Debate: 13th of Jan. '14

Today the debate class practiced our reasoning skills on the motion: THB mothers should stay home and look after their children. We discussed how we would define the motion if we were the affirmative team and how we would oppose the proposal if we were the opposition team. We discussed this with the whole class. I believe my friends and I came up with some good points. We decided that mothers in this motion should be women with working husbands while children should be anyone under 5 years old. When mothers are defined as women with working husbands, it means that when they are on their paternity leave, the household's economy will not be as much be disrupted. However, this creates a controversy between sexes. Why should mothers have the chance to stay at home and relate with their children? Why can't fathers have the chance to do the same thing? The affirmative side will then argue that it is not fair for women to not have these rights after carrying the baby in their wombs for 9 months and finally giving birth to them at that point. Nowadays is the era of women empowerment. Thus to limit women to not be able to have paternity leaves are contradictory with the objective of today's era. Basically that is an overview of how the debate practice went. I believe that this practice is very useful because it helped me to develop my critical thinking and therefore improve when I case build in my next debate. This skill can however be applied to other subjects not just debate. For example, in Business Management, I can use critical thinking to analyze a given case study more effectively.