The Overton Window and the Topics We Choose

Debate is at its best when students are allowed to take ideas seriously before anyone tells them what conclusions they are supposed to reach. Students spend an enormous amount of time being told what is true. Debate asks them to figure out why something might be true, what the best argument against it is, and whether their original position survives contact with someone who has spent the last month trying to prove them wrong.

I think that is an overwhelmingly good thing. I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea that speech and debate educators should decide the correct moral or political beliefs and then construct an activity designed to produce students who share them. This is probably the biggest change in my thinking from who I was at 25. I used to be much more comfortable with the idea that if we thought we had the better politics or the better theory, there was nothing especially wrong with building educational spaces that pushed students toward those conclusions. I don't think that anymore. If we justify pushing our beliefs onto children because we think our beliefs are correct, we have also justified the other side pushing its beliefs onto children when it gets control of the institution.

I do understand why advocacy organizations behave differently. If you believe the political or educational environment has already been tilted dramatically in one direction, trying to push back against that imbalance makes perfect sense. Advocacy organizations exist to advocate. But speech and debate as an educational institution should be something different. We shouldn't design the activity around the assumption that one political coalition, philosophical tradition, or ideological project has already won and that our job is to help students arrive at its conclusions.

I think a healthier version of democracy depends on resisting that kind of intellectual authoritarianism, including the softer version where educators decide which conclusions students are supposed to reach. And, frankly, I also think this is much closer to what students and parents actually want from the activity. They want students to learn how to think, argue, research, and make judgments for themselves. I don't think our job is to tell students whether capitalism is good, whether socialism is bad, what theory of morality they should adopt, or exactly how the government should solve complicated social problems.

Debate still isn't neutral in what it legitimizes, though. The concept of the Overton window is useful here. The basic idea is that there is a range of positions society considers acceptable to seriously discuss at a particular moment. Those boundaries move. An idea can go from unthinkable, to controversial, to something reasonable people apparently disagree about. Topic selection is one obvious way we do that. When we select a topic, we tell thousands of students that there are at least two positions on this question worth defending. We ask coaches to develop the strongest possible versions of those positions. Students spend months researching them. Judges listen to those arguments over and over again. The community collectively gets very good at defending both sides.

Topic selection isn't the only place this happens, though. Judges make decisions about which arguments they are willing to entertain, reward, and ultimately vote for. Coaches make decisions about what they are willing to teach. Tournaments and institutions develop norms about what counts as a legitimate strategy. A resolution can be perfectly defensible while a particular argument made under it crosses a line. So when I talk about the Overton window in debate, I am talking both about the questions we choose to make topics and about the arguments we collectively decide are legitimate reasons to win a debate round. I believe we should be extremely permissive about both.

Students should argue about capitalism, immigration, policing, war, environmental regulation, artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, democracy, punishment, inequality, and all sorts of other things adults passionately disagree about. They should encounter arguments that make their teachers uncomfortable. They should read radical literature. They should occasionally defend positions they personally dislike. The point of debate cannot be protecting students from controversial ideas.

There is a dangerous temptation to confuse "outside my politics" with "outside legitimate discourse." If the boundary of acceptable debate conveniently corresponds to whatever the adults running the activity already believe, we have created a pretty terrible educational model. I do have strong opinions about which arguments are actually true. I think a lot of the critical literature students encounter in debate is genuinely insightful, and I find parts of it persuasive. But even when I think an argument is right, I don't think my job as an educator is to protect it from competition or construct an activity that guarantees students arrive at it.

I want a forum where those arguments can rise to the top on their merits. If Marx gives students a better explanation of labor and ownership, or critical race theory better explains why formally neutral institutions can reproduce inequality, students should get to see those arguments win. Part of the educational value comes from watching an idea survive opposition, which students miss if we tell them in advance that the idea occupies the morally approved side of the room. How else will they be ready when people push back on their ideas in the "real world"?!?

