Seminar to the Congress 2015 - Youth debate

Thursday 

Despite the gray skies today, we were able to accomplish quite a bit of work at the Debate workshop. During this workshop, two instructors from the Swiss Debate “Stiftung Dialog” came to the hostel and taught us strategies about debating, about controversial topics at the Congress on Saturday. After introducing ourselves to the instructors, we divided into small groups and came up with controversial questions that we could debate about.

Ranging from legalizing marijuana to requiring Swiss women to serve at the military, we were able to vote on two questions for Congress:

- Should the Swiss government impose military service for women?
- Should foreigners born in Switzerland automatically receive Swiss citizenship?

After taking a break for lunch, we broke up into two groups, in order to do some research on our topics. Soon after, we learned about the procedure of debating, which allowed us to debate our two questions after. Throughout the debates, we were able to learn more about the daily issues and regulations of our country. We put this into practice during the trial debates and received constructive criticism on how to improve our speaking and debating skills.



After the debate workshop, we had a short session with two young politicians from the SVP and the FDP. We got to ask a lot of interesting questions and generated quite some discussion. Unfortunately, most of the day everyone was expected to be able to understand French. Some of us only understand German and the language from our native country. After the discussion with the young politicians, we went out for dinner and walked around Geneva before going back to the hostel.