I think that the closest that most American students get to learning to argue logically are certain university freshman courses which use books about logical argumentation and rhetoric. A standard textbook is Howard Kahane and Nancy Cavender’s Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric. However, I think that the OP should understand that the rhetorical skills of the SDBM regulars are far above those of the average American. There are debate teams in high schools and universities, but only a fairly small minority of students are on them.
I think you all are getting too hung up on the word “debate”–formal verbal debate teams are common, but an elective. However, there is more to instruction in rhetoric than formal vebal debate: 300K American high school students take a course in Rhetoric each year called “AP English Language and Composition”. This course,(which I’ve been teaching the better part of a decade) is a course in both rhetorical analysis and argumentation.
The curriculum of the course is pretty open, but the AP test requires students to write three essays–one synthesizes a variety of short sources to support a position (everything to “What factors would justify having a space program?” to “Should the penny be abolished?”, the second essay asks them to analyze a piece of rhetoric someone else wrote, speaking specifically about how language was used to accomplish a rhetorical purpose, and the third essay asks them to construct an original argument in response to a prompt. It isn’t the most difficult test in the world, but to pass it a kid needs to be able to read closely, evaluate source material, and to construct a thesis and support it with data in an organized way.
There are some teachers who still teach this course as a Lit course with a thin veneer of rhetoric, but that’s not how it’s designed and the trend is more and more away from the literary model. We certainly cover logical fallacies in my class (I use Hurley), and I don’t think that’s unusual (though you don’t have to know the Latin names on the AP test–you just need to be able to describe what the speaker is doing.
All of the kids who don’t pass the AP test (and earn college credit) and go on to college take a course called “Freshman Comp” or “Rhetoric” which is supposed to be a course on writing persuasive papers and where one ought to be exposed to at least the basics of argumentation. I do not know if such courses are standard in the Universities of other countries.
So yes, we do formally teach rhetoric and logic in our schools. Not everyone gets it, but it is pretty widely available.
I’m intrigued by the bolded part.
Since a lot of people do not state their location, how you know that any particular person is American?
Once that’s established, what are the particular techniques that are used by Americans but not, apparently, by those from other countries?
Before I answer, I would like to point out that I didn’t want to question the debating skills of any non-American Doper in general, and if my OP sounded like that, I’m sorry for that.
As you stated, a lot of people don’t specify their location in their info, but OTOH many do. Besides that, of many of the good debaters here, I got their nationality out of context from their postings. Furthermore, the majority of posters on this board is American, and I never encountered such a highly developed debating style on other boards I frequent, which are mainly German. So I drew the (maybe wrong) conclusion that a formal education in rhetorics could be an American thing, and that’s why I asked the original question.
Of course posters of every nationality are welcome to participate in this thread to report about the aspects of rhetorical education in their countries.
I’d agree that the standard of debating is a great deal higher here that on most other forum sites.
I think it’s a matter of site culture. Partly an intelligent selection of rules, partly a careful division of topics and partly sheer good luck (or, perhaps, a particularly good starting demographic).
The good luck part comes from when the site was formed. That tends to set the tone, possibly for the life of the site. If your initial intake is skilled and serious debaters you’ve hit the jackpot as like tends to attract like. Conversely, if you attract yobs and dilettantes serious debaters will stay away.
I went to high school in Canada over 30 years ago. (Not quite the USA, but not a lot different except we learned geography 
) Even though it was a university stream school, there was no formal “debate” or logic taught. The closest was the requirement in English class for a formal speech, which most kids failed at miserably or squeaked by - mostly due to severe antipathy to public speaking. We had debating teams (as others mentioned, right up there with the chess club, but less intellectually demanding).
I went to one or two debate club meetings in first year college, but it seemed to have degenerated from serious debate to smart-aleck zingers and bud puns. I forget the apparently serious topic, but the debaters twisted the definitions of the topic to suit their own humour like the actual debate was some in-joke. Mind you, parliamnet in Canada seems to be the same way.
At the time, the various Marxist groups were active on campus and handed out pamphlets arguing their position. There is nothing more painful than a fanatic’s twisted logic which ignores facts and details that everyone knows to make a point that is obviously absurd. Even today I find Michael Moore films annoying, even when I agree with the guy. OTOH, Canadian Parliament had degenerated into similar trite non-debate long before the neo-cons began destroying the American system.
I think I learned more debate logic from math procedures and set theory, which I took too much of.
Ouch!
I normally wouldn’t point out a misspelling, but since you’re not a native English speaker and you’ve used the term twice, I should mention that the English word is “rhetoric,” not “rhetorics.”
Thanks for the correction, Wendell. I wasn’t sure if the plural form was right, so I checked on my favourite English-German dictionary site, which gave “rhetorics” as an alternative translation for the German expressions “Rhetorik” or “Redekünste” (which is a plural), respectively. Obviously, you can’t always trust these kind of sites.
