That debatable time of year...

Can it really be a year since I drove over to University of Aston one autumn evening in 2007, and had the most terrifying and also rewarding evening in years?

Once again the opening rounds of the national schools competition Debating Matters are taking place across the land, and this year the venue for me, as one of the judges, was Wolverhampton High School for Girls. The competition has presumably grown so much in the past year that there are now two opening rounds in the West Midlands instead of one. Which is utterly fantastic, as Debating Matters must be one of the finest cerebral experiences you can have, either as a sixth former or as a judge.

This year the three subjects for debate in the opening round were

• Space Travel - Manned or unmanned?
• Privacy
• Congestion charge

The passing year had not dimmed the memory of the sheer tedium of ecotourism and the various arcane offsetting schemes that I had to ingest for last year's competition, so naturally I avoided the congestion charge like the plague. This was a shame because it produced the liveliest debate of the night. Having done quite a lot of the recommended reading on space travel and privacy, then, and considered some tricky questions to ask the hapless debaters, I drove off to Wolverhampton and managed to arrive on time by some quirk of luck entirely unrelated to the degree of journey planning carried out.

In fact I felt like crap; I had done all day, so I'd worked from home, secure in the belief that the sight of me rocking back and forth in physical pain might cause some consternation among my colleagues. But by the end of the evening, I felt great, and just like last year, the whole experience gave me a boost of energy that lasted for days. I think I wrote words to this effect in my blog posting on this subject last (academic) year, but it bears repeating. When you are privileged enough to share a room with these 17 year olds who are unbelievably well prepared and arguing so passionately and skilfully, all your anxieties about our dumbed down society just fall away and you remember that the very best of humanity can prevail in the most unlikely of circumstances.

All of this was underlined by the content of the Space Travel debate. I plead guilty to having been completely ignorant about the manned vs unmanned debate prior to preparing for Debating Matters, whereas I am now a veteran of over 3 articles from The Space Review!! The arguments in favour of manned space exploration are unapologetically humanist. It's not even a pro-science versus anti-science thing. Right now, to take a purely pro-science stance involves arguing for unmanned not manned space travel - the progress that robotic and other forms of unmanned exploration have made in a number of fields vastly outweighs the scientific achievements of the Apollo missions. But apparently, as a result of those Apollo missions, admissions to undergraduate science courses doubled in the US, as did PhD applications. The very existence of Silicon Valley is testimony to the inspiration that the moon landings created among us earth-dwellers. Manned space travel is also extremely unsafe and bloody expensive! So it's pretty difficult to argue its case, particularly in the straitened economic circumstances (not to mention the prevailing mood of risk-aversion) that we're all experiencing right now. But sometimes you've just got to take a long term view. Because if a bunch of British 17 year olds, brought up in an era of Reality TV and ubiquitous corporate branding, can demonstrate rigorous and passionate debating beyond their years, just think what they might achieve if human space explorers once again go beyond what was previously considered to be unachievable.

Meanwhile, Debating Matters goes from strength to strength, as indeed it should. It was recently announced that The British Council will be bringing the competition to India, using its network of schools and educational institutions, and the plan is that the contest will gradually be developed into "a real-time television reality show" according to India edunews. Time to revise my opinions of reality TV? Let's have a debate!