No Contest (41 page)

 

In fact, the lack of predictability that CL can engender is not a necessary evil; it is a requirement for learning. Neither CL nor education in general should allow itself to get too comfortable. A century and a half ago, Kierkegaard, observing that most public figures pride themselves on figuring out how to make people's lives easier in one way or the other, set for himself “out of love for mankind” the task of “creat[ing] difficulties everywhere.”
¹⁰⁰
In a sense, and with compassion, this is the teacher's task: to “design instructional activities that are likely to be problematic for children”
¹⁰¹
and to guard against relaxing when things are going too smoothly. “Deeper learning would look somewhat ‘messier' than what I am seeing in most of our [cooperative] classrooms” is how Eric Schaps, the director of the Child Development Project, once put it.
¹⁰²

 

The prospects for CL to sweep the country, and for the country to stay swept, depend to some extent on the willingness of parents to demand that their children—that all children—be permitted the benefits of working together. Many parents, looking back on their own years in school, may recall a superlative teacher here, a few satisfying friendships there, an occasional moment of excitement when a connection was made or an idea understood. But the background to these pleasant memories may be something much like what Goodlad and Henry and scores of other observers have documented: isolation, humiliation, self-doubt, rivalry, pointless tasks, boredom. All of us for whom this account rings true have a choice to make. We can set our jaws and harden our hearts, muttering, “Hey, if it was good enough for me . . .”—thereby dooming another generation to the same fate. Or we can ask, “What can be done to make sure our children get better than we got?” Even to ask this question presupposes that we have recognized—and this may come as an epiphany—that, just as a game does not have to be a contest, so the stultifying aspects of our education are not inevitable features of going to school.

Is cooperative learning out of step with our society's values? Some proponents deny this heatedly, pointing out that even a culture or an economic system as steeped in competition as our own requires cooperation to be successful. To some extent this is true, but we might as well admit that CL does challenge the beliefs and practices that set people against one another. Some curriculum guides augment this challenge by making cooperation and competition explicit topics for study,
¹⁰³
but the very fact of learning by working together presents children with another model, a different experience, a sense of perspective on the competition they otherwise might have taken for granted. Cooperative learning should not stand or fall depending on how well it serves our society's institutions. Rather, our institutions should stand or fall depending on how well they serve the sort of values represented by cooperative learning.

In the fall of 1982, a couple of years after considering and rejecting the possibility of writing my graduate thesis on the topic of competition, I found myself irresistibly drawn back to the issue. The research project on which I embarked, at first without much thought to whether it could result in a publishable book, eventually came to dominate my life. Now, a decade after scribbling my first notes on what it means to compete, I want to take a few minutes to look back—and especially to consider what has happened in the six years since
No Contest
went to press.

Specifically, I'd like to try to answer the questions I'm often asked when I speak on the topic: How have people reacted to the book and its thesis? Is our culture becoming more or less competitive? What new research has been published on the topic? (Now that I think about it, I cannot remember anyone actually asking the last question, but that is certainly not going to prevent me from answering it.)

The first thing that happened was that I received invitations to appear on more than one hundred TV and radio programs, including
Donahue,
to say nothing of interviews for newspaper and magazine articles. On
Donahue,
I was asked such questions as, “Well, if you're against competition, isn't that just because you're a loser?” (I invite you to consider how
you
would deal with this question in eight seconds on national television.) I realized pretty quickly that all this attention signified not that the book's reasoning was seen as cogent but rather that its position was seen as outrageously controversial. It was not that I had offered a meaty argument so much as that I had turned our most sacred cow into hamburger.

Today I am sometimes described as the country's leading critic of competition, but of course there is not much competition for that title. I have been invited to lecture at some organizations whose relentless pursuit of competitive advantage—they might as well have a bust of Vince Lombardi on display in the lobby—leads me to wonder whether my name is being circulated by an organization called Rent-a-Gadfly.

The reaction to my remarks on competition usually sorts itself into three categories. First, there are the people who nod continuously as I speak, as if to say “Yes! I've had these thoughts for fifteen years, but I've been embarrassed to say them out loud!” To my surprise, quite a few people react this way, but since attendance at most of my lectures is voluntary, these people, like those who take the trouble to write to me, probably do not constitute a representative sample of the American public. Nevertheless, I am always delighted to connect with kindred spirits and, if I can, to offer them further analysis and evidence with which they can work to replace competition with cooperation.

At the other end of the spectrum are those who accuse me of being either a Communist or a wimp.
^*
In person, these people sit with their arms tightly folded, scowling or smirking, convinced that anyone who thinks competition is undesirable and unnecessary must live on Neptune. If they bother to stay for the question period, their comments usually begin with: “What you say is very nice in
theory,
but . . .” I enjoy talking to these people, too, in part because, like them, I am a skeptic. (Where we differ is that I would prefer to see skepticism directed at the status quo rather than employed in its service.) Perhaps I can plant a seed, I figure; even those who dismiss my critique may find that something has sprouted the next time they see a person's spirit crushed, or performance obviously impaired, by a win/lose structure.

Between these two categories sit the listeners (or readers) who are strongly inclined to resist the news that competition is counterproductive but find themselves unable to wish it away. Even though these people are gravely troubled by the implications of my argument, they are willing to question the conventional wisdom. One woman came up to me after a lecture, frowning, and confessed, “Now I'm really disoriented.” This made my day.

