No Contest (62 page)
Authors: Alfie Kohn
World War I,
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Wynne-Edwards, V. C.,
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Yarrow, Marian Radke,
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Yerkes-Dodson Law,
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Zero-sum game,
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Zunis,
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A
LFIE
K
OHN'S
books include
Punished by Rewards
and
No Contest: The Case Against Competition,
as well as
Beyond Displine
and
What to Look for in a Classroom.
Descrilbed by
Time
magazine last year as “perhaps the country's most outspoken critic of educational fixation on grades and test scores,” he is a popular lecturer, speaker to teachers, parents, and reasearchers across the country. The author currently resides in Belmont, Massachusetts.
* There are exceptions, however. Humanistic psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers contend that human beings are fundamentally goodâthat is, that what we think of as healthy, productive, ethical behavior is the natural tendency of our biological natures. This approach hearkens back to the neo-Freudian tradition that includes Erich Fromm and Karen Horney, and, for that matter, all the way back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. More recent evidence from developmental psychology conceivably could be used to support the hypothesis that altruism is inborn. See p. 201, note 24.
***
* This matter of interrelationship is noteworthy with respect to the nature/nurture disputes because the critics of biological determinism typically do not subscribe to a
tabula rasa
environmentalism. If these critics are sometimes represented as doing so, it is because this simplistic version of environmentalism has been thoroughly discredited by now and attributing it to one's adversaries makes it easier to dismiss them. Moreover, to insist that we are not merely “survival machinesârobot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes”
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is not necessarily to cast our lot with the equally deterministic premises of, say, Skinnerian behaviorism. We can also challenge biological determinism from the vantage point of an affirmation of human freedom.
***
* This is not always the case. An emphasis on inevitability sometimes is found on the part of people who do not oppose change. Twenty-five hundred years ago, Heraclitus argued not that change is desirable, but that it is inexorable. Orthodox Marxists, too, with their talk of historical inevitability, are preoccupied with what is bound to happen.
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* Of course, just because all cooperation may be called cheating (because we have no legitimate place for it in American classrooms) does not mean that everything we call cheating is genuinely cooperative or otherwise admirable.
***
* The game, such a favorite of researchers that one writer called it the “
E. coli
of social psychology,”
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is set up so that the two players are more highly rewarded if they both cooperate than if they both defect, but that an individual stands to gain even more if she defects while her opponent cooperates. The paradox, to which I shall return in the next chapter, is that while the traditional paradigm of the social sciences (particularly economics) is predicated on rationality from the individual's perspective, in PD what is rational for the individual is irrational for the pair.
***
* The use of “American” to refer to people who live in the United States may itself be regarded as ethnocentric since this is not the only country in this hemisphere. I reluctantly adopt this usage here only because “United States” does not have a convenient adjective.
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* The cost of this advertising is, of course, passed through to the consumer, often accounting for a substantial proportion of the total purchase priceâand offering yet another reason to doubt claims of competition's efficiency.
***
* I follow common usage in taking
sports
to refer to certain competitive games that require vigorous physical activity. It follows, then, that
noncompetitive sports
is a contradiction in terms, but the extent of competition in a given sporting event is not fixed.
***
* The psychologically destructive elements of competition are not automatically eliminated by avoiding interaction. Any individual activity that can be quantified can also be turned into a compulsive effort to push oneself forward. This neurotic driven-ness is a sad enough spectacle in the workplace; it becomes that much worse when it spills over into recreational activitiesâsuch as running, swimming, or weightliftingâwhere the point is supposed to be enjoyment.
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* Psychoanalysts usually refer to the first two phenomena as examples of a defense mechanism called “reaction formation,” while the third is classified as “counterphobic” behavior.
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* “Self-esteem” (which, unmodified, is sometimes a shorthand for unconditional or high self-esteem) does not imply that one cannot or will not accurately gauge one's limitations. In fact, those with high self-esteem are better able to achieve the perspective and sense of safety that permit such assessments. People who appear to think that they can do no wrong are more likely suffering from
deficient
self-esteem. Likewise, self-esteem is not at all inimical to growth; a fundamental trust in oneself is very different from what we call “self-satisfaction,” which breeds stagnation.
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â This proposition and the ones that follow are not hypotheses; they cannot be proved or disproved in the scientific sense. Rather, their persuasiveness will depend on the extent to which they capture our experiences and enhance our understanding of others and ourselves. For people who are particularly competitive, this line of thinking may ring true only after more careful introspection; we usually resist seeing our own behavior as unhealthy.
***
* The reverse of this propositionâthat the less a person competes, the healthier he must beâdoes not follow, however. This is because competitiveness is not the only manifestation of low self-esteem. Many people, in fact,
avoid
competition because of their sense of inadequacy. In light of the psychological reversals spoken of earlier, this is not inconsistent with the fact that others embrace competition for the same reason. And thus it should not be surprising that children with low self-esteem in some circumstances showed the least competitive behavior
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or viewed without pleasure the prospect of working at a competitive job.
