20+ Debate Examples for Students: Samples, Speeches, and Scripts

If you're not yet sure which debate format your assignment uses, the different types of debate guide covers the full classification.

Speaker for the motion:

Good morning everyone. The motion before us today is that schools should ban mobile phones during class hours, and I am speaking in favour. I want to make three points.

First, phones are the single biggest distraction in classrooms today. A 2023 study from the London School of Economics found that test scores improved by 6.4% on average in schools that banned phones, and the gain was nearly twice as large for the lowest-performing students. The students who lose the most when phones are allowed are the ones who can least afford to lose ground.

Second, phones harm focus even when they are not being used. Researchers at the University of Texas showed that having a phone face-down on the desk reduced cognitive capacity in the same way as having a second person in the room talking. The phone does not need to ring to break your concentration. Its presence is enough.

Third, banning phones in class is not the same as banning them in life. Students still have phones at lunch, after school, and on the bus. We are talking about a six-hour window in which we ask them to focus on learning. That is a reasonable ask.

For these reasons, schools should ban mobile phones during class hours. Thank you.

Speaker against the motion:

Good morning. I am speaking against the motion. I do not deny that phones can distract. What I deny is that an outright ban is the right response.

First, phones in classrooms are tools, not just toys. Students use them for translation apps, dictionaries, calculators, calendars, and access to learning platforms. A blanket ban removes the tool along with the distraction. A better policy is structured use, phones away by default, out only when the teacher allows.

Second, the bans we have studied work in narrow conditions and not in others. The same LSE study showed no improvement at all in schools that already had strong classroom management. The phone is not the disease. Weak management is the disease, and the phone is just a symptom.

Third, students need to learn to manage technology in their lives. School is the place to build that skill. If we ban phones from the classroom for thirteen years and then send students into a workplace where phones are constant, we have not prepared them. We have postponed the problem.

The motion proposes a ban. I propose a structure. Thank you.

Speaker for the motion:

Good morning. I am here to argue that homework is necessary. The case is simple. Homework lets students practice what they learn in class without a teacher hovering over them, and that independent practice is what turns understanding into memory.

Three points. First, the research is clear that for secondary students, regular homework is associated with higher test scores, better study habits, and stronger time management. The effect is small for primary students, which is fair criticism, but for older students it holds up across decades of data.

Second, homework is the only place students can fail safely. In a classroom, a wrong answer is public. At home, a wrong answer is private and fixable. That is where most real learning happens.

Third, the alternative to homework is more class time, more tutoring, or worse outcomes. None of those are free. Homework is the most efficient form of practice we have.

For these reasons, homework is necessary. Thank you.

Speaker against the motion:

Good morning. The case for homework rests on outcomes, but the outcomes are not as clean as my opponent suggests.

First, the volume of homework most students receive is not supported by any of the research. The studies that show benefit show benefit at one to two hours per night. Most students get more, often much more. The benefit ends and the harm begins around the two-hour mark, and students spend most evenings well past that line.

Second, homework punishes students whose homes are not built for it. A student in a quiet house with two parents and a desk has a different homework experience than a student sharing one room with three siblings and a parent working night shifts. Homework widens the gap that school is supposed to close.

Third, the practice argument assumes practice has to happen at home. It does not. Class time can be restructured to include practice. Sports teams do not send athletes home to practice alone. They practice together, with a coach, where mistakes get caught.

I am not arguing that practice is bad. I am arguing that homework, as it actually exists, is not the right vehicle for it. Thank you.

If your assignment is short and you need to start writing now, take one of the two structures above (three points, opening, closing) and swap your topic in. That is the fastest path from blank page to first draft. For more topic ideas to plug in, see the list of debate topics.

A note on CBSE format. If you are writing for a CBSE assignment in India, the format is slightly different from the examples below. CBSE debates are usually 150 to 200 words, follow a fixed structure (Formal Address, Introduction, Arguments For or Against, Conclusion, Formal Thanks), and are graded on Format, Content, Expression, and Accuracy. The examples below show the structure and reasoning. For a CBSE submission, condense each example to fit the 150 to 200 word limit and open with the standard CBSE salutation: "Respected principal, teachers, and my dear friends, good morning. Today I stand before you to speak... 

