Lessons learned from fifth graders

I am endlessly fascinated by the mechanics beyond rhetorical argumentation and how we convince others that we are in the right.

I spent about four years of my life where competitive debate was my primary focus - one year in high school, and two and a half years in college. Participating on both high school and collegiate debate teams has given me the love of breaking down arguments, and my experience in the activity was at the forefront of my mind when I got to attend the Judicial Learning Day for fifth graders across Carbon County. The students got to participate in a mock trial and I got to sit in the back and take some pictures.

It was as a new experience for me as it was for the students because I had never seen a court trial before and was unfamiliar with a lot of how it worked. One of the first things I noticed was how the attorneys constructed their arguments.

When I competed in debate one of the major things I was taught to focus on was the cross examination period, where you asked your opponent questions. However, it was drilled into me that every question was actually an argument. During the mock trial this idea was very evident. Outside of the opening and closing statements, the arguments that were being made to the jury were done through the process of asking questions to the witnesses.

Despite this glaring obvious comparison between the style of debate I was trained in and the one used in the courtroom, there was also a major difference I noticed. When I competed in policy debate, the questions you asked to your opponent were not the only argument being made. Your opponent got the opportunity to respond, and that response was also an argument. However, in the mock trial, the witnesses were not making arguments. For the most part, the responses were only a yes or a no. The witness would effectively become an accomplice to the argument the lawyer was making.

I was left feeling like this model of debate would be supremely difficult to do effectively. You have to ask questions to make an argument and you have to design those questions in a way where you get the exact answer you expect.

Another thing I learned in debate was something called “judge instruction.” These would be moments where you tell the person judging the debate the exact way they should evaluate it based upon the arguments presented. You would list out the ways in which you won and how your opponent’s arguments were worse than yours. For example, “While my opponent said x, they failed to consider x, which disproves their point, and is a reason why you should vote affirmative.”

There wasn’t really an equivalent lining up of the arguments in the mock trial, however, in the closing statements the attorneys pointed out specific moments to the student jury, directing them to the most important things to consider. Additionally, there was literal judge instruction, as in the judge told the jury how exactly they should evaluate this trial. She explained the concept of “beyond a reasonable doubt”, and emphasized that if they had any doubt the defendant did the crime, they should vote not guilty.

After I watched the trial, I was certain that I would have voted not guilty. I felt the defense did a great job of poking enough holes in the prosecution’s case. It was not clear cut that the mock defendant stole the victim’s lunch. I would have been confident giving an explanation as to how the defendant did not commit the imaginary crime.

As the trial was winding down, I remembered a few facts from when I helped to teach high school students how to debate at the Wyoming Forensics Institute. At that summer camp, and at debate summer camps across the country, one of the first things students see is a demo debate. The coaches at the camp do a prepared debate to show the students how a debate should look, and introduce them to the styles of argumentation we would be teaching. At the end of the debate, the students would act as the judges and decide which side won the demo.

A funny thing with this was a vast majority of the time the students would vote for the affirmative. It does not matter what the topic was, or how well the coaches debated, most students would vote affirmative. There was a simple reason for this - the affirmative side always spoke last. They had the final speech, so they were the most recent thing the students remembered and got to characterize the debate however they wanted to.

This is not to say that those kids were easily tricked or that they were silly for voting this way. You have to remember that this would be at the beginning of camp, where they had not yet had experience judging debates and thinking through decisions. The purpose of camp was to teach them how to evaluate and think about arguments, and at the beginning they didn’t quite have those skills yet. Policy debate is also a very complex activity, and even after judging many debates at high school tournaments I could have difficulty deciphering two hours worth of arguments.

So when the mock trial was finishing, I noticed that the prosecution got to speak last. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall in the room with the student jury deciding. What moments did they latch on to? What would fifth graders with probably no experience in persuasive argumentation think about when trying to think through a complicated debate?

In the group I watched, they voted guilty. I have no idea how the earlier group voted, but I would not be surprised if it was guilty as well.

It does make me think about how this kind of trial plays out in real life. Just by the virtue of being adults, are people better at evaluating arguments? Do the years of critical thinking experience make a difference, even if you aren’t trained in debate? Or do we still lose the details - remembering only the big gotcha moments and voting for who was given the advantage of speaking last.