One
day driving up to a field for one of my games I saw a family running
across the road with lawn chairs. First one family, then two, then a
whole slew of them. Where were they going? Well the regular lot that normally held must be 800 parking spots, was all
full--Families were fending with overflow parking across the street. And what was the
event? It was a youth academy soccer tryout.
Hundreds
maybe thousands of kids/families running 30 minutes north of the city,
trying to find parking, rushing their kids around, plunking down $50, for a chance to tryout for the most competitive youth soccer club
in town.
I have been
wary of competition for some time now. Observing free play I see the
whole continuum of organic games from competitive to cooperative. I have
watched closely and I am very suspicious of falsely ramped up
competition. It may be behind our failures as a nation. While we lead
the world in youth soccer participation and investment, we also may lead
the world in drop out, poor experiences, low skill levels, and fun.
Read the article below and let me know what you think.
The Case Against Competition
By Alfie Kohn
When it comes to competition, we Americans typically recognize only
two legitimate positions: enthusiastic support and qualified
support.
The first view holds that the more we immerse
our children (and ourselves) in rivalry, the better. Competition
builds character and produces excellence. The second stance admits
that our society has gotten carried away with the need to be Number
One, that we push our kids too hard and too fast to become winners
-- but insists that competition can be healthy and fun if we keep it
in perspective.
I used to be in the second camp. But after
investigating the topic for several years, looking at research from
psychology, sociology, biology, education, and other fields, I'm now convinced
that neither position is correct. Competition is bad news all right,
but it's not just that we overdo it or misapply it. The trouble lies
with competition itself. The best amount of competition for our
children is none at all, and the very phrase "healthy competition"
is actually a contradiction in terms.
That may sound extreme if not downright
un-American. But some things aren't just bad because they're done to
excess; some things are inherently destructive. Competition, which
simply means that one person can succeed only if others fail, is one
of those things. It's always unnecessary and inappropriate at
school, at play, and at home.
Think for a moment about the goals you have
for your children. Chances are you want them to develop healthy
self-esteem, to accept themselves as basically good people. You want
them to become successful, to achieve the excellence of which
they're capable. You want them to have loving and supportive
relationships. And you want them to enjoy themselves.
These are fine goals. But competition not
only isn't necessary for reaching them -- it actually undermines
them.
Competition is to self-esteem as sugar is
to teeth. Most people lose in most competitive encounters, and
it's obvious why that causes self-doubt. But even winning doesn't
build character; it just lets a child gloat temporarily. Studies
have shown that feelings of self-worth become dependent on external
sources of evaluation as a result of competition: Your value is
defined by what you've done. Worse -- you're a good person in
proportion to the number of people you've beaten.
In a competitive culture, a child is told
that it isn't enough to be good -- he must triumph over others.
Success comes to be defined as victory, even though these are really
two very different things. Even when the child manages to win, the
whole affair, psychologically speaking, becomes a vicious circle:
The more he competes, the more he needs to compete to feel good
about himself.
When I made this point on a talk show on national television,
my objections were waved aside by the parents of a
seven-year-old tennis champion named Kyle, who appeared on the
program with me. Kyle had been used to winning ever since a tennis
racket was put in his hands at the age of two. But at the very end
of the show, someone in the audience asked him how he felt when he
lost. Kyle lowered his head and in a small voice replied, "Ashamed."
This is not to say that children shouldn't
learn discipline and tenacity, that they shouldn't be encouraged to
succeed or even have a nodding acquaintance with failure. But none
of these requires winning and losing -- that is, having to beat
other children and worry about being beaten. When classrooms and
playing fields are based on cooperation rather than competition,
children feel better about themselves. They work
with others instead
of against them, and their self-esteem doesn't depend on winning a
spelling bee or a Little League game.
Children succeed in spite of competition,
not because of it. Most of us were raised to believe that we do
our best work when we're in a race -- that without competition we
would all become fat, lazy, and mediocre. It's a belief that our
society takes on faith. It's also false.
There is good evidence that productivity in
the workplace suffers as a result of competition. The research is
even more compelling in classroom settings. David Johnson, a
professor of social psychology at the University of Minnesota, and
his colleagues reviewed all the studies they could find on the
subject from 1924 to 1980. Sixty-five of the studies found that
children learn better when they work cooperatively as opposed to
competitively, eight found the reverse, and 36 found no significant
difference. The more complex the learning task, the worse children
in a competitive environment fared.
Brandeis University psychologist Teresa
Amabile was more interested in creativity. In a study, she asked children to
make "silly collages." Some competed for prizes and
some didn't. Seven artists then independently rated the kids' work.
It turned out that those who were trying to win produced
collages that were much less creative -- less spontaneous, complex
and varied -- than the others.
One after another, researchers across the
country have concluded that children do not learn better when
education is transformed into a competitive struggle. Why? First,
competition often makes kids anxious and that interferes with
concentration. Second, competition doesn't permit them to share
their talents and resources as cooperation does, so they can't learn
from one another. Finally, trying to be Number One distracts them
from what they're supposed to be learning. It may seem paradoxical,
but when a student concentrates on the reward (an A or a gold star
or a trophy), she becomes less interested in what she's doing. The
result: Performance declines.
Just because forcing children to try to outdo
one another is counterproductive doesn't mean they can't keep track
of how they're doing. There's no problem with comparing their
achievements to an objective standard (how fast they ran, how many
questions they got right) or to how they did yesterday or last year.