For the motion:

Good morning, teachers and friends. I am speaking for the motion that children should have homework on weekends.

Homework on weekends helps us remember what we learned in class. If we forget on Saturday, we will be slower on Monday. Just ten or fifteen minutes of practice keeps everything fresh in our heads. It is not a lot of time, but it makes the next school week easier. My maths teacher says the students who do their weekend homework always understand the new lessons faster.

For these reasons, I support the motion. Thank you.

Against the motion:

Good morning, teachers and friends. I am speaking against the motion that children should have homework on weekends.

The weekend is for resting, family time, and play. Children study five days a week. Two days off is not too much. If we have homework on weekends, we get tired before the new week even starts. Tired children do not learn well. Doctors say children need free time to be healthy and to grow up creative. Free play is also a way of learning, just a different way.

For these reasons, I oppose the motion. Thank you..

For the motion:

Honourable judges, respected teachers, and my dear friends, good morning. I stand before you to support the motion that video games are harmful for children.

My first point is health. Children who play video games for more than two hours a day are more likely to have eye strain, poor posture, and disturbed sleep. A 2022 study by the World Health Organisation classified gaming disorder as a real condition, just like other addictions.

My second point is school performance. The hours spent gaming are hours not spent reading, studying, or playing outside. Teachers across the country report a clear pattern: the heaviest gamers are usually the weakest students, not because gaming makes them weak, but because gaming takes the time that would have built strength.

My third point is behaviour. Many popular games involve violence, and while a single game does not turn a child into a violent person, repeated exposure changes what a child sees as normal.

For these reasons, video games are harmful for children, and I urge you to support the motion. Thank you.

Against the motion:

Honourable judges, respected teachers, and friends, good morning. I oppose the motion that video games are harmful for children.

My friend has spoken about health, school, and behaviour. I will answer all three.

On health, the issue is time, not the activity. A child who reads for six hours straight will also have eye strain. The fault is in the duration, not the game. Limit the time and the harm disappears.

On school performance, video games can teach skills that schools struggle to teach. Strategy games build planning. Multiplayer games build teamwork. Puzzle games build pattern recognition. The same children my friend calls weak students are often the ones solving real-world problems online.

On behaviour, the link between game violence and real violence has been studied for thirty years and the strongest finding is that there is no strong link. Countries with the highest gaming rates, like South Korea and Japan, have very low youth violence.

Video games are not harmful for children. Time spent on them is what we should manage. Thank you.

For the motion (excerpt):

The question is no longer whether we can edit the human genome. CRISPR has settled that. The question is whether we should, and on what terms. I argue that genetic engineering of humans should be allowed, but only in tightly defined cases.

The first case is the treatment of a severe genetic disease. Sickle cell, cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease, these are conditions where a single gene causes a lifetime of suffering. We already accept gene therapy for living patients. Editing the embryo before implantation does the same job earlier, more cheaply, and once for all the patient's descendants. Refusing it on principle while accepting it in practice is incoherent.

The second case is the prevention of disease that the parents are known carriers of. A couple who both carry the cystic fibrosis gene can either accept a one-in-four chance their child has the disease, or use IVF with embryo selection, which we already permit, or use gene editing to correct the gene. If selection is allowed, editing should be. The outcome is the same.

The objection most often raised is the slippery slope to designer babies, intelligence, height, eye colour, and athletic ability. That objection is real, but the answer is regulation, not prohibition. We regulate what surgery is legal, what drugs are legal, and what reproductive technologies are legal. We can regulate this, too.

To ban genetic engineering outright is to refuse a tool that can end specific suffering, because it might one day be misused. By that standard, no medical technology would have ever been allowed. I support the motion.

Against the motion (excerpt):

The case my opponent has made depends on a regulatory regime he assumes will work. I will explain why it will not.

