Debate Worksheets

Name:                                Class:                                                             Table:                                    

Debate Proposition: “A strong government is necessary to protect the rights and well-being of citizens.”

Affirmative Arguments (YES, a strong government is needed to protect the rights and well-being of citizens)	Negative Arguments (NO, a strong government isn’t necessary to protect the rights and well-being of citizens.)
Affirmative Argument 1 Topic: Working Conditions The Status Quo (everything is bad!): Why The Status Quo is Bad: What My Plan Is: How My Plan Will Fix the Status Quo:	Negative Argument 1 Topic: Political Bosses The Status Quo (everything is good!) How the affirmative plan will change the status quo (and this is bad!) The bad results of the affirmative plan

Name:                            Class:                                                             Table:                                    

Debate Proposition: “A strong government is necessary to protect the rights and well-being of citizens.”

Affirmative Arguments (YES, a strong government is needed to protect the rights and well-being of citizens)	Negative Arguments (NO, a strong government isn’t necessary to protect the rights and well-being of citizens.)
Affirmative Argument 2 Topic: Monopolies and Trusts The Status Quo (everything is bad): Why The Status Quo is Bad: What My Plan Is: How My Plan Will Fix the Status Quo:	Negative Argument 2 Topic: Eugenics The Status Quo (everything is good!) How the affirmative plan will change the status quo (and this is bad!) The bad results of the affirmative plan

Name:                               Class:                                                             Table:                                    

Debate Proposition: “A strong government is necessary to protect the rights and well-being of citizens.”

Affirmative Arguments (YES, a strong government is needed to protect the rights and well-being of citizens)	Negative Arguments (NO, a strong government isn’t necessary to protect the rights and well-being of citizens.)
Affirmative Argument 3 Topic: Food and Drug Regulation The Status Quo (everything is bad!): Why The Status Quo is Bad: What My Plan Is: How My Plan Will Fix the Status Quo:	Negative Argument 3 Topic: Chinese Exclusion Act The Status Quo (everything is good!) How the affirmative plan will change the status quo (and this is bad!) The bad results of the affirmative plan

Name:                            Class:                                                             Table:                                    

Debate Proposition: “A strong government is necessary to protect the rights and well-being of citizens.”

Affirmative Arguments (YES, a strong government is needed to protect the rights and well-being of citizens)	Negative Arguments (NO, a strong government isn’t necessary to protect the rights and well-being of citizens.)
Affirmative Argument 4 Topic: Environmentalism and Conservation The Status Quo (everything is bad!): Why The Status Quo is Bad: What My Plan Is: How My Plan Will Fix the Status Quo:	Negative Argument 4 Topic: Political Bosses The Status Quo (everything is good!) How the affirmative plan will change the status quo (and this is bad!) The bad results of the affirmative plan

Notes, Information and Sample Argument

-Our project at the end of this unit will be a formal debate. Every debate has a proposition. A proposition is a statement that claims something needs to change. The proposition for this debate will be what you wrote about in your Initial Activity:

            “ A strong government is necessary to protect the rights and well-being of citizens.”

-In a debate, there are two sides: affirmative and negative.

-The affirmative side affirms the proposition (agrees with it!)

-The negative side negates the proposition (disagrees with it!)

-The affirmative side always believes that change is good, and that the “status quo” (current situation) is bad.

-Our position is that “A strong government is necessary to protect the rights and well-being of citizens.” The affirmative case agrees with this- that we need to make a change and have a strong(er) government.

Instructions for how to write an affirmative argument and a model argument are below. The 4 affirmative arguments should be based on topics we've learned this unit: 

a) Regulating monopolies and trusts
b) Working conditions
c) Food and drug regulation
d) Environmentalism and conservation 

-To make an affirmative argument (agreeing with proposition) you need to do 4 things:

1)   State what the “status quo” is

2)   Describe why it is bad

3)   Say what your plan is

4)   Explain why your plan will eliminate the problem

-The model argument is one based on working conditions. 

1) (STATE WHAT The STATUS QUO IS) A strong government is needed to protect the rights and well-being of citizens. Currently the government can do nothing to protect workers from neglect and exploitation by big business. 

2) (DESCRIBE WHY ITS BAD) Workers are being forced to work in unsafe conditions and face the risk of injury and death. Steelworkers in Pennsylvania have to work 12 hour a day, 6 days a week and constantly face the risk of injury and death if they make a mistake while tired. Women workers in the garment business work in factories that aren’t fireproof, and recently over 140 of them died at the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Women and children are exploited and placed in dangerous positions because they can be paid less and easily fired. 

3) (SAY WHAT YOUR PLAN IS) This situation needs to change. Our plan is to give the government the power it needs to regulate business so that it can protect workers. We need new laws that limit the amount of hours children can work, that ensure workers can form unions to collectively bargain with their employees, that force companies to have working sprinklers and enough exits in case of fire. 

4) (WHY WILL YOUR PLAN ELIMINATE THE PROBLEM?) If we do that, we can ensure that the rights and well-being of workers are protected. We can ensure that nobody will die because their employer failed to take the necessary steps for safety. We can ensure that being a worker doesn’t mean you become a slave completely at the mercy of your employer.

Environmentalism and Conservation Documents

“How the Other Half Lives” by Jacob Riis (excerpted)

Where Mulberry Street crooks like...is “the Bend,” the foul core of New York’s slums...The city authorities, moved by the angry protests of ten years of sanitary reform effort, have decided that it is too much and must come down. Another Paradise Park will take its place and let in sunlight and air to work such transformation as at the Five Points, around the corner of the next block. Never was change more urgently needed. Around “the Bend” cluster the bulk of the tenements that are stamped as altogether bad, even by the optimists of the Health Department. Incessant raids cannot keep down the crowds that make them their home. In the scores of back alleys, of stable lanes and hidden byways, of which the rent collector alone can keep track, they share such shelter as the ramshackle structures afford with every kind of abomination rifled from the dumps and ash-barrels of the city. Here, too, shunning the light, skulks the unclean beast of dishonest idleness. “The Bend” is the home of the tramp as well as the rag-picker.

“Our National Parks” by John Muir (excerpted)

The tendency nowadays to wander in wildernesses is delightful to see. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. Awakening from the stupefying effects of the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury, they are trying as best they can to mix and enrich their own little ongoings with those of Nature, and to get rid of rust and disease. Briskly venturing and roaming...jumping from rock to rock, feeling the life of them, learning the songs of them, panting in whole-souled exercise, and rejoicing in deep, long-drawn breaths of pure wildness. This is fine and natural and full of promise. So also is the growing interest in the care and preservation of forests and wild places in general, and in the half wild parks and gardens of towns.

Working Conditions: Child Labor Quotations

"There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work."

-- Lewis Hine

Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.

--Grace Abbott

“They began work at 5:30 and quit at 7 at night…I have seen the hair torn out of their heads by the machinery, their scalps torn off, and yet not a single tear was shed, while the poodle dogs were loved and caressed and carried to the seashore.”  

--Mother Jones

“Child labor perpetuates poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, population growth, and other social problems.”

--Kailash Satyarthi