But if we value our children's intellectual development, we need to
realize that turning learning into a race simply doesn't
work.
Competition is a recipe for hostility.
By definition, not everyone can win a contest. If one child wins,
another cannot. This means that
each child comes to
regard others as obstacles to his or her own success. Forget
fractions or home runs; this is the real lesson our children learn
in a competitive environment.
Competition leads children to envy winners,
to dismiss losers (there's no nastier epithet in our language than
"Loser!"), and to be suspicious of just about everyone. Competition
makes it difficult to regard others as potential friends or
collaborators; even if you're not my rival today, you could be
tomorrow.
This is not to say that competitors will
always detest each other. But trying to outdo someone is not
conducive to trust -- indeed, it would be irrational to trust
someone who gains from your failure. At best, competition leads one
to look at others through narrowed eyes; at worst, it invites
outright aggression. Existing relationships are strained to the
breaking point, while new friendships are often nipped in the bud.
Again, the research -- which I review in my book
No Contest: The Case Against Competition
-- helps to explain the
destructive effect of win/lose arrangements. When children compete,
they are less able to take the perspective of others -- that is, to
see the world from someone else's point of view. One study
demonstrated conclusively that competitive children were less
empathetic than others; another study showed that competitive
children were less generous.
Cooperation, on the other hand, is
marvelously successful at helping children to communicate
effectively, to trust in others and to accept those who are
different from themselves. Competition interferes with these goals
and often results in outright antisocial behavior. The choice is
ours: We can blame the individual children who cheat, turn violent,
or withdraw, or we can face the fact that competition itself is
responsible for such ugliness.
Studies also show, incidentally, that
competition among groups isn't any better than competition among
individuals. Kids don't have to work against a common enemy in order
to know the joys of camaraderie or to experience success. Real
cooperation doesn't require triumphing over another group.
Having fun doesn't mean turning playing
fields into battlefields. It's remarkable, when you stop to think
about it, that the way we teach our kids to have a good time is to
play highly structured games in which one individual or team must
defeat another.
Consider one of the first games our children
learn to play: musical chairs. Take away one chair and one child in
each round until one smug winner is seated and everyone else has
been excluded from play. You know that sour birthday party scene;
the needle is lifted from the record and someone else is transformed
into a loser, forced to sit out the rest of the game with the other
unhappy kids on the side. That's how children learn to have fun in
America.
Terry Orlick, a Canadian expert on games,
suggests changing the goal of musical chairs so children are asked
to fit on a diminishing number of seats. At the end, seven or eight
giggling, happy kids are trying to squish on a single chair.
Everyone has fun and there are no winners or losers.
What's true of musical chairs is true of all
recreation; with a little ingenuity, we can devise games in which
the obstacle is something intrinsic to the task itself rather than
another person or team.
In fact, not one of the benefits attributed
to sports or other competitive games actually requires competition.
Children can get plenty of exercise without struggling against each
other. Teamwork? Cooperative games allow everyone to work together,
without creating enemies. Improving skills and setting challenges?
Again, an objective standard or one's own earlier performance will
do.
When Orlick taught a group of children
noncompetitive games, two thirds of the boys and all of the girls
preferred them to games that require opponents. If our culture's
idea of a good time is competition, it may just be because we
haven't tried the alternative.
How can parents raise a noncompetitive
child in a competitive world? Competition is destructive to children's
self-esteem, it interferes with learning, sabotages relationships, and isn't
necessary to have a good time. But how
do you raise a child in a culture that hasn't yet caught on to all this?
There are no easy answers here. But there is
one clearly unsatisfactory answer: Make your son or daughter
competitive in order to fit into the "real world." That isn't
desirable for the child -- for all the reasons given here -- and it
perpetuates the poison of competition in another generation.
Children can be taught
about competition,
prepared for the destructive forces they'll encounter, without being
groomed to take part in it uncritically. They can be exposed to the
case against competition just as they are taught the harms of drug
abuse or reckless driving.
You will have to decide how much compromise
is appropriate so your child isn't left out or ridiculed in a
competitive society. But at least you can make your decision based
on knowledge about competition's destructiveness. You can work with
other parents and with your child's teachers and coaches to help
change the structures that set children against one another. Or you
may want to look into cooperative schools and summer camps, which
are beginning to catch on around the country.
As for reducing rivalry and competitive
attitudes in the home:
-
Avoid comparing a child's performance to
that of a sibling, a classmate, or yourself as a child.
-
Don't use contests ("Who can dry the
dishes fastest?") around the house. Watch your use of language
("Who's the best little girl in the whole wide world?") that
reinforces competitive attitudes.
-
Never make your love or acceptance
conditional on a child's performance. It's not enough to say, "As long as you did your
best, honey" if the child learns that Mommy's attitude about her is quite different
when she has triumphed over her peers.
-
Be aware of your power as a model. If you
need to beat others, your child will learn that from you
regardless of what you say. The lesson will be even stronger if
you use your child to provide you with vicarious victories.
Raising healthy, happy, productive children
goes hand in hand with creating a better society. The first step to
achieving both is recognizing that our belief in the value of
competition is built on myths. There are better ways for our
children -- and for us -- to work and play and live.
Copyright © 1987 by Alfie
Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed
without permission as long as each copy includes this notice along
with citation information (i.e., name of the periodical in which it
originally appeared, date of publication, and author's name).
Permission must be obtained in order to reprint this article in a
published work or in order to offer it for sale in any form. Please
write to the address indicated on the Contact
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