No Contest: The Case Against Competition

by Alfie Kohn

  TOWARD A NONCOMPETITIVE SOCIETY

  Whether employed deliberately or not, these mechanisms for frustrating change have been devastatingly effective. My point in reviewing them is to make it easier to anticipate and deal with such maneuvers. Having considered some of the issues that arise with respect to “generic” change, we can return to the specific case of competition. If competition is indeed unhelpful and destructive, and if attitudes and personal goals are shaped by the win/lose structure, then we need to set about the formidable task of undoing the arrangements that set us against one another—from parlor games to geopolitical conflict.

  While working to dismantle existing structures, we should also be careful not to produce new occasions for competition. This means taking pains to avoid creating scarcity. Most scarcity is artificial, I have argued, because a prized status has been set up where none existed before. As parents and teachers and managers, we are constantly transforming situations into contests. In fact, the widespread assumption that “someone’s got to lose” arises only because we keep making goal attainment mutually exclusive. Every time we make salespeople try to outdo one another, every time we display the best homework assignment in class on the bulletin board, every time we call out to our children, “Who can set the table fastest?”—we are contributing to the unnecessary and undesirable competitiveness that suffuses our culture. The real alternative to being Number One, as I have already noted, is not being Number Two; it is dispensing with rankings altogether. Starting immediately, we can stop contriving contests and we can urge our friends and colleagues and children’s teachers to do likewise. At the very least, we can present the case against competition to them so they understand the implications of what they are doing.

  All of this applies to the vast number of cases where scarcity is created. But even where scarcity seems to be real, we need to look at the bigger picture to determine whether certain assumptions or policy decisions (which can be re-evaluated) lie behind competition and give it the appearance of necessity. Consider a familiar example: When cars prowl the city streets in search of parking spaces, the shortage is not invented and the quest is clearly competitive. But the number of spaces to be had downtown was not decreed by God. It is the result of a decision that can be changed. The same is true for the availability and convenience of mass transit, which indirectly causes or eliminates the frustrating race for space. Instead of taking competition for granted, we ought to be asking what broader arrangements might be altered so as to present us with a structure that does not require winners and losers. Sometimes the search for these broader arrangements will lead us to the very foundations of our economic and political system.17 This does not mean we ought to drop the matter and resign ourselves to competition. On the contrary: whatever we encounter, however large the stakes, is open to question and, perhaps, transformation.

  There are quite a few thinkers whose work is useful in beginning to think about reducing structural competition. Terry Orlick offers noncompetitive games as a way of reconceptualizing recreation. “Why not create and play games that make us more cooperative, honest and considerate of others?” he asks.18 David and Roger Johnson propose noncompetitive alternatives in the classroom as a way of improving education. Robert Paul Wolff sketches a plan for severing the ties between high school performance and college admissions, and again between college performance and graduate admissions.19 Both moves would allow genuine learning to replace the awful competitive scramble that now preoccupies students. On the political scene, Benjamin Barber has argued persuasively that the adversarial and individualistic underpinnings of politics as we know it are actually inimical to democracy; in their place he proposes a consensus-based system that is similar to the cooperative resolution of conflict discussed in chapter 6.20 With respect to global rivalry, Morton Deutsch, among others, emphasizes that “the old notion of ‘national security’ must be replaced by the new notion of ‘mutual security.’”21

  In each case, the revolt against competition is wedded to the affirmation of an alternative vision. This is a practical necessity, since we can hardly tear down one set of structures without offering something in its place. But the alternative also is the very reason for objecting to competition in the first place. It is because we value human relationship, among other things, that we found competing to be problematic. The motive for opposing competition and the arrangement to replace it are one and the same: cooperation.

  Despite the productivity and sense of fulfillment that come from working together, we often act as if cooperation is something for which we must sit passively and wait, like a beautiful sunset. In fact, there is scarcely an arena of human life which cannot be transformed into a cooperative enterprise. I have hinted throughout this book at how this might be done, from leisure activities to workplace cooperatives, but I have not laid out anything like a comprehensive guide for coordinating our efforts. Having concentrated my efforts on a critique of competition, I leave that task to others, confident that there will be no shortage of suggestions once our energies are freed from planning and participating in competitive projects. Once the myths justifying competition are behind us, the prospects are good for changing the structures that perpetuate it.

  So long as we remain a competitive society, however, it will be possible to insist that one has got to compete to survive. This argument is heard most often from those who actually have no inclination to stop competing and often from those who, as Bertrand Russell pointed out, are really invoking “survival” in order to justify their desire to beat others. But let us assume that this objection is offered not as a rationalization but as an expression of genuine discomfort, arising from the inability to reconcile one’s own values with the competitive demands of our culture. What can we say in response?

