High schools must require a mandatory curriculum on digital literacy and misinformation analysis.

This debate presented a genuinely contested clash between idealistic policy design and pragmatic implementation constraints, with the Pro side ultimately securing a narrow victory through superior evidentiary grounding and more effective rebuttal of the opposition's core feasibility objections. The debate remained tightly contested through the first three rounds, with the Con side successfully neutralizing the Pro's initial momentum in Rounds 2 and 3 by highlighting legitimate concerns regarding teacher capacity, resource variability, and the risks of curricular rigidity. However, the decisive factor emerged in Round 4, where the Pro successfully synthesized their empirical evidence—specifically citing the Stanford study and quasi-experimental research from Spanish high schools—into a cohesive "force multiplier" argument demonstrating that digital literacy enhances rather than displaces core academic competencies.

The Con side's performance suffered from a critical evidentiary deficit. While their pragmatic objections regarding implementation realities (teacher training gaps, resource constraints, developmental variability) were theoretically sound, they relied primarily on argumentum ad consequentiam (appeals to negative consequences) and appeal to futility rather than empirical demonstrations of mandatory curriculum failures. Their metaphor of "smashing a hole in the hull" constituted a straw man fallacy, exaggerating the Pro's position as destructively inflexible when the Pro explicitly acknowledged the need for adaptable pedagogical frameworks.

Conversely, the Pro side occasionally lapsed into argumentum ad metum (fear appeals), with hyperbolic framing such as "existential threat to our democratic discourse" and "drown in a sea of misinformation" that weakened their logical rigor. They also committed a non sequitur in assuming that the severity of the misinformation crisis automatically justified a mandatory (as opposed to strongly encouraged) curricular approach. Nevertheless, their engagement with the Con's implementation concerns—specifically addressing teacher capacity through cited professional development models—demonstrated superior responsiveness. The Con's failure to provide comparative evidence showing voluntary integration outperforming mandatory approaches in similar contexts proved fatal to their closing argument, leaving their pragmatic objections as theoretically plausible but empirically unsubstantiated speculation.