No debate class here. A lot of schools have extracurricular debate clubs, but ours didn’t. We did have one half year required “speech” class but it focused mostly on generic public speaking skills. I think we might have learned a few fallacies at some point, either in that class or english or social studies, but I don’t think we spent more than one day on the subject.
I think most of us learn these things online. In particular, the SDMB seems to encourage fair and useful debating behaviors.
What I picked up, I picked up in speech class and English class. Both involved making persuasive arguments and backing them up with verifiable facts. In speech class, we also learned about appeals to pathos (emotion). I also think we covered appeals to ethos (ethics/morals), but, as you can probably tell, I can’t remember that nearly so well.
In other words, we have training in rhetoric, but it usually isn’t called that.
And, of course, a place like this is self-selecting. If I were to make a Wild Ass Guess, I’d say that people from other countries tend to have a bigger awe for intelligence-based skills, and thus it is more likely that someone lacking that skill would still appreciate it from others. In other words, it isn’t that we are better debaters–it’s that less good debaters from other countries are more likely to enjoy a board with good debaters.
As for using technical rhetoric terms–once you see someone else use them, you tend to want to look them up. It’s just nice to have a name for something you’ve often noticed.
A big component is that this place never got too big. I’ve seen other sites (Reddit and Slashdot, for example) get big enough that they regress to the mean, a term I’m using loosely to describe the fact most people online, like most people in the entire world, aren’t good at debating even to the standards we set around here.
The SDMB, on the other hand, tends to split off into smaller communities, like the Fabulous Forums of Fathom (apologies if that’s older than the SDMB) and the Giraffe Board and other communities which may share members with the SDMB, but also pull off some of the people who aren’t happy here into similar-but-different environments.
Finally, most of the content here isn’t focused around responding to links or videos, and we discourage the drive-by mentality that seems to engender: We like people who post to a thread to invest in it to a certain extent, and, here, that usually means debating.
Also, as a direct response to the OP’s question, I agree with BigT and others: English class, from grade school through high school and, often, college, is a debate course in a thin disguise, given that you have to analyze a text and then defend the analysis using sound logic and textual evidence.
Dropped in to say:
**Everything I know about Rhetoric I learned …
right here!**
But then you reminded me about college, and those late nights BS’ing, and arguing John Maynard Keynes vs. Martin Luther King vs. Clive Staples Lewis. So I’ll switch to: Here, but with a introduction to the art form in
the Ezra L. Koon Honors Dormitory at Hillsdale College.
But I must say that my conversation skills have been honed by watching some of the pros here (in GQ, GD, and esp. the Pit!) burst the bubbles of some pompous party-liners here.
I think that if a university has a philosophy department, it will generally have a logic/propositional logic class.
Many universities have debate clubs, but, I would bet that that is shrinking.
Best wishes,
hh
Didn’t read every previous post, so this may have been said already. I think it has less to do with education and more to do with attitude. In the US the notion that an individual should speak out, stand up and be counted, whatever you want to call it, is celebrated. In other countries/cultures maybe not as much so. If the person speaking out happens to have a modicum of reason and articulatory ability (cf. your average Doper), it sounds impressive. However, those attributes are in no way required to engage in the US proclivity for spouting off (cf. Sarah Palin). In those cases it sounds, well, embarrassing.