This is where I have to acknowledge the obvious problem with my own argument: I am imposing normative assumptions too. I am perfectly happy with many of those assumptions. That's why I hold them. But I also recognize that someone operating from a radically different moral framework might draw the boundaries of acceptable discourse somewhere completely different. I don't get to solve that problem by declaring my values objective, and I'm certainly not going to resolve normative ethics in a six-minute blog post. I struggle with this a lot. I'm comfortable letting students debate nuclear weapons, despite the fact that nuclear weapons can kill millions of people and potentially end civilization. So "this position could produce horrific consequences" clearly isn't my bright line. Over the years, any attempt I have made to sort every conceivable political proposition into acceptable and unacceptable categories has inevitably contained inconsistencies, edge cases, and a whole lot of Spencer's personal normative commitments masquerading as neutral rules.

But I don't think we need a comprehensive theory of acceptable political thought to establish some basic expectations for an educational activity.

I think we can establish a much narrower procedural floor. Here's my thought. We should not construct topics, normalize strategies, or reward arguments that require students to deny the equal moral standing of other people. That doesn't require agreement about utilitarianism or deontology, and it doesn't require resolving capitalism, borders, policing, religion, war, or the proper role of government.

I also think we need to be careful about what that means. Arguing for restrictive immigration policies is not necessarily an argument that immigrants have less moral worth. Neither is opposing affirmative action necessarily an argument that racial minorities are inferior. People can have serious disagreements about rights, government policy, and the consequences of particular institutions without denying the basic standing of the people affected by those policies.

But "racism good," "slavery good," and arguments that immigrants or queer people deserve less basic moral consideration because of who they are are different. Those should not become competitive paths to the ballot.

A student shouldn't have to enter an educational activity where the identity or basic standing of the person sitting across from them is itself something another student can be rewarded for successfully negating. I haven't discovered the objective moral rule separating acceptable from unacceptable political thought, but I don't think I need one for this. We are educators running an activity for students. "You don't have to competitively defend whether you deserve to exist here as an equal" seems like a perfectly reasonable procedural floor for participation. Teachers should protect students. People are obviously going to disagree about where that boundary falls. I don't have a perfect mechanism for preventing that, beyond expecting educators to justify those decisions carefully and being willing to listen to challenges.

Students should encounter ugly ideas. They should learn about racism, fascism, colonialism, homophobia, xenophobia, slavery, eugenics, and the arguments people have used to justify them. Understanding an ideology, criticizing it, and learning how it operates are completely different from institutionally designating its central premise as either one side of a competitive controversy or a legitimate route to winning a ballot.

Debate is unusually good at producing arguments. Give talented students and coaches a resolution and a couple of months and they will find obscure academics, clever philosophical justifications, historical examples, strategic reframings, and increasingly absurd ways of defending positions. That's one of the coolest things about the activity. It also means we must be conscious of where we point that machinery. I think we should ask what we are doing when we frame something as an open question, or when we treat an argument as a legitimate reason to win. Whether a proposition is controversial or offensive can't answer that, because almost every worthwhile debate topic will make somebody uncomfortable.

Sometimes opening a question is exactly what education should do. The existing Overton window isn't inherently good. Plenty of ideas we now regard as obviously correct once existed outside it, and plenty of terrible ideas have comfortably existed inside it. Students should challenge conventional wisdom, interrogate institutions adults tell them are inevitable, and encounter arguments that make all of us uncomfortable. I would much rather tolerate too much controversy than create an activity where adults decide which political conclusions students are permitted to reach.

But topic selection, argument choice, and judging are all institutional decisions about which questions and claims we are going to spend thousands of hours teaching students to argue better. We should treat that power carefully. I don't know exactly where the Overton window should be, and I don't trust myself, or anyone else, to draw it perfectly. But I do know I am not going to reward an argument that denies the humanity of the person sitting across the room.