  There are no easy answers here. We should begin by reviewing the catalogue of competition’s disadvantages. It may seem prudent to enter contests and devote ourselves to winning, but the many respects in which competition is destructive should be weighed against the need to join the race.

  To follow out the price we pay for this way of life into all the intricacies of social and personal life, the frustration and wastage of temperaments and abilities that do not and can not conform to this competitive stereotype, the inevitable failure of the many who try to conform and fail, more often from lack of aggressiveness rather than absence of ability, these are some of the inquiries that we should and probably will make as time goes on.22

  Furthermore, the apparent necessity of competing is another of the self-fulfilling prophecies that we keep encountering. As each of us sighs and says he has no choice but to stay ahead of the next person, that next person feels compelled to do the same. You become part of the “they” to which someone else refers.

  To take this perspective is to move beyond our customary individualistic frame of reference. Even if it seems appropriate for me to compete—overlooking for the moment the price I pay for doing so—I need to ask whether it is in our collective interest to keep competing. (That such a discrepancy can exist is, of course, the lesson of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game described earlier.) If it is not, then we need not only to think but to act as a group. Replacing structural competition with cooperation requires collective action, and collective action requires education and organization. An individual tenant is at the mercy of her landlord, but if all the tenants in the building unite, they can demand their rights. The same is true of competition. An individual may in some respects lose out by refusing to take part in a mutually destructive struggle, but a group of people who work in an office or study at a college or send their children to a school can join forces. By helping others to see the terrible consequences of a system that predicates one person’s success on another’s failure, we can act together to change that system.

  As with other features of the status quo, the stakes are highest here for those with the least power. People who have systematically been denied the opportunity to earn a decent wage, to lead
a life with dignity, to make decisions about what affects them, may think it peculiar to be told that competition is destructive. After all, they might argue, “my only hope is to enter the race and try to win, to beat them at their own game.” It is not a coincidence that this is precisely the response to oppression encouraged by those who hold the power. First, this strategy rarely works (even in conventional terms) because the deck is stacked: those who already are winners are in better shape to win succeeding contests. Edgar Z. Friedenberg put it this way:

  The classic device for legitimating the unequal distribution of rewards in a democratic society is, of course, competition in which the same rules are applied to all the contestants and the status system of the society is protected by the nature of the rules rather than by their inequitable application. The people in the society thus learn to divide themselves into winners and losers and to blame themselves for being among the losers if they are.23

  Second, to participate in competition is to help perpetuate an arrangement that caused the problem in the first place. No one stands to benefit more from a noncompetitive society than those who have been cheated by a competitive society.

  Transforming the nature of society, then, requires a collective effort and a long-term commitment. In the meantime, each of us has a series of choices to make. Once it becomes clear why competition ought to be avoided, we must re-examine our own lives to determine what concessions to the prevailing ethic, if any, we are prepared to make. These concessions should be made with a clear understanding of the costs—both personal and societal—that they entail. And they should strengthen our resolve to work at the same time to create healthy, productive, cooperative alternatives.

  10

  Learning Together

  I consider . . . the tendency toward a selfish individualism one of the strongest counts against our customary . . . sit-alone-at-your-own-desk procedure. . . . Wholehearted purposeful activity in a social situation as the typical unit of school procedure is the best guarantee of the utilization of the child’s native capacities now too frequently wasted.

  —William H. Kilpatrick, 1918

  INTERVIEWER: What is it like to work in a group?

  JUSTIN (age ten): You have four brains.

  BACK TO SCHOOL

  Every so often, parents and teachers and policymakers get swept up in yet another earnest discussion about whether values should be taught in the schools. Kids need them, someone will exclaim, brandishing fresh evidence that today’s young people routinely violate standards of decent conduct. No, values ought to be taught at home, comes the predictable reply. But the point is that they’re not being taught at home, the first speaker rejoins. Well, then, whose values would we teach? another challenger wants to know.

  Despite their differences, the speakers in this imaginary colloquy share a profound naivety. To argue about whether it is time for values to be introduced into the classroom is like asking (to take Molière’s charming example) whether you ought to start speaking in prose: the point is you have already been doing so, even if you never thought of it that way. Teachers do not need to lecture children about stealing in order to exude values. Their choice of stories, the order in which they are taught, and the tone of voice in which a character is mentioned; the fact that children must raise their hands to speak or obtain permission to go to the bathroom or address one person in the room by his or her last name; the objects that decorate the walls and who decided they should be there; how students’ work is evaluated (and for what purpose)—all these and many other aspects of life at school already vibrate with values whether we realize it or not. There is no question, then, of introducing values into a neutral environment, but only of critically examining existing values in light of others that could be there instead.

