Highlighting Debating at the Girls' College

Highlighting Debating at the Girls' College
Debating goes from strength to strength with outstanding results

The Senior SACEE debating team have now completed the first 6 preliminary rounds and have been ranked 7th of 27 schools in the Central Region. This is the highest St Stithians Girls’ College have ranked for a number of years and is a really great achievement as the Central Region pool is a particularly difficult one in which to compete. Our girls will now progress to the Senior League Championships at the end of May.

In addition, Jemma Jenkins-Ferrett joined the Gauteng Development team for the Bratislava Schools Debating Championship at the end of March. The Development Team was coached by one of the co-coaches of the South African National Debating squad and gave Jemma the exposure to competing at an international level.

Our Junior & Senior SACEE Debaters competed and debated the following interesting topics this term:

• Ban teachers from interacting with students over social media
• Allow wealthy people to pay less tax if they gave money to charities instead
• Prospective parents should pass a parenting test before having children
• Ban contact sports in school
• Elect the Director of Public Prosecutions by public vote
• Allow parents monitoring rights over their children's social media accounts
• This house regrets the decision by some student protest movements to restrict their membership to black students only
• This house believes that the West should fund Madrassas in Pakistan/Afghanistan

At the MUN debate at Wits University with our MUN debators, the topic was Evaluating Constitutions across Africa.  Our girls represented NGO's in Central Africa.  St Stithians Girls' College debators won Best Position Paper.  The guest speaker at that debate was Justice Edwin Cameral (the Constitutional Court judge).

Term three started with the annual interhouse debate finals between Kenwyn and Trewen.  The topic was to debate the refugee situation in the EU and the hotly contested debate was won by Kenwyn.  Best speaker at this year's interhouse debate was Sirini Pather.