Jun 26, 2023 At 11:50 AM EDT
Haven Howard loves to argue. Whether it's in the classroom or at a debate competition, Howard is fascinated by the art of crafting—and critiquing—arguments, and he has used that passion to excel, not only at debate, but in his academics and advocacy.
Howard, a rising senior at Phelps High School in Washington, D.C., is an accomplished debater who is currently the captain of his school's debate team.
He is also the recipient of the 2022 Keoni Scott-Reid Debater of the Year award, given to a student in the Washington Urban Debate League who exemplifies excellence, innovative scholarship, leadership and character. The award is named in memory of Scott-Reid, a debate coach who passed away in 2019 at the age of 21.
After starting debate in middle school, Howard quickly learned it was something he "couldn't take [his] mind off of." As his passion for debate grew, so did his love for learning about new types of arguments and critiques of those arguments.
"One of my favorite arguments is to talk about an assumption that the other side makes and how that's wrong," he told Newsweek. "That's always fun because you do a lot of background research on [the assumption], and you get to really break it down and understand it. Once you do that, it becomes a very powerful argument."
Becoming a great debater is an ongoing quest for improvement, and Howard is committed to always being the best debater he can be. If he loses at a tournament, Howard will "fully submerge" himself in researching a topic he didn't know well to figure out new types of arguments and better understand why he lost.
"Even if I was mad because I lost or something, or something didn't go the way I wanted, I still looked into it as a reason to gain knowledge about something," he said.
Howard has always been a curious kid. At a young age, he became enamored with space. When he reached Phelps, he was able to take that passion to the next level in the engineering track the school offers in the hopes of studying aeronautical engineering in college.
This summer, Howard will spend part of his time doing scientific research at an internship with the Air Force before heading to debate camp at Dartmouth College in July, where he will get a "head start" on his case preparation for next year's debate topic.
One of Howard's favorite parts of debate is the exposure it brings to ideas and sources he's never read before, including arguments that focus on Afropessimism and Afrofuturism, which are race-theory arguments that are popular in the varsity policy debate space.
These are topics that are not typically discussed in the classroom, but Howard still found a way to incorporate his knowledge into his schoolwork. He wrote a research paper about Afropessimism for a college-credit course he was taking because the professor let students write about the topic of their choice.
"No one knows about it, and this would be the perfect opportunity for me to understand it more and to educate other people about it as well," Howard said.
In his seminal book Afropessimism, published in 2020, University of California, Irvine, professor Frank B. Wilderson III presents slavery not as an element of the past but as a perpetual presence in modern society.
As it turned out, Howard's professor did not know about the theory and was happy to learn, even offering more resources for Howard to use for further study.
"By engaging in discussions, you bring a lot to the table and you also bring a new perspective," Howard said. "In a debate, you have to use critical thinking skills and present evidence. And it's important to do that at an early age because then as you get older, you start to understand more about the world quicker than people who don't have those discussions or have that perspective."
It is not an atypical occurrence for Howard to teach his teachers about something or challenge them in class. Zachary Komlo, a social studies teacher and debate coach at Phelps, said teachers often tell him that Howard is always "arguing with them," but in a good way.
"He always brings these ideas and things, the challenges in the class, and it makes them more lively and interesting," Komlo said, adding that debate exposes everyone, even him, to new topics and ideas that inform constructive and interesting conversations.
"I see Haven having that same experience, like when we look at criminal justice reform or water regulations the past couple of years, every once in a while, he can bring something up in class or something that he learned through debate," Komlo said.
This type of engagement, Komlo added, makes classes more fun and more educational for every student.
"If the purpose of social studies is to memorize facts and dates, then just go watch a YouTube video and take notes," he said. "But what I want [the students] to do is be able to have those critical thinking skills to be able to have those discussions."
These skills are especially important today, when misinformation and harmful conspiracy theories run rampant on social media used by impressionable young people.
Komlo said teenagers in debate are better equipped to discredit false information because they can recognize that a controversial claim may not be true and question the integrity of the evidence or reasoning used to support it.
While Howard is constantly trying to improve his own skills and knowledge through individual research or class participation, he is also focused on helping others around him. Currently, debate is only an after-school activity at Phelps, and Howard has taken on a mentorship role for many of the novice debaters.
But starting next year, debate will be offered as a class option during the school day. This will not only ease the time management challenges student debaters face, but will make for more robust instruction.
"We'll actually be able to sit there and work and research, and kids can go into different groups based on how advanced they are," Komlo said. "It will give Haven more of an opportunity to be more of the teacher and help enhance his own knowledge about different technical skills through teaching and critiquing other students."
Howard has taken advocacy skills fostered in debate and put them to use outside the classroom to enact real change in his community.
This year, he participated in the Mikva Challenge, an organization that empowers youth activism to create a more equitable society through democratic participation in their city. Howard is part of the Mikva Challenge's student voice council that discusses issues students observe in D.C. public schools to come up with recommendations to district leadership for feasible solutions.
This year's topic was about how to mitigate school violence. One of the council's actions was to send out a survey to students about how they think teachers, administrators and other school officials can help make changes in their schools.
They made recommendations based on the data from the survey and presented them in April to Phelps principal Cara Fuller. Recently, the students also presented their findings to the central office of the D.C. public schools, including individuals who control how resources are allocated to the school.
"[The presentation] went great," Howard said. "We got a lot of information out there [and] we talked to a lot of people that are high up within [the D.C. public school system] who can actually make the changes."
And when those officials told the students that some of those measures are already being worked on, the students were quick to correct them and say that students have not seen those implementations in schools yet. Howard's years in debate have prepared him for this sort of real-world activism.
"I became more aware of how to word certain things so that it's not argumentative and it actually gets the point across," he explained, "so it looks like I'm not attacking a certain person or being defensive, but just [expressing] my perspective."
