RoundTable: A New High School Forum for Productive Political Debate

Background

RoundTable is a new political forum created for high schoolers by high schoolers.

Ian Chen and Noor Mehndiratta met as classmates in AP US Government, where they frequently debated various topics in class. They learned that there was a lot of value in engaging in healthy debates with people who don’t share their views, instead of settling into echo chambers.

This inspired them to create RoundTable, and they are looking for more high schoolers to join the group and the discussion.

I sat down to interview them, and to say I am impressed and excited about this group is an understatement, as much of my work on this page is also aimed at bridging gaps between people with different beliefs.

You can follow RoundTable on Instagram here and high schoolers (both those inside MCPS and out) can visit this link for more information or to sign up. It’s a simple survey that takes about five minutes. It will ask questions like ‘Where do you sort of lean right now?’ and ‘What are some issues you consider important?’ The form will help gauge what discussions the group should start with.

Mission Statement

The group’s mission statement can be seen on the sign up page but the image below shows it as well:

Interview

For the interview, we had a zoom conversation in a Q&A format. I will list the questions and then paraphrase the answers, while trying to stick to what they said as much as possible.

Question 1: What was the motivation to come up with RoundTable?

Ian: Noor and I started off as classmates in AP US government. Both of us really had different political views and really how it started out, is whenever a teacher posed the question, the two of us would be the first ones to debate each other. Although we often got heated, we sort of took the opportunity and valued it to learn from each other’s perspectives. And then after learning and going off of that, we started to notice that many of our peers seem to engage in these political discussions only with the people that they agreed with, and that sort of contributed to the echo chamber and partisanship that we see so much of today.

Noor: When I first talked to Ian, it was such a different experience. It was the first time talking to someone with different political views than myself. With growing up in Montgomery County, I feel like it’s very easy to fall into echo chambers. A lot of people hold similar political views. And I just immediately found that I was able to understand issues better when I had all of the perspectives shown to me, and when we started talking in class, I also was able to see just the effect it had on on the entire environment. I felt like everyone there benefited from it. A lot of people learned more. When classes changed, we weren’t in the same class anymore. So we decided to set up bi weekly meetings and we had a small group of people who came and attended some meetings. People were there just to see how it would turn out. And it really allowed us to sort of do what we want to do with the roundtable where we got to dissect different topics each meeting. The entire explanation is built on the experiences we had.

Question 2: How have your experiences around these topics shaped how you feel?

Noor: From talking to each other, just those conversations led to us being able to have a deeper respect for each other. And generally, it let us go into these conversations with a better mindset. That experience really helped us approach conversations around politics with all people.

Ian: I’ll just add that, especially for nowadays, if you can relate to someone with different perspectives than you and have used respectful conversation to really develop an empathy and a really understanding that you really wouldn’t if you just saw it on cable television and watching these debates. So really being involved makes them appreciate a point of view they really would not understand otherwise.

Question 3: What are you going to do to prevent the binary and divisive type of thinking that has come to dominate politics from getting into your forum?

Noor: Even just the creation, where you have people with different views coming together, in itself is a way to fight off of fight off the typical binary thinking. When people fall into their echo chambers, that’s what really causes the very black and white, right and wrong, thought process. When you take people and you put them in a situation with like you guys were just saying they have to develop empathy for a specific face for a specific place and the fact that all issues have a lot of gray and moral ambiguity to it becomes really clear. That’s one way that the forum really helps show the nuance to different issues.

Ian: I’ll just piggyback off of that and say that we also really made it clear from the start that this is not a screaming session, once a month. This is really a productive conversation that we’re trying to foster. And to encourage the productive conversations we have currently two MCPS social studies teachers, who are signed on to be more of adult moderators to ensure everything goes smoothly and to be the additional voice in the room just to make sure everything is working smoothly and that there’s no intricate fights going on. We’re really just trying to make it clear and then have that support there if we do need it.

Question 4: I’ll preface this question by saying I think that this actually makes your work even more important but do you think in our area with such a heavy left leaning population there will be some unique challenges here?

Ian: I’m more conservative than the vast majority of high schoolers. And I think that’s one of the reasons why Noor asked me to help her with this project, is that my views are vastly different than most high schoolers my age. So in order to encourage people to come I’ve been reaching out to a bunch of different more conservative groups, in order to encourage them to say that this is not going to be a place where you’re going to be ridiculed or chastised for your views. This is a place for you to be open and to express them without fear of retribution. In light of that, I’ve reached out and we’re working on partnerships currently with young Republican clubs from high schools across the county, as well as the Maryland GOP in order to welcome those members in and to ensure that there’s a diverse range of perspectives welcome at roundtable.

Noor: I think it’s a really important question, because the last thing that we want is a situation where one view gets the focus of the meeting and make the other view feel stupid, not valid, or not welcome. That was something we really kept in mind when we were figuring out who we wanted as participants and who you wanted to reach out to.

Question 5: Even though there are only two major parties, there are also other smaller parties. Do you have any thoughts about the Forward party, RCV, open primaries – all of which kind of are trying to move away from the binary party system to more open elections? Don’t take the question from your personal point of view, but from the group’s point of view, finding those voices that are not just one side or the other.

Noor: That’s a really really important question. These are topics that we really want to discuss in these meetings, and introduce more people to and we also search for and really welcome people who don’t fit into the binary political parties. On the interest form have, many, many different options, and just always the option to identify as a party which is not as popular and have that and figure out how we can get more people like that involved in these because the more opinions we have, the better and there’s nothing more important than bringing in opinions which are typically not highlighted in these discussions.

Questions 6: What kind of guest speakers will you have?

Noor: So we have guest speakers. We chose people who we think really embody this mission. One person has been fostering these discussions in Maine, a state legislator. They wrote a book about connecting America. We have local politicians, people who know the system, who know issues and we also want to involve experts when we can on the issues that we’re talking about because we think that one of the greatest causes of extremism and black and white thinking comes from ignorance and a lack of deep understanding of issues.

Question 7: What ages are you targeting for this? Can anyone at any school participate?

Noor: It’s open to all high school ages but we probably expect it to be with more juniors and seniors. It is open to everyone. We want to bring younger people into these conversations.

It is open to High schoolers in MCPS or outside of MCPS but in Montgomery County.

Question 8: I really love what you are doing here as someone who is somewhere in the middle and has been working to do similar things with adults…. What will you do if there kind of become groupings and people unwilling to consider others’ positions? This is a problem that has come up with some of the discussion groups I have moderated. Or people wanting others to agree to baseline arguments before being willing to discuss.

Ian: First of all, we know that these issues, some high schoolers may be super educated about some of them and some of them may never have heard of these. So what we’re planning to do is sort of have a one page sort of rundown of the issue with just facts. That way everyone is on quite literally the same page and understand the issue at hand and the nuances of it. So that we plan to start with that on the education level. And then in terms of arguing we really are trying to push the open mindset as much as possible and the two Whitman teachers who we’re working with are both amazing debate moderators, and they’re going to help us guide the conversation and ensure that the sort of rhetorical arguments and questions are kept at the very minimum. We’re just trying to make sure that we keep everyone with an open mind and then everyone’s on the same page.

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