Debating and Public Speaking
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In many circles the ESU is best known for its major educational activity, the promotion of debate as an educational tool. The English-Speaking Union Centre for Speech and Debate, established in 1995 to coordinate the organisation's work in persuasive spoken English, is one of the world's major supporters of formal debate. In the United Kingdom it runs the national championships in debating for schools (the ESU Schools Mace, the largest and oldest competition of its kind in the world) and universities (the John Smith Memorial Mace, named after the former Labour party leader John Smith who was a member of the winning team of the competition in 1962 and died in 1994). Other winners of the universities mace include Charles Kennedy, former leader of the Liberal Democrats. The ESU also runs competitions in mooting, a form of legal argument, and public speaking. The flagship moot of the ESU is the English Speaking Union Moot.
The Centre teaches debate through outreach programmes, teacher training and the provision of resources. It offers teaching support to overseas ESUs and also selects and trains the England Schools Debating Team which competes in the World Schools Debating Championships each year. The ESU hosted that tournament in London in 1999.
Read more about this topic: English-Speaking Union
Famous quotes containing the words debating and, debating, public and/or speaking:
“Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“This our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Here the term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, of a form of life.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)