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Hurt

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Competition not only harms the young it harms society.
I recently had to decide between 2 software suppliers. Their products were fairly similar, pricing not too far apart and the decision was looking difficult. Then the decision was made for me. Competitor A sent me an e-mail with lots of data about the poor performance of Competitor B.
That swung it. I went with competitor B
The reason was because Competitor A had decided that this was a competition in which he had to do anything to win. It was short term strategy which he hoped would sway me. I however was looking at a longer strategy of trust and partnership and I don't believe that Competitor B could display those. He thought that by giving me a one sided argument I would just go with him without any research of my own.

What has this got to do with school?
Well it's at school, I believe, that people learn about short term victories, about beating people every week. It's at school that people learn about arbitrary targets and taking orders without question. This is all useful stuff if you want to join the army but what if you'd like to think for a living?
At my school we had over 1000 pupils and in each year we had a football team (this is a British school with five years rather than grades and football is soccer!) that would play against other schools. So out of 1000 pupils maybe 60 got to play a sport at a reasonable level and the rest had to make do with being not very good.
Now you might say that this is what you have to put up with in life but this is simply not true. In life if we don't excel at something we can go try something else but in school we have to do the same thing every week whether we like it or not. And to what purpose? Fitness? Hardly, if you were in goal this meant that you stood around for a long time and if you were actually running it was only for short bursts. A number of pupils at my school had to be taken of the pitch on a stretcher, and I'm sorry but I'm not sure what job that was preparing them for.
Now obviously all competition in school is not about sport. There are of course exams, but they are not really a competition. Whether there are 10 or 1000 people taking the exam you will still score the same. And in an audition for a play there are usually several parts and if you don't get in there is often a good reason (like you can't dance) and so you've been saved a lot of pain and struggle and also you can focus on things you might be good at.
Last year I beat 30 other candidates to get my job. I didn't know how many candidates there were until afterwards. And I'm glad I didn't know about the other candidates because I might have spent time worrying about beating them rather than how I could help my future employer.
I think an alternative to competition in school might be cooperation. Getting children to think "how can I help" rather than "how can I beat" this person might make people grow up to value things other than getting concert tickets fastest or trying to outbid people on the housing market or getting into debt so that our possessions at least look like they belong to winners.
Life shouldn't be a competition. It should be a never ending game.

Learn more about this author, Brendan O'Connor.
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