The technical line between treating sickle cell and selecting for height does not exist. Both use the same tool to change the same kind of genetic instruction. The line is moral, not biological. Moral lines drawn by regulators are pushed back every year. We have seen this with IVF, with surrogacy, with embryo selection itself. What was unthinkable in 1980 is routine now.

The second problem is access. Gene editing will not be free. The first families to have access will be wealthy families. The first generation of edited children will be a generation born to parents who can afford it. We will not abolish disease. We will redistribute it. The poor will still get sickle cell. The rich will not.

The third problem is consent. A patient consents to surgery. An embryo cannot consent to anything. We are making permanent choices on behalf of a person who does not yet exist, and those choices pass to every descendant. No medical ethics framework we have answers this question, because the question has never had to be answered before.

I am not arguing that suffering is good. I am arguing that the cure my opponent proposes carries harms he has not addressed, harms that do not show up in the first generation but compound across generations. For these reasons, I oppose the motion.

For the motion (excerpt):

Whenever a new communication technology arrives, the same conversation happens. Print was going to destroy memory. Radio was going to destroy print. Television was going to destroy radio. Each time, the prediction looked plausible. Each time, the technology turned out to add more than it took away. Social media is now in that conversation, and I argue that, like the technologies before it, it is a net positive for society.

Consider organising. The Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, the Hong Kong protests, the climate strikes, none of these movements would have reached the scale they did without platforms that let strangers find each other and coordinate without permission from a state or a newspaper. For groups that have historically been excluded from mainstream media, this is not a marginal benefit. It is the entire game.

Consider access to information. A medical student in a small town now has the same access to current research that a student at Harvard has. A teenager exploring their identity can find a community without leaving their bedroom. A small business can reach customers without buying advertising. The platforms have made expert knowledge, support networks, and customer access available at near-zero cost.

Yes, there are harms. Misinformation, mental health effects on teenagers, attention damage. These are real. But the question is not whether harms exist. Every technology has harms. The question is whether the harms outweigh the benefits, and the evidence does not support that they do.

Against the motion (excerpt):

My opponent has chosen the comparisons carefully. Print, radio, and television. None of those are correct comparisons. None of those technologies were optimised, in real time, by algorithms specifically trained to keep human attention regardless of consequence. Social media is a different category, and pretending otherwise is the central trick of the case for the motion.

The harms are not side effects. They are the business model. The platforms make money when users stay longer, and what keeps users longer is outrage, comparison, and fear. This is not an accident the platforms are working to fix. It is the engine they are tuning. To call this a net positive is to look at the benefits, accept the harms as collateral, and refuse to ask whether the harms are designed.

The mental health data on teenagers is now consistent across countries, across platforms, and across the decade since smartphones reached saturation. Anxiety and depression in teenage girls have risen sharply, and the rise tracks the spread of social media platforms with image-based feeds. This is not correlation looking for causation. It is causation that has been replicated.

The benefits my opponent listed are real, but they are not unique to social media. Communities of strangers organised before social media. Information was accessible before social media. Small businesses found customers before social media. The platforms made all of those things easier and made other things, deliberately, much worse.

I oppose the motion.

Good afternoon, judges, teachers, and fellow students. I am here today to argue that standardised testing should be abolished, and I want to walk you through three reasons, in order of importance.

The first reason is that standardised tests measure a narrow slice of intelligence and treat it as if it were the whole. They measure how well a student can answer a multiple-choice question under timed pressure. They do not measure curiosity, creativity, persistence, the ability to collaborate, or the ability to take a hard problem and live with it for a week before solving it. These are the qualities that matter in real work, and they are exactly the qualities the tests miss.

The second reason is that the tests are not fair. Test preparation is a multi-billion dollar industry. The students with the highest scores are not the smartest students. They are the students whose parents can afford the best preparation. We have built a system that calls itself meritocratic and is actually a sorting machine for family income.

The third reason is that the tests damage what they measure. Once a school's funding depends on its test scores, the school teaches to the test. Teachers stop teaching the parts of their subject that the test does not cover. Students stop being curious about ideas that the test does not reward. Over time, the curriculum shrinks to fit the exam, and we have no curriculum left, just a long preparation for one Saturday morning.

