Debate training session

During the semester, GTK members had the opportunity to participate in a series of 4 sessions on the topic of debating.

On November 15th, 2022, the GTK students participated on their debate training held by Kende-Ferenc Pastor and Gáspár Incze, third-year students. During the training, the students received a theoretical insight into the world of debate. They learned about the history of the debate culture and understood the structure of it. After the theoretical introduction, the students put what they learned into practice. Following the “Karl Popper” structure, they debated the “Remote work will never be as efficient as office work.” statement. At the beginning, 80% of the audience agreed with the statement, which remained the same even after the debate.

On 24 November, the GTK members took part in the second session of the debate training series, where they put into practice what they had learned previously. This time, the students started with a warm-up debate, the topic of which was “War is justified in some cases”. Then, the GTK members discussed two other debate topics. The first was “The death penalty is justified in some cases”, and the second was “Multinational firms are killing small businesses”. During the debates, two teams of 4 people argued with for and against arguments, after which the trainers presented their observations, comments and advice to the debaters. A lot of new information was gained by all GTK participants, both on the topics discussed and on the process of the debate.

On Tuesday, 29 November GTK students took part on the third session of the debate training series. The training was organised in the GTK office, during which the students discussed in a practical way the thesis “Gender quotas are at the expense of efficiency”. During the training, the students learned the Toulmin argument method and the 15 types of logical fallacies.

On 12 December, GTK members took part in the fourth and final debate session of the semester. It was a lively evening, as the trainers focused on practice. Participants debated two motions in the style of a British parliamentary debate. The slogans discussed were “We should ban the production of advertising material for children”, “We should build more nuclear power plants to create a sustainable energy industry”.

We would like to thank Kende and Gaspár for the interactive training!