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* That victory is the stuff of many dreams is clear from the popularity of mass culture entertainments that trade on it. A stock cinematic device, for example, consists in having a likable character come from behind in the final moments of a big game to win the trophy. The more obstacles he or she has had to overcome, the better. In the last few years, the same essential formula has been used for movies about basketball, karate, ice-skating, skiing, horseback riding, wrestling, boxing, football, baseball, dancing, and auto and bicycle racing. Of course, the vicarious thrill experienced in a movie theater is a pallid substitute for being a winner oneself, and the very demand for fictional triumphs bespeaks the inability of actual competition to satisfy our needs.
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* We are moved to help a hungry individual but oblivious to how broad social policies have created hunger on a massive scale. In the face of considerable contrary evidence, we continue to believe that longer prison sentences will stop crime; we fail to consider how crime springs from structural barriers to the fulfillment of human needs.
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* There are many concepts that similarly depend on a social context for their very existence even though we take their ultimate reality for granted. The idea of theft, for instance, is literally without meaning in cultures where private property does not exist. There is no such thing as leisure unless work is experienced as alienating or unfulfilling. You cannot commit blasphemy unless you believe there is a God to be blasphemed.
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* The slogan “Smash patriarchy!” is an extreme example of this. It is a perfect paradox, neatly refuting itself.
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* Two qualifications are in order here. First, even such noncompetitive measures as past performance are product-oriented. In many instances it may be desirable to stop checking our performance and pushing ourselves to produce more. We can stop counting laps and simply swim for as long as it gives us pleasure. Second, even the process of comparing our performance to othersâwhich I have been suggesting is unnecessaryâdoes not necessitate competition. We can see how well others are doing without needing to do better than they (see
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).
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* Having a conversation with a large group of people does not in itself establish a competitive interaction. One way to avoid transforming a discussion into a contest is to ask deeper questions for which there are no clear-cut answers (“What would happen if there were no countries?” instead of “What's the capital of Italy?”) or to encourage students to do some of the asking themselves. Where there are unambiguously right answers, formats other than whole-class discussions might be preferable. In any case, these conversations can always be conducted so that each participant's contribution is valued, an atmosphere of safety prevails in which students feel able to take risks, and verbal fluency and simple recall are not the only skills seen as worth having.
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* Deutsch, in turn, had studied with Kurt Lewin, whose work in the 1930s and 1940s was instrumental in developing a systematic theory of how people behave in groups. Lewin's influence passed, on the one hand, to Deutsch and then to the Johnsons, and, on the other, to a second well-known student, Leon Festinger, who, in turn, was mentor to Elliot Aronson, developer of the Jigsaw model of cooperative learning.
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* Ir makes sense for teachers and students to create a cooperative context before tackling tasks that will provoke strong disagreement. Conflict should be introduced gradually, with care taken to ensure that students' social skills (and the bonds between students) can accommodate mildly opposing views before asking them to thrash out more incendiary issues.
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* I should emphasize that it is not necessary to arrive at the position I have taken in this book, that competition is inherently destructive and counterproductive, in order to recognize the merit of cooperative learning.
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* This reluctance to leave could also, in theory, be explained by the sort of food that awaited them. However, other reports corroborate the excitement that students demonstrate for their work when engaged in CL, groaning when the bell rings and displaying other signs of being engrossed that many teachers thought they would never live long enough to witness. CL sometimes makes learning so engaging, according to one researcher and trainer, that students may “be prepared to remain in the classroom and continue working on learning tasks rather than taking a recess and going out to play.”
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* A couple of important qualifications are needed here. First, CL is not absolutely
necessary
for helping students to become more excited about school; enthusiasm can and does describe some noncooperative classrooms, too. Second, CL is not
sufficient
for changing attitudes about school. It does not in itself respond adequately to the fact that so many children view school as a series of unpleasant tasks, sweetened only by the chance to see their friends. As I will argue later, using team learning to more effectively cram the same pointless and disconnected bits of information into children's heads, or relying on the same carrot-and-stick approach to instruction (except this time with groups), will not transform the experience of learning in the way that CL has the potential to do. In fact, a student's view of CL may itself be contaminated by its continued association with an otherwise stagnant system of pedagogy.
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* We should not overlook the corresponding belief that implied threats are necessary to ensure individual accountability. The impact of my earlier remarks is that even teachers who abhor the use of extrinsic motivators (preferring to foster interdependence in less artificial ways) may be sneaking them in the back door by leaning on tests and mandatory recitations to make students “accountable” for learning.
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* Sadly, some models of CL require groups of students to compete against each other. Like team sports, the central message this conveys is that the reason to work together in a group is to defeat another group; triumphing over a common enemy is established as the ultimate goal.
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This not only sends children conflicting messages, but takes auay with one hand everything that the other has given by making CL available.
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* One observer argues that this attenuated model of learning in higher education helps to explain why CL has rarely taken root in the college classroom. “The traditional role of the university professor as an expert who initiates novices into disciplinary ways of knowing and thinking is itself an impediment to creating genuinely cooperative learning environments,” according to Steven A. Gelb, who teaches at the University of San Diego. The other impediments he mentions are the fact that many students
expect
to defer to authority rather than learning cooperatively, and the extraordinarily competitive milieu in which faculty members work, with cooperation construed as a hindrance to professional success.
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