I am not arguing that we should not measure students. I am arguing that the tool we use to measure them has, for the past forty years, made them smaller than they would otherwise have been. We can do better. We can build assessments based on portfolios, projects, and teacher judgment. Other countries do this. Their students are not worse for it. They are better.

Standardised testing should be abolished. Thank you.

Good afternoon. The motion is that schools should teach financial literacy as a required subject. I oppose the motion, and I want to explain why I think the case for it, while well-intentioned, is mistaken.

I will start by agreeing with the motivation. Young adults in this country leave school with poor understanding of credit, debt, taxes, and saving. The consequences are real: families in financial trouble, students taking on loans they cannot model, retirement accounts left empty. The problem is real. What is wrong with the proposed solution?

The first problem is that adding financial literacy means removing something else. The school day is not infinite. Every hour given to a new subject is taken from an existing one. The motion assumes financial literacy is more important than the hour of mathematics, English, or science it would replace, and that case has not been made. If the goal is to give students tools for financial decisions, more mathematics is more useful than less mathematics combined with a survey course on credit cards.

The second problem is that financial literacy taught in school does not stick. The studies on this are clear and they are uncomfortable for the case in favour. A meta-analysis published by the Federal Reserve in 2019 looked at twenty years of school-based financial education programmes and found almost no measurable effect on adult financial behaviour. The students who took the courses made the same mistakes as the students who did not. Financial knowledge, it turns out, is learned through use, not through lectures.

The third problem is that the case for financial literacy in schools assumes the problem is education. It is not. The problem is a financial system designed to be confusing, with products built to extract value from people who do not read the fine print. Teaching students to read the fine print does not solve the underlying problem. Regulating the products does. We are sending children to fight a system when we could fix the system instead.

For these reasons, schools should not teach financial literacy as a required subject. Better mathematics, better consumer protection, and adult financial counselling at the moments people actually need it are more effective uses of resources. Thank you.

The examples above show what a debate speech looks like. For a step by step guide to actually writing one, structure, opening, body, rebuttal, and closing, see our debate speech writing guide. 

Prime Minister, Government (5 minutes):

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to this debate. The motion before us today is that this house would make voting mandatory in general elections. We, as today's proposition, strongly believe this motion is true.

Before we come to our actual argumentation, let us define what we mean. By "mandatory voting" we mean a legal requirement for every eligible adult citizen to either cast a ballot or formally abstain at every general election, with a small fine for non-compliance, modelled on the Australian system that has been in place since 1924.

We have structured our case as follows. I, as the first speaker, will be talking about why mandatory voting produces more representative governments. My deputy will then speak to why it strengthens democracy itself, and how the objections raised against it do not hold up under examination.

My first argument is representation. In voluntary-voting systems, the people who turn out to vote are not a representative sample of the population. They are older, wealthier, and more politically engaged than the average citizen. The result is governments that respond to the preferences of voters, not the preferences of the public. Australia, with mandatory voting, consistently produces governments whose composition reflects the population. The United States, with voluntary voting, does not. The motion is the simplest available fix.

For these reasons, we strongly believe this motion is true.

Leader of the Opposition (5 minutes):

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome from this side of the house. The proposition has presented its case. We, the opposition, do not accept it.

But before I come to my own arguments, let us first have a look at what the Prime Minister has said. He claimed that mandatory voting produces more representative governments. The example he gave was Australia. What he did not mention is that Australia's politics, with mandatory voting, has produced just as much polarisation, just as much populism, and just as much voter dissatisfaction as any voluntary-voting system. The supposed benefit does not survive contact with the data.

Now my own arguments. We will make two points.

First, mandatory voting violates a principle democracies are supposed to honour: the freedom not to participate. The right to vote includes the right to refuse to vote. A citizen who has examined the candidates and concluded none deserve their support is exercising democratic agency by abstaining. Mandatory voting forces them to either lie or pay a fine. Neither is the behaviour of a free citizen.