  I have already argued that few values are more persistently promoted in American classrooms than the desirability of trying to beat other people. Sometimes this lesson is presented with all the subtlety of a fist in the face, as with the use of spelling bees,1 grades on a curve (a version of artificial scarcity in which my chance of receiving an A is reduced by your getting one), awards assemblies, and other practices that redefine the majority of children as losers.

  At other times, competition is promoted tacitly, perhaps even unwittingly, by pitting students against one another for the teacher’s attention and approval. This may occur through the use of manipulative behavior management strategies—for example, a public announcement such as: “I like the way Joanne is sitting so nice and quiet.” (A contest has been created for Nicest, Quietest Pupil, and everyone except Joanne has just lost.) Or it may follow from the conventional arrangement of asking a question of the whole class.

  The teacher asks the question, the students who think they know the answer raise their hands, and the teacher calls on one of them. We’ve all seen it many times: when one student is called on, the other students who have their hands up register their disappointment with a little “Oh.” It’s a structure that sets the kids against each other.2

  Anyone who doubts that competition is the subtext of most whole-class question-and-answer sessions need only continue watching the faces of the children who were not recognized. Are they rooting for Jeremy, who now has the floor, to succeed? Hardly. They are hoping he says something stupid because this will present them with another opportunity to triumph. The teacher’s face is scanned for signs of dissatisfaction with Jeremy’s answer; once they find it, the children’s hands shoot up again, fingers reaching anxiously for the fluorescent lights. Some students participate energetically in this scramble to be first with the right response, while others stare dully and look beaten (which, at some point, they have been). Our attention, however, is properly focused not on the temperament of the individual participants but on the structure that has turned learning into a contest.*

  Alongside competition stands another value, stressed with equal vigor by educators: individualism. Between the American flag in the corner and that preprinted strip of impossibly proper cursive letters that stretches above the blackboard, there might as well be a sign that proclaims: I WANT TO SEE WHAT YOU CAN DO, NOT WHAT YOUR NEIGHBOR CAN DO. Children sit at separate desks, as if on their own private islands, instructed to keep their eyes on their own work. Helping is construed as cheating, since it goes without saying that one is evaluated only on the basis of one’s solitary efforts. Quite a bit goes without saying, in fact, since even talking with one’s classmates is usually regarded as inappropriate. The fact that each child is supposed to be responsible for his or her own assignments and behavior means that even when students are not led to see one another as obstacles to their own success, each is, at best, irrelevant to the other’s learning.

  The two standard classroom arrangements in the United States require children to work against each other or—as a result of the ostensibly progressive reform of a few decades ago known as individualized learning—apart from each other. Earlier ([>]), I indicated that some teachers are making use of an alternative to these two models, known as cooperative learning. My scant three paragraphs on this subject do not begin to do justice to the topic, however, with respect to the research supporting its use, the various models for implementing it, or the extent of its potential impact on education. Since writing that brief account in chapter 3, I have discovered a great deal more about cooperative learning and have become an enthusiastic and outspoken proponent of its use. Meanwhile, the movement itself has taken root in many schools around the country—indeed, around the world. Cooperative learning (CL) is, in my judgment, one of the most promising alternatives to structural competition not just in the classroom but in any arena. If there is a single concrete image that represents the transcendence of mutually exclusive goal attainment, it is a picture of three or four children sitting around a table animatedly exchanging information and ideas.

  BETWEEN STUDENT AND STUDENT

  From Morton Deutsch comes the notion of promotive (or positive) interdependence: my success i
s facilitated by, or even dependent on, your success. The explicit application of this model to classroom learning in the U.S. began quite recently. David Johnson, a former student of Deutsch’s,* and his brother Roger published the first major book on CL in 1975.3 The 1970s also saw early work on a reward-driven model of team learning at Johns Hopkins University by David DeVries and his doctoral student, Robert Slavin, as well as the development of the Jigsaw approach by Elliot Aronson and the Group Investigation method by Shlomo and Yael Sharan in Israel. (From another perspective, though, students have been working together, although not necessarily cooperatively, for as long as there have been too few Bunsen burners to go around in science classrooms. In fact, the practice of having students learn from each other can be traced to the seventeenth century, and probably all the way back to Aristotle.)4

  CL means working toward a common goal in the classroom—learning in pairs or small groups in the context of positive interdependence. This context implies that merely dividing a class into teams and announcing that students should work with their groupmates (“You four do this ditto together”) is not sufficient for, much less equivalent to, cooperative learning. Because of this, teachers who have merely put children in groups and are unimpressed with the results have not yet given CL a chance to prove itself. Virtually everyone who has thought seriously about CL has, at one time or another, warned educators that it takes time and skill to foster positive interdependence successfully, particularly in light of the competitive and individualistic norms that students have internalized from other settings.