Débats anglais

PRO: 1st Speaker

DEFINITIONS:

• School attendance (=the action of going to school, and in our case is mandatory + in reality still mandatory)

• mandatory annual graduation exams (=exams passed athe end of an year in order to test a student’s knowledge gained during that year)

CASE DIVISION:

• I, as a first speaker, going to talk about current situation and first reasons why we should make school attendance optional, because of absenteism and other reasons.
• Catalina, as a second speaker, will talk about the freedom of choice of the student & the importance of knowledge which can be appropriated by ourselves, on our owns
• Lastly, Smaranda will sum up our arguments and the hole debate.

1st argument:

While most of the students miss school some days during their elementary and secondary years for occasional sickness  or family problems, some students miss school far more often and for other reasons. One conservative estimate is that 10 percent of students miss at least 10 percent of school days each year. ( source: www.brookings.edu) Some teachers are far abler to engage students in class than others are. In many cases, students choose to skip classes as they don’t find particular classes interesting and they get bored very easily or a certain teacher does not get to him. Our house believes that making school attendance optional would engage students more in their education, leaving them the choice whether going or not to a certain class, based on their interest in that subject. Leaving this choice to the latitude of the students would let them focus on whatever they enjoy, improving this way their attitude in class and their results this way.

CON: 2nd speaker

RECONSTRUCT OUR 1ST ARGUMENT (WORK RHYTM, MATERIALS USED THAT CANNOT BE PROVIDED, MOTIVATION)

COUNTER ARGUMENT

1ST ARGUMENT:

School is an institution providing the necessary education for decades. Education systems in the world are constantly changing in order to provide a qualitative education to students. By education we understand all the structure that stays behind: teachers, parents, libraries, workshops and even optional courses at school providing you a larger point of view. Teachers usually have a vast experience in that domain and their role cannot be rejected: besides presenting the lesson, they have a big amount of knowledge that can be seen by examples and even personal individual advice based on every student personality. There is someone out there, tracking you and your evolution, trying to make you improve your skills. Making school attendance optional, there will be no possibility of tracking students as individuals and no way of working on weak points with them. Yes, the mandatory exams would prove at the end of the year whether a certain student worked or not during the year but how would this type of exam prove an implication, an evolution or an effort during the year? We think it wouldn’t. Exams during the year are a great way of making the student conscient of his current situation and leaving him the opportunity to improve himself by looking at his errors. By making school attendance optional there would be no control to the students and a lot of freedom would certainly affect their success rate, of course In some cases. There would be a lack of control of the students and we can not pretend all students would fit in this “optional school attendance system”. In this way, there will certainly be a need for some students to follow all classes, but it couldn’t be done as, school attendance can not then be imposed to a certain amount of students.

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