Second, mandatory voting does not solve the problem the proposition identifies. The proposition says voluntary voting produces unrepresentative outcomes. Mandatory voting produces uninformed outcomes. A voter compelled to vote without engagement chooses largely at random or by superficial cues. The proposition has traded one distortion for another.

For these reasons, we oppose the motion.

Deputy Prime Minister, Government (5 minutes):

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome back from the proposition. The Leader of the Opposition has raised two objections. I will respond to both and then develop the second arm of our case.

On the freedom-not-to-vote argument, the opposition has confused freedom with disengagement. The Australian system already protects the right not to vote; citizens can show up and submit a blank ballot, which counts as turnout but not as a vote for any candidate. The freedom is preserved. What is removed is the freedom to ignore the question entirely, and that freedom is what the proposition argues citizens of a democracy should not have.

On the uninformed-voter argument, the opposition assumes that voluntary voters are informed. The data shows they are not. Voluntary-voting systems have voters whose information levels are no higher than those of mandatory-voting systems. The opposition has compared an idealised voluntary voter to an actual mandatory voter. The fair comparison is actual to actual, and on that comparison, the gap closes.

Now my own argument: mandatory voting strengthens democracy itself. When everyone votes, parties cannot win by mobilising their base while suppressing the other side's turnout. They have to compete for the median voter. The politics that result is less polarised and more responsive. The American experience is the strongest evidence for this; entire campaign strategies are built around turnout suppression and base mobilisation, which would be impossible under mandatory voting.

For these reasons, we strongly support the motion.

Deputy Leader of the Opposition (5 minutes):

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome for the last time from today's opposition. It is now my pleasure to summarise this debate and respond to the proposition's second speaker.

A first major clash was on representation. The proposition told us that mandatory voting produces representative governments. We had to find that the actual evidence from Australia does not support this claim. Australian politics is no less polarised and no more representative than comparable voluntary-voting democracies.

A second major clash was on freedom. The proposition argued that the freedom not to vote is preserved by allowing blank ballots. We have to point out that requiring a citizen to physically attend a polling station to register their disengagement is not the same as preserving their freedom to disengage. It is a procedural fiction.

A third major clash, raised by the Deputy Prime Minister, was on whether mandatory voting reduces polarisation by forcing parties to compete for the median voter. This is the proposition's strongest argument, and we should be honest about it. The answer is that polarisation has many causes, such as media fragmentation, social sorting, primary systems and turnout is only one of them. Australia, with mandatory voting, still has polarisation. The proposition's mechanism is real but small.

And for all these reasons, I beg you to oppose the motion.

Government opening (Prime Minister, 7 minutes):

The world of work is changing faster than at any point since the industrial revolution. Within fifteen years, between thirty and forty percent of jobs that exist today will be done by machines. This is not a prediction made by activists. It is a prediction made by McKinsey, the OECD, and the central banks of three G7 countries. The question before this house is not whether automation will displace workers. The question is what we do when it does.

Our argument is that universal basic income is the right response, and we define universal basic income as a regular cash payment, sufficient to cover basic needs, paid to every adult citizen, with no work requirement and no means testing.

We will make three arguments. First, that the alternatives, which are extending the existing welfare system and retraining programmes, have already been tried and have already failed. Second, that universal basic income removes the trap that pushes displaced workers into worse jobs rather than better ones. Third, that the cost, properly calculated, is not the cost the opposition will claim it is.

The opposition will argue that universal basic income is too expensive, that it will discourage work, and that it is unfair to taxpayers. We will answer each of those objections in turn. But the foundation of our case is that we are not choosing between universal basic income and the status quo. The status quo is ending. We are choosing between universal basic income and a worse, more chaotic alternative.

I now hand over to my colleague, who will develop the first two arguments in detail.

Opposition opening (Leader of the Opposition, 7 minutes):

The motion before this house is that universal basic income is the right response to automation. We oppose the motion, and we will show that universal basic income is the wrong response in three specific ways.