That’s interesting, because I had noticed that posters here like using technical rhetoric terms, and sometimes threads are even started asking for the formal name of some fallacy or rhetorical device in an argument they found somewhere else. You get back-and-forths with “is it a strawman?” “No, I think it’s begging the question.” “It’s probably just some application of Occam’s Razor.” (Note that I just randomly selected some terminology I know, I’m not saying these three devices could be confused.)
I assumed it had to do with the kind of people we have here, but apparently it is possible that Americans learn such terms in school. And I did learn the names of a few logical fallacies in my first philosophy class as well. But I guess it’s not the kind of thing most people remember much later.
Do remember that what you usually see of parliamentary debates on television is the political theatre of the question period. It’s a rhetorical game with a main goal of producing soundbites, not the place where most parliamentary work is done.
That sounds like a nice place. Where is it?
You’re seeing selection bias, I’m afraid. Check out the “blogs” on YouTube or after stories in American on-line newspapers for a more balanced view.
Could be a eurocentrism thing, like “maths”.
Another set of anecdotes:
I went to a very large public high school in Portland, Oregon. We had an elective class called Rhetoric (and maybe some other stuff, it’s been over 40 years). It was a wonderful class, taught by a one-in-a-million teacher (I wish I could remember his name). This class did cover persuasive communication (rhetoric) to restless ignorant teenagers, which was something in itself. It also covered a lot of epistemology (how do you know things, what distinguishes knowledge from opinion), which was even more of an achievement, considering the target.
We had a large public speaking department and I went to a number of National Forensics League tournaments, but I stayed away from NFL debate, because as others have noted the style had very little to do with logical argument and a great deal to do with being able to cite authority - the biggest index card collection often won. You could intimidate your opponent by dragging in boxes and boxes of them, even if they were mostly dummies.
I learned formal logic in college philosophy classes.
The only type of debate I have heard lately that seems worthy of the name are these occasional programs on NPR which are called Oxford-style debates in America, and they measure success by the percentage of the audience that has its opinions swayed from one side to the other during the course of the debate. The best part about it is that they do rely on argumentation rather than on appeals to authority.
I strongly agree with qpw3141 that this board is not representative of the US as a whole in terms of acquaintance with concepts of logic and rhetoric, and that it is a very fortunate local culture.
Roddy
To those who mentioned that the SDMB doesn’t represent Americans in general: I’m fully aware of that. When I wrote “…especially the American ones” in the OP, I meant the American Dopers.
As I made clear before, there’s no selection bias, but concerning YouTube and online papers: I know, I know well … (but the same applies to the German YouTube commentary section and to some online news outlets)
I learned via following the SDMB and looking up terms in Wikipedia, not in school.
The debate skills seen on this board are in no way indicative of the American public at large. There is no formal debate education. At various schools it’s an optional elective.
Watch the news anytime they are interviewing random people on political issues and it becomes painfully clear how poor Americans can be at debating.
On this board it is moderated and there is a high standard for factual information. The posters here have simply developed their skills to the format.
Good debating skills comes with experience. As this is a very long lasting message board many here have had plenty of opportunity to hone their skills.
While I am not going to argue with the idea that many people have weak skills, we do have formal education in argumentation–at the high school level, AP Language and Comp, and then freshmen composition courses in college. You can argue that these aren’t as effective as we’d like, but there is a deliberate effort to improve argumentation skills.
I wrote:
> I normally wouldn’t point out a misspelling, but since you’re not a native English
> speaker and you’ve used the term twice, I should mention that the English
> word is “rhetoric,” not “rhetorics.”
TimeWinder wrote:
> Could be a eurocentrism thing, like “maths”.
Well, no, it couldn’t.
Some Brit could verify what I’m saying here. (I lived in the U.K. for three years, but I’m not a complete expert on British English.) I presume that what you mean is that perhaps “rhetorics” is the British equivalent to the American term “rhetoric,” just as “maths” is the British equivalent to the American term “math.” That’s not true. To be sure, I checked the OED (which is a British dictionary, so don’t anyone accuse me of only checking an American dictionary). The British term for the subject is “rhetoric,” the same as the American term for the subject.
In case somebody makes the following quibble, let me forestall it: Yes, I know that there are certain contexts in which one can say “rhetorics.” This has nothing to do with the difference between British and American varieties of English. It’s done in the following context: Suppose you want to talk about the two different theories of rhetoric. You could say (fairly loosely), “Smith’s theory of rhetoric makes different claims than Jones’ theory of rhetoric. These two rhetorics differ in the following ways.” This is irrelevant to the fact that as the name of a subject studied in school, the term is always “rhetoric” in any variety of English.