Chapter 2—A Competitive Learning System, Part 1

Our social framework is based on competition, so it follows that our educational system is also competitively based. Hardly anyone can imagine sports, education, business, or politics without competition. From a young age, we find that virtually every activity in which we participate includes some form of competition. Whether in school or sports, shortly after we get involved, we face an opponent in one form or another. When we’re graded on a curve, when we take the PSAT to prepare us for the SAT, and even when we are asked to raise our hands if we know the answer, we are competing against other students. Few of us question the competitive approach. We tend to think of it as organic and essential; people must compete to succeed, the logic goes, so they had better get used to the pressures of competition from the start. The problem is not with competition per se, but how and when we go about having people compete.

Premature Competition
Introducing competition into the learning process prematurely — before we master fundamental skills — causes many problems. This is perhaps most obvious in the field of sports, so I will use that arena to illustrate this concept. It is not uncommon to see five-year-olds playing competitive soccer games after two weeks of practice, which as a rule means two one-hour practices. What skill level can be achieved in two hours? Many teams practice very little together once they start playing their weekly game; often their weekly competition is their only practice. This is putting the cart before the horse! These children need to spend non-competitive time running around the field, having fun, kicking the ball to one another, getting fit and coordinated, practicing and developing their skills, and allowing cellular memory to pattern the basics into their body/minds before competition enters the picture.

This competitive approach is common in youth sports. In baseball I’ve seen seven-years-old pitchers who couldn’t throw the ball over the plate, and batters who couldn’t make contact with a slowly pitched ball. Why do we make these kids compete before they’ve learned the basic skills? One of the few sports where competition is postponed until fundamental skills have been developed is gymnastics. This is because gymnastics can be very dangerous, and the consequences of premature competition (before developing fundamental skills) are potentially severe.

Even when children aren’t competing against one another on a conscious level, they are often being pushed to get to the point where they can compete. This so called games-based approach to learning is widespread. Players are supposed to learn their skills while playing competitively. Indeed, some learning is going on during competition, but a lot of it negatively impacts a player’s development. Many skills are not being developed, and many less than optimal habits are being patterned into the physical, mental, and emotional cellular memory.

In the competitive system, winners are lionized; the rest are second-class citizens, often regarded as also-rans, or worse, losers. The world of competition is a jungle. Is it really a good idea to expose children to this jungle before they are prepared physically, mentally, and emotionally? It is hard enough even when they are prepared. The question to ask is whether the competitive system truly produces excellence, or just a set of winners of uncertain ability? With winning such a premium and so strongly desired, it would make sense at the very least to learn the essential skills of an activity before being thrust into competition. But that is not how we are taught.

Many assume that exposing children to competition at an early age prepares them for all the competition they will face throughout life. But as you will see, this is not the case. This is the drop-the-baby-in-the-deep-end-of-the-pool theory of learning. If the “baby” sinks instead of swimming, it is assumed, in the competitive mind-set, not to “have what it takes.” Putting people, especially children, into competition before they have developed effective skills, can be painful, even traumatic. Many will be scarred emotionally. The resulting embarrassment, shame or lowered self-esteem will hold them back in other areas of life, and diminish their chances of achieving their potential.

When a society places so much importance on winning, losing is often experienced as personal failure. We’ve all heard that it doesn’t matter if we win or lose, it’s how we play the game. But these hollow words do not reflect the reality we see all around us, and the message we are “told” in countless ways. The winner gets it all — the praise, the glory, the fame, and the fortune. Even young children can see and feel that it does matter whether we win or lose; and that there are real benefits to winning, and real consequences to losing.

Winning Versus Learning
The competitive approach to learning is widespread in all aspects of education. Children find themselves in a recital or a performance after taking only a few months of music or dance lessons. If children really know and can proficiently play or perform the material, no problem. If not, they are programming performance anxiety into their cellular memory. I know this from personal experience. From starting piano lessons at age six, to playing drums in the band in high school, I was put into performances before I was confident of the material. Those experiences sowed the seeds of a lack of confidence, and performance anxiety. Academically, it’s the same: Children are given material to learn, and then tested and graded before they have really learned that material. What are we really testing and teaching by putting children into competition prematurely? And what are children really learning in this way?

This is the trial by fire or school-of-hard-knocks approach to learning: “We learned the hard way; you have to learn the hard way. Life isn’t fair, life is tough!” Maybe life is tough. Do we need to make it tougher on principle? Maybe we did learn the hard way. Do we have to make learning harder for everyone? How about discovering what may actually be the best way to learn? The school-of-hard-knocks approach does push a small percentage of people to excel, primarily from fear of the consequences of failure, or perhaps an overweening desire to win or to be number one. But most people fail to achieve their potential in a competitive environment. Even those who succeed often pay a steep price, physically, mentally, and emotionally. Yet this is the environment in which we continue to raise and educate our children. What are we passing on?

When learning becomes a contest, the focus shifts from learning skills to winning contests, and to fears of losing. When being a winner is so important, it can’t help taking precedence over developing the skills necessary to achieve excellence. And this is a fundamental problem in our competitive culture.

Positive Effects of a Competitive System
There is no disputing the fact that competition has produced many tangible benefits in people’s lives. It encourages us to work toward goals and develop concentration, perseverance, motivation and ambition. It can help us hone our skills, raise performance levels, strive for excellence, build character, and even foster camaraderie and teamwork while channeling aggression in a less destructive direction. We have seen the benefits of a competitive approach in industry where competing companies, teams and individuals stimulate higher levels of creativity and leap-frog off each other, inventing or designing better and better products and technologies. Such competition has fostered rapid growth and accelerated technological breakthroughs in many fields. A clear example of competition motivating accelerated development is the space race between the United States and the U.S.S.R. back in the 1960’s that resulted in the U.S. sending the first man to the moon.

Yet despite all the benefits of a competitive paradigm, I suggest that our next stage of evolution will enable us to achieve far more benefits through non-competition, which includes a skill-to-mastery based focus, and a higher principle of cooperation.

This chapter focuses mainly on the negative side effects of competition. (The benefits of competition have been actively promoted for centuries, if not millennia. We all know them quite well.) It will show why the premature introduction of competition into the learning process produces far more negative than positive effects. In fact, if competition were a drug, the Food and Drug Administration would ban it for having too many adverse side effects!