First, the motion assumes the scale of the problem the proposer has described. The McKinsey numbers the proposer cited are upper-bound estimates. The lower bound, from the same studies, is closer to ten percent of jobs displaced over fifteen years. This is significant, but it is not catastrophic, and a response calibrated to the upper bound will overshoot massively if the lower bound is correct.

Second, the proposed solution is poorly designed even if the problem is exactly as described. Universal basic income is paid to everyone, including people who do not need it. This means a large fraction of the budget is wasted on transfers to people who are not displaced. Targeted support, paid to actual displaced workers for the duration of their displacement, costs a fraction as much and produces better outcomes. The proposer will say this is paternalistic. We will say it is rational.

Third, the universal basic income proposal carries political risks the proposer has not addressed. A programme paid to everyone is also a programme that everyone, including high earners, has a stake in keeping. Once introduced, it is impossible to remove or reform. We are not just choosing a policy. We are committing every future government to the policy, regardless of whether it works.

We will develop each of these points in our subsequent speeches.

Topic: "This house would replace the jury system with judicial panels."

Speaker (third government, 5 minutes):

The opposition has built its case around two claims. First, that juries represent the conscience of the community. Second, that a panel of judges, however expert, is dangerously narrow. I want to address both, and then make a positive argument the opposition has not yet engaged with.

On the first claim, the conscience of the community is a beautiful phrase but it does not survive contact with data. Studies of jury decisions across multiple jurisdictions have consistently found that juries are influenced by factors that are not the evidence. The race of the defendant. The race of the jurors. The attractiveness of the lawyers. The order in which witnesses appear. None of these correlate with guilt or innocence, but all of them predict the verdict. If the jury is the conscience of the community, the conscience of the community is not what we have been claiming.

On the second claim, narrowness, the opposition assumes a panel of judges will share the same biases. But a panel can be designed not to. Three judges from different professional backgrounds, with different career paths, deliberating in writing with reasoned decisions, produces a kind of accountability juries cannot produce. A jury vote is a black box. A panel decision is a published document with reasons that can be appealed.

Now my positive argument. The strongest case for replacing juries is not that juries are bad. It is that juries are unreviewable. When a jury gets a verdict wrong, there is no mechanism to identify what went wrong, because juries do not explain themselves. A panel decision can be appealed on its reasoning. A jury verdict can only be appealed on procedural grounds. This means the legal system has no way to learn from its mistakes when juries make them. We are running a system at scale that cannot improve. That is not a feature. It is a defect.

The opposition will respond that the panel system removes the citizen from the legal system. I would respond that the citizen has been removed already, by complexity, by length of trials, by the cost of participation. The current jury is not a randomly drawn citizen. It is whoever could afford to take three weeks off work. Replacing that with a panel of trained reviewers does not remove the citizen. It acknowledges that the citizen is already gone, and replaces the fiction with something accountable.

I urge you to support the motion. Thank you.

Person A: Coffee is better than tea. It tastes stronger, it works faster, and it has a culture around it that tea cannot match. When you say "let's go for coffee," you mean let's go somewhere and talk. When you say "let's have tea," you mean let's sit at home. Coffee is a public drink. Tea is a private drink. Public drinks are more social.

Person B: That is a very narrow definition of culture. Tea has a far richer cultural history than coffee. Britain, Japan, China, India, every major tea-drinking country has developed elaborate ceremonies, social rituals, and class signalling around how tea is prepared and served. Coffee culture is forty years old. Tea culture is two thousand.

Person A: History is not the same as relevance. Coffee is what most working adults drink today. The market has decided.

Person B: The market has decided what is profitable. That is a different question from what is better. Tea has lower caffeine, lower acidity, and a much wider range of flavour. The reason coffee dominates is that it is faster and more addictive, not that it is better.

Person A: Faster and more functional is part of being better. A drink that helps you do your work is doing more for you than a drink that requires a quiet afternoon.

Person B: That argument only works if work is the only thing that matters. The case for tea is that it slows you down on purpose, and slowing down is a thing humans need.

Affirmative (arguing liberty should be prioritised):

The motion forces a choice between liberty and security, and I argue that when the two conflict, liberty should win. My case rests on three claims.

