St Anthony's on the value of debate and public speaking

The Debating Club has been a huge success. Run by one of our heads of faculty, it is regularly oversubscribed. There are internal debates every week, as might be expected, but also debates with local schools.

The Current Affairs and Critical Thinking Club has also proved popular.

These clubs are rightly viewed by parents as constituting valuable preparation for senior school interviews, as well as being valuable in their own right.

We live in an age where there is more information than ever before and where information is more accessible than ever before. Notwithstanding this, the information that really matters is often extremely hard to come by.

Richard McMillan says that debating clubs are seen as preparation for senior school interviews (Image: St Anthony's School for Boys)

The abundance of information online is of no use to young people if they cannot bring a discriminating, discerning mindset to what they are encountering.

Online resources are no less biased than analogue resources. Bias is not necessarily a bad thing, of course, but its existence must be acknowledged for intelligent, discerning engagement to take place.

Not surprisingly, young people can become completely bewildered by what they find online because they do not have the means at their disposal to ascertain for themselves whether they have actually found useful information.

An older person, who has seen more of the world, can readily detect excessive bias or blatantly false information but for younger people, this can be much more difficult.

At St Anthony’s, discussions regularly take place on a variety of topics: history, British politics, American politics, medical ethics, science and technology, the importance of languages and much more.

We do not expect our pupils to know everything and will happily provide a helping hand if their existing knowledge is holding them back, but what we do expect, and here we are seldom disappointed, is that pupils think critically, creatively and flexibly and respond to direction.

We are also insistent that they engage respectfully with alternative points of view on controversial topics.

• Richard McMillan is academic in residence at St Anthony’s School for Boys, Hampstead.