PHOTO: My group at the camp, World Schools format in English

Anja Serc is a veteran of the Slovenian debate experience. This is her tenth high school summer camp, and she has gone from being a wide-eyed beginner to an experienced veteran instructor. She is emblematic of the Slovenian debate program, now in its eleventh year after being started by the Open Society Institute. Under the direction of Bojana Skrt it has become one of the premier debate programs in the world both in terms of penetrating Slovenian society with a debate culture as well as representing at all levels around the world.

This summer sixty students and ten faculty have gathered in the lovely mountain village of Tolmin, where it is cool and lovely as opposed to Ljubljana down on the plains where it has been fairly hot. The camp began on Saturday and ends tomorrow, another Saturday. The camp is being held in a high school boarding dormitory which has lots of classroom space and nice rooms even if the meals could, at times, be a bit better. No meals have been bad, it’s just that I usually expect a little more from breakfast.

One of the major goals of this camp is to guide the transition of Slovenian high school debate from the Karl Popper format of debate to the World Schools format. The speeches are longer and there are more of them, and cross examination has been replaced by points of information. Half the motions are prepared and half are impromptu. The reply speech adds a whole new element to the debate which the students seem to be enjoying.

<== Team prepares for a debate

The days are long and rigorous, but the students seem extremely enthusiastic and are tuned in and on time. The days begin at 9 AM and end as late as 9 or 10 PM, and consist of one lecture, a long series of drills and exercises on the subject of the lecture, and two or more debates, each with a long critique. About half of the students are preparing, receiving instruction and debating in English. This is not because Slovenia is moving away from debating in the native language, because domestic debate will continue in Slovenian, but because there is a new emphasis on international competition, Slovenia increasingly hosts and attends international tournaments in the WSDC format in English. Next year the plan for the camp is to include both a domestic track in Slovene and an international track in English, so that students from other countries will be invited as well.

This is my fourth such camp as an instructor and I can see with each year the increasing skills and seriousness of the students and the staff. What was once a mostly social activity with an eye towards instilling civic virtue has become increasingly a more intense intellectual activity designed to impart critical success skills to the students as well as prepare them for more intense levels of competition.

<== Slovenia WSDC team - Filip Dobranic. Maja Cimerman, Bojana Skrt, Anna Kerr, Blashka Hunski and Teo Radic

The Slovenian national team is also here preparing for the World Schools Debating Championship to be held starting next week in South Korea. These five students have been preparing for a full year for this contest, and they fly out on Saturday. I have been debating against and with them as well as helping them with the prepared motions that have been announced for the tournament. When you combine this with my other duties of lecturing and running exercises and drills with the English language group, I have been quite busy. I spent last fall on sabbatical in Slovenia and I worked intensively with them during that period as well. I feel very close to them even though they are not “my” team. I am very proud of their progress and hope they do well in Korea. Slovenia is a tiny country (2 million) and we will see how it competes against huge countries like India and Indonesia, as well as debate giants like England and Australia.

For more information about ZIP, the Slovenian national debate program, go to www.ljudmila.org/debata. You can contact Bojana at bojana.skrt@siol.net .  To follow the progress of this year’s World Schools Debating Championship see Claire Ryan’s blog at http://www.schoolsdebate.com/blog/ .