First, liberty is the foundational value. Security exists to protect liberty. A society that has security but not liberty has a prison, not a country. The order of importance is built into the definition of what we are trying to protect.

Second, the trade-off proposed is not symmetric. Sacrificing some liberty for some security usually produces a small security gain and a large liberty loss. The post-9/11 surveillance regime is the clearest case. We accepted broad surveillance powers in exchange for what was promised as a meaningful security improvement. Twenty years later, we know the security improvement was small and the liberty loss was permanent.

Third, liberty has a self-correcting property that security does not. A free society can identify and fix its own mistakes, because criticism is allowed. A secure-but-unfree society has no mechanism for course correction, because the criticism that would identify the mistake has been silenced. Liberty preserves the conditions under which we can be wrong without being punished, and being wrong without punishment is how societies improve.

For these reasons, liberty wins.

Negative (arguing security should be prioritised):

I do not argue that security beats liberty in every case. I argue that, in the cases the motion contemplates, security comes first because liberty depends on it.

First, liberty without security is not liberty. A citizen who is free in theory but cannot leave their home because of street violence is not free. A worker who is free to take any job but is shot on the way to work is not free. The liberties we care about, freedom of speech, of association, of movement, of property, all assume a baseline of physical safety. When that baseline fails, every other liberty becomes theoretical.

Second, the cases where liberty and security genuinely conflict are smaller than the affirmative claims. Most security measures, police, courts, contract enforcement, do not reduce liberty in any meaningful sense. They produce the conditions liberty needs. The affirmative has confused a small set of edge cases with the overall relationship.

Third, even in the edge cases, the right answer depends on the threat. A society at peace can prioritise liberty almost without limit. A society at war cannot. The affirmative wants a single rule for all conditions, and no such rule exists. Security comes first when security is what is at risk.

For these reasons, security wins.

Speaker for Nature:

Identical twins separated at birth and raised in different families show striking similarities, in IQ, in personality, in political views, in the careers they end up in. The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart followed dozens of such pairs and found the same pattern again and again. Twins who had never met chose similar professions, married similar partners, and held similar values. The environment was different. The outcomes were similar. The simplest explanation is that the genetics did most of the work.

This is not the only evidence. Heritability estimates for traits like height, intelligence, mental illness, and even political orientation consistently come in between forty and seventy percent. That does not mean environment does not matter. It means genetics matters more than the nurture side of this debate has historically been willing to admit.

The implication is uncomfortable but unavoidable. Many of the outcomes we attribute to upbringing, education, or social environment are partly outcomes of inherited disposition. Acknowledging this does not condemn anyone. It just means our policies and our parenting should account for what genetics already determines.

Speaker for nurture:

The twin studies are real and the heritability numbers are real. They also do not say what the nature side claims they say.

Heritability is a population statistic. It tells you how much of the variation in a population is due to genetic variation, given the range of environments in that population. It does not tell you how much of an individual's traits are caused by genes. A trait can have eighty percent heritability and still be enormously responsive to environmental change. Height in many countries has heritability above eighty percent, and yet average height has risen by ten centimetres in seventy years, because nutrition improved. The genes did not change. The environment did. The trait moved a long way.

The same is true of every trait the nature side cites. Intelligence is highly heritable, and average measured intelligence has risen by thirty IQ points across the twentieth century. That cannot be explained by genetics. It can only be explained by environment, schooling, nutrition, the demands modern life makes on cognition.

Identical twins reared apart show similarities, but they also show real differences, in mental health, in life outcomes, in happiness. The similarities are striking only because we expected them to be zero. They are not zero, but they are not everything. The nurture case has never been that the environment is everything. It has been that environment matters in ways the nature case keeps trying to dismiss.

Opposing argument: "We should ban single-use plastics because they harm the environment. Plastic bags, straws, and bottles take hundreds of years to decompose, and they end up in oceans, killing marine life. The science is clear, and the harm is well documented."

