11-28: An Exciting Debate

 Today I had an exciting debate with my classmates. The topic was: "Which is more important, curing stupidity (providing education)_A or fighting poverty_B ?"

I was on the side of fighting poverty being more important than providing education, becoming debater B1. My argument was that people in poverty don't have their basic needs (e. g. food, shelter, healthcare) satisfied. The satisfaction of these basic needs is more fundamental than education. If one is stuck in poverty and is starving, could you just throw him some books and tell him "after you study you will become rich"? We need to solve the problem of extreme poverty, because poverty threatens survival, before we provide education, which purpose is to improve the quality of life. My opponent, debater A1, said that education is a stabler way towards ending poverty rather than the government giving out aids. I argued that education can be seen as a type of investment. Investments do not guarantee success; in this case, if the economy of a nation is not good, people might graduate from a good university and then get a low income. I found that both my opponent and I had good preparation before the debate.

Another debater on my side, debater B3, seems to have a lot to speak. Apart from my point, he brought up the point that in China, rather than a "war on stupidity" the government started a "war on poverty". He also argued that stupidity is part of human nature, and changing human nature is a harsher job than fighting poverty. She took the job of summarizing our team’s viewpoint after the arguing ends.

After we each gave our arguments and counterarguments, it was time for the audience to ask questions. However, many of the audiences choose to ask nothing, and only the teacher gave both sides a question. The question was: if an uneducated person becomes wealthy, would this person eventually lose their money? I answered that when a person’s needs (basic requirements for survival like food, shelter and healthcare, not wants) are satisfied, then keep providing financial support and providing good education will become equally important. It is only when a person is both poor and uneducated that we should solve the problem of poverty first. Some audiences also expressed their doubts in the chat, and we handled the questions quite confidently.

The time for audiences to vote has finally came. Each of us was very nervous, because we knew that this debate topic is a difficult subject, and we could have done better. Finally, the results were in and my team won by a large number of votes!

After the debate between me and my classmates, the teachers reviewed our debate, summarizing and giving advice. An interesting thing is the teachers had their own small debate about our performance. An audience playfully advised that we vote which teacher’s the best, and the two teachers got the same votes.

It was a great debate and I appreciate both my teammates and opponents. During the preparation and the debate, I learned that real-life challenges are more complex than you think, and attempting to get a simple answer only make things worse. I look forward to more great events like this in the future where we can practice our critical thinking skills.