In essence, National High School Ethics Bowl is a competitive discussion. Teams compete to give the most accurate, comprehensive, clear, and complete answer to the match question. Each two-match round involves presenting an initial take on the question at hand (6 mins.), defending it against the opposing team’s critique (3 mins.), and responding to questions from a three-judge panel composed of academic and non-academic professionals (10 mins.). The questions focus on one or more aspects of a case drawn from a set of fifteen cases that teams have worked with for roughly two months prior to competition.
Each year, Professor Laura Grams, Department of Philosophy at the University of Nebraksa, Omaha (UNO) generously spends her time recruiting schools and hosting the Nebraska Regional Competition.
National High School Ethics Bowl (NHSEB) is the arm of the Parr Center for Ethics at the University of North Carolina (UNC) responsible for organizing regional and national competition each year. Regionals are held around the U.S. and colleges and universities self-select which regional they’ll participate in. If a school wins a bid to nationals due to their regional performance, they head to UNC to compete with other bid winners. The University of Nebraska has sent teams to Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl's national competition twice since the inception of the UNL Ethics Bowl Team in 2011. We aim to help our high school partner schools achieve similar success.
Of course, as the saying goes, ‘Winning isn’t everything.’ That certainly rings true in the case of participating in ethics bowl. The work individual team members due to prepare themselves and the team for competition significantly develops their skills at critical and moral reasoning as well as their abilities to speak and reason publicly with an interested community. In particular, members can expect to (a) sharpen their intellect, (b) develop their interrogative and contrarian dispositions, (c) deepen their interest in exploring and analyzing complex situations and concepts as well as their ability to do so, and (d) cultivate the virtue of epistemic humility. Hence, win or lose in competition participants efforts are meaningfully rewarded.
We’re always recruiting! If you think that your students or friends could put together a team to represent your high school in National High School Ethics Bowl, please, don’t hesitate to contact assistant director, Adam R. Thompson (art@unl.edu). Like Lincoln, Nebraska, and the world we can always use more Husker excellence.
Cass Didier, a teacher at Waverly High helped us establish a High Schools Ethics Bowl team at Waverly High School.