Rebuttal:

My opponent's argument is built on three claims, that single-use plastics harm the environment, that they take hundreds of years to decompose, and that the science is clear. I will address each in turn, and show that the policy proposed does not follow from the facts presented.

First, the harm claim. Yes, plastic in the ocean is harmful. But the proposed ban is on consumer single-use plastics, which account for less than ten percent of ocean plastic. The remaining ninety percent comes from fishing gear, industrial waste, and a handful of polluted rivers in countries with poor waste management. Banning straws in our country does not address ninety percent of the problem. It addresses ten percent of ten percent.

Second, the decomposition claim. Plastics taking hundreds of years to decompose is true, but it is also true of glass, of aluminium foil, and of much of what we replace plastic with. The lifecycle analysis on plastic bag bans consistently shows that the cotton bags that replace them have to be reused over a hundred times to break even environmentally. Most are not reused that often. The replacement is worse than the thing being replaced.

Third, the science is clear claim. The science on the harm is clear. The science on the policy response is not. There is no peer-reviewed evidence that consumer plastic bans, in countries that have tried them, reduce ocean plastic by a measurable amount. If the policy were as effective as my opponent claims, that evidence would exist. It does not.

I am not arguing that we should not act on plastic pollution. I am arguing that we should act where the evidence says action will work, on fishing gear, on industrial waste, on the rivers that produce most of the problem. Banning consumer plastics feels like action, but the data does not support that it is.

Moderator: Good evening, and welcome to tonight's debate. The motion is "this house would ban private cars from city centres." Speaking for the motion is Speaker A. Speaking against is Speaker B. Speaker A, you have three minutes to open.

Speaker A: Thank you. The case for banning cars from city centres is straightforward. Cars take up enormous amounts of urban space, they pollute the air for everyone, and they kill pedestrians. A city centre without cars is quieter, safer, and more pleasant to be in. Cities that have done it, Oslo, parts of Madrid, Ghent, report higher footfall, more business activity, and better public health within two years. The evidence is in. The question is why other cities have not followed.

Moderator: Speaker B, your three minutes.

Speaker B: The cities my opponent named are real, and so are the benefits. What is also real is the cost, and my opponent did not mention it. Restricting cars from city centres does not eliminate the trips. It pushes them to the edges, to ring roads, to suburbs. Pollution moves with them. The people who lose are not the wealthy who live in the city centre. They are the workers who have to commute to it, who now park further away and walk in. The case for the ban looks better in the centre and worse if you stand at the edge.

Speaker A: That is fair, and I would respond by pointing out that the cities I mentioned all paired the ban with serious public transport investment. Oslo did not just remove cars. It built the tram network and the bike lanes that replaced them. The ban only works as part of a package, and where the package has been implemented, the workers my opponent described have alternatives.

Speaker B: And where the package has not been implemented, the ban makes things worse. My opponent's argument holds in cities that have already invested in transit. In cities that have not, banning cars without the alternative is just punishing people who cannot afford to live close in. The policy is not portable. It is a policy that works for rich cities with rich governments, and we should be honest about that.

Moderator: Closing statements, two minutes each.

Speaker A: I accept the point that the policy needs the package. I do not accept that this means we should not pursue it. The package is what cities should aim for, and the ban is the part that triggers the rest. Without the ban, cities never invest in transit, because there is no pressure. With the ban, the investment becomes necessary. That is how change happens.

Speaker B: I accept the point that pressure produces investment. I do not accept that the people who pay the cost of the pressure should be the ones who can least afford it. A policy that makes things worse for years before it makes them better is a policy designed by people who do not have to live through the years. I oppose the motion.

Moderator: Thank you both. The debate is now open to the floor.

You've got a model to work from. The harder part starts now, adapting the structure to your topic, making the arguments actually defensible, and getting it tight enough to deliver in the time you're given. If you would rather not spend the night doing that, the team behind this site can get debate speech written for you, a complete, structured debate or debate speech within 24 hours, formatted for the time limit, with real arguments and rebuttals built in, ready to read out loud.

For debate specific delivery techniques, body language, voice, handling interruptions, see the debate tips guide.