I have believed in the past, that debate is a bit isloated “sport” and that if you use arguments and styles that we use in debate, that you will not be as greatly apreciated in general life. Don’t get me wrong, I TRULY believe that debating will help you in your life, and luckily I got another piece of evidence to support that.

Let me tell you where. There’s a TV show on the Slovenian national TV called the pyramid (piramida). It should be an argumentative discussion, because the show features three publi figures (mostly known people, pop stars and simmmilar) that get to speak about important topics. Each person gets a minute to present his/her oppinion on a given topic and they can interupt the other speaker while her/she speaks with a 30 seconds speach/reply. During the whole show people that watch the show can send sms-es or call to vote for the person that they believe makes most sense.

One of the Korea Worlds team debater was invited to the show just yesterday (his name is Filip DobraniÄ? and he recieved the award for the best speaker in EFL (english as a foreign language) at the Korea world schools. I took a couple of my Serbian guests to see the show, so I got to see it live.

Filip won the show, so he is advancing to the semi finals. And I must say that I was a bit surprised, not because I would not believe that Filip could do it (heck he won a couple of debates agains me, or probably all of them) but I was sure that the other two guests (one semi popular singer and one theatre and TV actress) will use more populistic arguments (and they did) and that people will like them more. I have seen parts of previous episodes of this show, and people that used most populistic arguments usually won the contest.

Filip did a good job, and it the difference between him and the others was very obvious, he did show, that it is not his first time that he does public speaking.

It is nice to have a comparisign between debaters and non-debaters in such a show, where you see them side to side and you can see, that we are doing something good when we teach people how to debate.