by Michael Patrick

Created on: June 08, 2008

Competition in school isn't just helpful, it's vital. Life itself is competition for resources, food, mates and progeny, and oh, by the way, the smarts to balance a checkbook and learn from the mistakes of our forebears. Without competition, there is little left but vacant self-indulgence. We do better when in the company of and guided by others who are more proficient, more able to achieve their desires and more able to give to others. To recognize talents and special abilities in others to which we aspire is critical to growing up and discovering our own unique capabilities.

School isn't an isolated institution for competition, it's a controlled extension of it. The position of a teacher is: "I know something you don't and I challenge you to know it, too." That's a competitive stance and it's the same as any parent takes when instructing a child.

Children find laudable persons more often in the greater social pool of school than at home. Schools aren't daycare centers devoted to babysitting insolent and indolent children, they are institutions of learning where reluctant and often spoiled children are given information they don't want, taught concepts beyond their interest, and tested on subjects they couldn't break away from MTV long enough to learn.

What kid loves that? Every child is born selfish and self-indulgent. It's a good quality for survival but without training in the art of social discourse and immersion in the wealth of human knowledge, that child is little better off than the household dog whose only desire is food and a scratch behind the ear. But dogs can't, as far as we know, learn to read or write; the basics of human endeavor.

Should my twenty-year-old daughter be able to challenge Hillary Clinton without competing? Should she make varsity volleyball without demonstrating ability? Should she pass a course that she ignored?

Competition has a bad rap in our current lexicon of scholastic enterprise. A couple of generations of hippies and yuppies who envision some utopian Elysium where flushing toilets and charged cell phones are an entitlement rather than an accomplishment have damned competition as too harsh, too unreasonable, too, well, gee, challenging. It's a generational blindness that doesn't bode well in a declining economy and more "competitive" world.

Let's not forget that a family is a school. What mother or father doesn't show Johnny or Jill their skills and challenge him or her to achieve or exceed those skills? It's a gentle competition between parent and child. The child is born ignorant and incompetent; the parent is educated and able and instills in the child the desire and the need to be at least as educated and able. That's benign and productive competition.

Without setting some "bar" to reach, why in the world would Johnny or Jill try to jump over it? How would he or she even grasp the concept that there was a bar in the first place? Each time Jill jumps the bar, Johnny tries to do it, too. It's called play. And it's still competition, an inherent human desire to do as well as we can at that bar, and there are as many bars as there are people. Each of us is able to jump the bars of which we're capable and prosper as a result.

Competition isn't about fights to the death or winners and losers. It's about the ability of one individual to recognize superior abilities or knowledge in another and aspire to that and go beyond. It's the "I want to be as good as or better than" principle and it is competition; the forge of individual growth and the mettle of human progress.

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