One very specific response to the case against competition may also be worth mentioning here. I am regularly informed that we would be doing children a disservice by minimizing competition since they need to be prepared for the rivalry they will encounter when they grow up. My response is that we need to work on two tracks at once: preparing children for what they will find in our society, and preparing them, if need be, to
change
what they find. To concentrate only on the latter, keeping our eye fixed on a distant goal, may make life difficult for children in the short term. But to concentrate only on the former ensures that
their
children will encounter the same destructive institutions and backward values.

Beyond this, however, the fact is that students in our society already are well acquainted with competition. Even if some experience with trying to triumph over others were useful, children have more than they could ever need. Imagine a school that studiously avoids competition, in the classroom or on the playing field, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. We may be confident that not a single graduate of this school, on entering college or the work force, would suddenly exclaim, “Whoa! What's all this about ‘competition'?” Our best efforts to promote cooperation notwithstanding, children in this country are all too familiar with win/lose activities.

What students need is not more of the same but experience with alternative arrangements so that they can achieve a sense of perspective about the competition that proliferates in our culture. While a case can be made that students would benefit from a curricular unit in which they explicitly consider the effects of competition, talking about it is quite different from being immersed in it. (By way of analogy, consider the distinction between teaching schoolchildren
about
religion and indoctrinating them to
be
religious.) Moreover, there is no reason to imagine that having children participate in competitive activities week after week after week could provide any incremental benefit. The rationale for doing so, if made explicit, would look something like a sign I once saw tacked to a wall in a sixth-grade classroom:
THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES
.

 

While I have continued to write and speak on competition, I have also been following three other lines of inquiry growing out of that work. First, I have been drawn to the field of education and, specifically, to the use of cooperative learning as an alternative to competition. The practice of having students work together in pairs or small groups was already attracting attention before
No Contest
was published. The research literature and practical record of success connected with this approach have mushroomed since then. I have discussed the topic in chapter 10, which is new to this edition.

Second, the question of whether competition is just part of “human nature” (chapter 2) led me to look at that concept more carefully, and specifically to ask whether selfishness, aggression, and other of our less noble attributes are really more natural than generosity, caring, and empathy. The result of that investigation was published in 1990 as
The Brighter Side of Human Nature: Altruism and Empathy in Everyday Life,
and it, in turn, has led me to try to devise strategies for promoting “prosocial” behaviors and attitudes in children.

Finally, the study of competition has opened up a broader issue, namely, the consequences of using other extrinsic motivators (discussed briefly on pp.
[>]
). If any assumption drives our culture more powerfully than the faith that competition is valuable, it is the belief that all problems can be solved if only we find a big enough carrot to dangle in front of people. My next book (also to be published by Houghton Mifflin) will consider the unhappy consequences of manipulating people with rewards—at work, at school, and at home.

 

Is competition on the upswing today or has its day come and gone? I have seen no polls or studies seeking to measure the pervasiveness of competition in American life, much less any longitudinal data attempting to identify trends. I am more than a little suspicious of sweeping, facile pronouncements of epochal transformations currently under way, and, frankly, I don't even know what would count as evidence for the beginning of a significant change regarding something like competition.

I will say that I am heartened by the move toward cooperative learning in many schools and, to some extent, by the growing interest in real teamwork and “quality” among some managers. I am discouraged, however, by the fact that
competitiveness
has become more of a buzzword among politicians, businesspeople, and educators than it was even half a dozen years ago.

I am heartened by recent news reports about a school in Indiana where every willing student can be part of an athletic team or the cheerleading squad or the choir. Its “no-cut” policy in extracurricular activities has resulted in huge increases in participation and far fewer problems than some had anticipated.
¹
I am discouraged by recent news reports about elaborate “Little Miss” beauty contests for three- to six-year-old girls
²
and pressure-filled interscholastic academic contests that reduce learning to a matter of preparing for victory at a quiz show.
³

I am heartened when I see dissidents starting to raise questions about the value of competition in publications as diverse as a psychoanalytic journal (1986)
⁴
and magazines for guitar players (1989),
⁵
music teachers (1990),
⁶
and photographers (1992).
⁷
I am discouraged by the fact that most of the popular press, notably magazines intended for women, continues to treat competition as inevitable, desirable, amusing, or all three. Not every such article is as egregious as one recent quiz for teenage girls (“Compete, Don't Retreat!”), bursting with cheerful exclamation points, which awards more points to readers who know enough to put their desire to win ahead of their loyalty to friends.
⁸
In magazines for parents, articles often advise against putting too much pressure on children to win. Such cautions, however, are accompanied by a de rigueur concession that, “of course,” competition in moderation is appropriate and productive.
^*

I am appalled when I read that forty-nine teenagers from one school district have been hospitalized for depression, suicide attempts, or substance abuse, all apparently connected to the stress caused by academic competition. (The school administrators responded by citing the “failure to teach adolescents coping skills.” If, by way of comparison, a factory's polluting smokestacks had sent nearby residents to the hospital, presumably the factory manager would not have the audacity to attribute the problem to a failure to buy respirators.)
⁹
I am horrified when I read that some of the people who were killed when a plane crashed and burned on a runway in Los Angeles might have lived were it not for two men standing in front of the exit door, competing over who would get out first.
¹⁰
It is hard to take any consolation in such tragedy save for the faint hope that some people may begin to understand that competition by its very nature is a problem.