Academic Debate

I agree to the principles here, but I suspect that the chosen subject is a little too complicated for middle schoolers.

There are actually two kinds of slavery - there's "chattel slavery", which is what Americans usually associate with the term, where the slave is simply property, and there's "forced labor", which is historically far more common.

In the forced labor version, the slave retains quite significant rights - there's little difference between that kind of slavery and a modern chain gang, and even very little difference between forced labor and the kind of life that most humans lived prior to the industrial age.

If we're looking at the "cost of slavery in terms of inequality", it's fairly easy to argue that forced labor doesn't exhibit a much higher cost than medieval serfdom. This is why there are always proposals floating around to require those in prison to "pay off their debt to society" by performing some kind of work - chain gangs, call centers, or what have you. I'm sure you've heard the arguments.

Chattel slavery is almost universally justified by the claim that the slave is less than a full human. The "inequality" is built into the model there, and it's considered only right that the sub-humans serve their human masters. The slave, in this model, is no different than a domesticated working animal.

Now, I'm not trying to say any of these arguments are right - they're not. But they're easy arguments to make, and take more maturity than your typical middle schooler has to address.

One other potential land mine for the subject is that slavery has biblical endorsement (see for example, Leviticus 25:44-46 and 1 Peter 2:18). Much theological camel-swallowing is involved in justifying how passages like these are to be ignored. If a student were to put forth an argument along those lines, unpleasantness is almost certain to follow.