fails, you have to figure out why. When someone reads evidence you've never seen before, you get a few minutes to understand it and respond. Eventually your original strategy stops working and you have to build another one. That looks a lot more like navigating a career to me than memorizing the correct answer for a test. The particular knowledge will change. It almost has to. Technology is moving too quickly for us to know exactly what jobs today's middle school students will have when they are thirty. Some current jobs will disappear. Others will change dramatically. Completely new ones will show up. People will probably move between industries more frequently, and the distinction between an employee, contractor, creator, entrepreneur and consultant will continue getting blurrier.

I have no idea how we would predict that labor market accurately. Teaching students how to learn their way into it seems much more realistic. Debate makes you practice that constantly. A student who becomes obsessed with winning eventually realizes there's always another article to read, another skill to develop, or another weakness somebody can exploit. Nobody hands you a certificate saying you now know debate. You keep getting better at figuring things out. I know I learn new things about debate every single day.

I'm not suggesting we stop teaching algebra or literature. A broad base of knowledge is obviously important. You need things to think about before you can get good at thinking. I just think we undersell students when we present education as preparation for a small menu of occupations. The menu is going to change. They'll need to learn things nobody formally taught them, turn information into something useful, and communicate with people who disagree with them. Some of their best opportunities may never come with an application form or a clear job description. Speech and debate teaches a lot of that almost accidentally.

I'd feel much better betting on skills mattering in twenty years than trying to guess the job titles.