Quality of Education

There is no other tool as powerful and vigorous as debate that boosts young people’s critical thinking and presentation skills, all while enhancing the role of education as a lifetime partner. Students spend significant time researching, learning to learn, discussing with their colleagues, and practicing for competitions.

This culture of self-directed learning and support for the need for cognition stays with debaters through their entire life and helps them far beyond the end of their debate club engagement.

Debate participation promotes innovative thinking and approaches that most students didn’t know existed. 
Debate challenges students to ask why to explore the thinking and reasoning behind ideas we usually take for granted.

It helps them find a way of expressing ideas and making meaningful concepts.

Throughout the involvement, they work with an ever-growing array of complex information that needs to be arranged understandably, learning to spot patterns and create mind maps that allow them to engage with new information more thoroughly.

On top of that, debating influences other aspects of education besides itself: it improves a wide variety of academic skills, such as written and oral communication and reading comprehension, but also professional ones, like working in a team, collaboration, and problem-solving.

Students become comfortable with new concepts and unfamiliar language. They mature cognitively and emotionally by engaging seriously with current, real-world problems and discussing impacts on different stakeholders.

Moreover, they learn how to empathize and change perspectives. Disagreeing constructively is key benefit debaters take from our activities.

Debate coaches, educators, and trainers using debate methodology are adept at working with children and young people, transferring skills that can significantly impact the quality of their life.

Every lesson or exercise is constructed to engage with the classroom or group as thoroughly and dynamically as possible.

Using debate methodology means putting learners in the "driver's seat." Students are active drivers of the learning process and understand that they control the process. This makes them more engaged and contributes much more to the overall process.

IDEA’s trainers come from and train different societal groups: debate societies, youth centers, educational organizations, schools, and universities. Our programs occur in schools, universities, youth clubs, and informal youth groups.

Debate methodology has almost no barriers and can be used with children and young people from various backgrounds.

It can also occur in different settings, from schools to libraries, and youth clubs to a city park, requiring no investment in infrastructure.

This makes our approach one of the most easily scalable and transferable ways of empowering children and young people, ensuring an immediate and lasting impact on the quality of their educational opportunities.

One of the most significant rewards of this process is allowing the youth to take control of their education and internalize it as a never-ending quest for knowledge.

Years spent debating are years of intense personal development, usually omitted from ‘normal’, everyday educational environments. Under our programs, young people transform into active citizens and learn about responsibility and individual initiative.