Nonprofit founded by UChicago alumni teaches students essential skills through mock debate
Skye Freeman, 13, is an eighth-grader at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools who wants to be a lawyer when she grows up. She’s already practicing oral arguments.
On Oct. 20, Freeman and six other kids aged 10 to 13 debated each other as presidential candidates with their own platforms in a live Zoom webcast moderated by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.), a University of Chicago Law School alum and former presidential candidate.
The event was organized by Debate it Forward, a nonprofit founded by recent UChicago alumni Leah Shapiro, AB’18, and Josh Aaronson, AB’19. The organization hires and trains college students to teach debate skills to kids aged four to 16, including low income students and students with learning and developmental differences. The teaching, like the debating, now happens virtually.
Several of the students that participated in last week’s event attend Hyde Park area schools including the Laboratory Schools, Bret Harte Elementary and Whitney Young Magnet High School.
“Our students have a lot of really passionate and mature viewpoints that they don’t get to express a lot of the time, so we wanted to create an event that would feature them in a fun, novel way that was true to what we do,” Aaronson said.
