Advocacy

If you’ve been in a public school classroom in the past few years, you’ve seen the impact that educational reforms have had on our students. Most teaching today is done using a “one size fits all” approach that is almost exclusively focused on testing with little to no time left for students to learn the critical thinking and speaking skills that are so crucial to their success.

But through speech and debate activities, our nation’s teens have the opportunity to not only vastly improve their abilities in the four core zones of literacy—reading, writing, speaking and listening—but also gain the self-confidence and higher-level thinking they need to become great leaders.

As our mission is to promote speech and debate activities as a means for students to develop essential life skills, the National Forensic League is committed to advocating for forensics—both within the educational system and across the broader public spectrum—to increase awareness of the importance of speech and debate activities. This includes gaining media exposure, attending national and state educational conferences, providing our coaches with resources to advocate themselves, and highlighting the dynamic world of interscholastic speech and debate through our forensic news section on this website.

Our big audacious goal is that those outside our community will appreciate the value speech and debate activities bring to our students, our educational system, and ultimately to our society.