Scrappy Burlington High School Debaters Make National Finals

Team members huddling during a competition Credit: Courtesy

Is it ethical to gloat when your scrappy public school squad defeats some of the most elite private schools in the nation?

For members of the Burlington High School ethics debate team, the answer is: Absolutely!

In its first year, the school’s 12-member team made it to the national finals in North Carolina, besting some of the nation’s priciest private schools in the process.

“Given that we go to school in an abandoned shopping mall, beating these schools with tuition north of $60,000 did have a little satisfaction to it,” said Sam Doherty, a junior on the team.

The school’s philosophy club started two and a half years ago, when most of the current members were first-year students. Tyler Doggett, a philosophy professor at the University of Vermont, formed the club when his son Felix started at the school.

“They’re adolescents, so this year they were interested in turning engaging philosophical discussion into a competition,” Doggett said. “It wasn’t enough to talk about justice; you had to defeat someone as we talked about justice.”

So, they decided to enter the National High School Ethics Bowl.

The organization promotes respectful dialogue and deliberation about some of the toughest moral issues of the day. This year, teams explored everything from wage equity to the appropriate uses of artificial intelligence to the ethics of cloning pets.

The Burlington kids didn’t really know what to expect when they went to their first competition, in New Hampshire in January. It turned out they were pretty good at it, Doherty said. They outsmarted schools that included the elite Phillips Exeter Academy. They followed that up by talking circles around the best teams from Massachusetts, too. That qualified them for a berth at the national competition, which took place earlier this month in Raleigh.

In the end, the Queen City team was outgunned by seasoned schools that have been sending students to the competition for years, but it was still a thrill.

“To win one match against some of the best teams in the country, it just felt great,” Doggett said.

The original print version of this article was headlined “Brave Little Philosophers”