Carson, R. (2003). Beyond competitive schooling. EDCI 552 Course pack.

NPTT Program: Montana State University.

BEYOND COMPETITIVE SCHOOLING

Robert N. Carson

As teachers our goal is to create a community of avid learners. We recognize that any
group of twenty or thirty humans will show remarkable diversity. Humans are conditioned by
their environments, including their social environment, and the effects of that conditioning can
show up in the degree of courage, mental freedom, and motivation they have as learners. In this
article we want to look at the spectrum of possibility, from the well motivated and confident
learner at one end, to the discouraged, detached isolate at the other. Discouraged learners are
common in our society. We place high demands on people at an early age, we engage them in
psychological combat (competition), and we willingly sacrifice the losers for the benefit of the
winners. Understanding how competition, inability, discouragement, and helplessness can affect
learners will equip us to make informed decisions about how we want our classroom to function,
and how we will work with those who are struggling. Discouraged learners often withdraw from
the social environment, but they seldom do so graciously. Most of them find ways to get back at
a society that has defeated them. Misbehavior, vandalism, gangs, hostility, violence, and other
anti-social responses may stem in part from the unwillingness or inability of our society to create
a dignified social space for every member and to legitimate their being.
Our society places a high value on competition. It is not without controversy. The
supporting ideology states that competition is good for business, and that it reflects the natural
order of things. Darwins notion of natural selection and the survival of the fittest was
developed in England during that countrys period of classical, laissez-faire capitalism. It
portrayed the natural order in a way that made it appear suspiciously similar to that particular
economic system. Americans are heavily influenced by that heritage, and by the ethos of the
protestant work ethic, which states in effect that people get what they deserve out of life.
Americans tend to be an aggressive, hard working, robust people. We value hard work,
competition, and success in life.
Because these are seen as national character traits, we tend to incorporate a competitive,
meritocratic framework of assessment and valuation into our schools. The reasoning is that
competition is healthy and natural, that it motivates every student to do his or her best, and that it
prepares them to live in a competitive world. Critics of this practice argue that the use of
competition in schools is cynical, that it is used to legitimate a hierarchical social structure, and
to adjust children to their future roles as winners and losers. It comes as no surprise that children
who have enjoyed the advantages of a literate and rational household end up at the top of the
pecking order as determined by exams, standardized tests, and other sorting mechanisms.
This debate is one of many instances in which educational policy ends up reflecting
ideological and political conflicts in society. As is typical, both sides tend to have reasonable
arguments. Let me state my own position so you will not have to guess what I believe. Know
that you are free to come to your own conclusions.
I think there should be competition in schools, because in fact it is a feature of our
society. Children should be taught what competition is, and how to conduct themselves
successfully within competitive situations. They should be taught that ours is a competitive
society in a competitive world. But I also think it is overused, and misused. We should try to
sort out when the use of competition is appropriate. And, when it is used, the emphasis should
be placed on the dynamics of competition itself. In other words, use competition to teach about

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competition. But be very careful about using it otherwise. The idea that this is a competitive
world is only partially true; it is equally true that while one company or nation or sports team
may compete against another, the work within a given organization depends more on
collaboration and teamwork than on competition. People who learn to work together effectively
are the ones who are able to achieve success.
Most school learning should not be competitive. Rather, it should be an individualized
challenge in which failure is not an option, and it should also be a cooperative process in which
group dynamics support the efforts of all members to achieve success. Those who excel at
learning should be enriched by additional challenges that broaden their command of the subject
at hand, and their expertise should occasionally be turned around into tutorial assistance of those
who are still struggling toward mastery. Even from a crassly meritocratic point of view, this
suggestion can be defended. If we assume that the best learners will end up in positions of
responsibility and power, then let us also recognize that their constructive labor in positions of
authority will be targeted at getting the most out of subordinates under their command. To do so
they must understand how to teach others what they know.
It degrades competition to misuse it in schools. If we value competition, we ought not to
use it in places where it is not appropriate. Public schooling is not an appropriate place for
competitive relations in most respects. Schools are there to equip all citizens with a solid
command of the basic elements of intellectual culture. The curriculum, from kindergarten
through 12th grade, represents not the whole of intellectual culture but the absolute minimum that
every citizen needs to have at their command. Any legitimate competition for excellence takes
place beyond this shared base of general competencies.
We should also recognize that, except in the savagery of unlimited warfare, all human
competitiveness (economic, amorous, athletic, artistic, or otherwise) takes place within
cooperative frameworks. Whenever two sports teams compete, they compete in all seriousness
against one another, but they play by rules that define the occasion, and they value one anothers
competitiveness because it gives meaning to their own. We cannot view schools as anything but
the place where the cooperative framework of human civilization is established. To view it
otherwise is a great confusion of means and ends. Those are my personal beliefs.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF COMPETITION
Genuine competitive effort is psychologically complex. It involves a disciplined focus
on ones actual performance and an ability to control the effects of numerous distractors.
Ironically, a focus on winning and losing actually interferes with competent performance. Those
who succeed in competition of any sort generally do so by mastering the skills needed to be
competitive, and then engaging those skills in a manner that is focused on the conditions of the
game itself. This requires self respect, self control, and determination.
Walker says of successful competitors, To the extent that they understand themselves
and improve their control of themselves, they will attain competence (control of their game), and
competence leads to courage, creativity, and fun. Lack of understanding and lack of control lead
to fear, depression, and incompetence and no fun. (Walker, p. xiv). Stuart Walker is a
professor of pediatrics, an avid competitive sailor, a former member of the 1968 Olympic team,
who has written several books on the psychology of winning. The obvious requirement of
winning is to have the requisite skills. Winning also requires knowing how to focus those skills
on the event as it unfolds. There are admirable character traits that most successful competitors
exhibit, such as a genuine love of the game, a respect for competitors, simple aggressiveness, an
ability to stay focused on the changing conditions of the event and to keep from losing

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concentration as mistakes occur. He writes about mental toughness, courage, concentration,

skillfulness, honesty, teamwork, self-control, and other admirable qualities we would like to
develop in our children. But the most interesting and complex analysis he goes after is not the
psychology of winning, but the intricate psychology of losing, including the psychology of those
who consistently finish just off the mark.
A person who fears failure avoids situations in which failure, if it occurs, will be
unmistakable. He shuns direct conflicts with his opponents starts at the favored end, prolonged
side-by-side contests on the windward leg. Thus, the competitor who desperately needs to win
misses opportunities to make gains, deliberately handicaps himself, and fails to acquire muchneeded experience in tight situations. As he fails more and more often, the tension becomes
intolerable; ultimately, he may surrender and give up the race, the class, or even the sport.
(Walker, p. 66). This paragraph refers to the manner in which adult competitors in sailing
competitions tend to avoid the real sting of failure by decommissioning themselves as the
competition unfolds. When children face losing situations, such as schools frequently present
them with, they too engage in complex patterns of self-destruction.
Finally, consider this insightful passage:
That each racing sailor tends to finish in the same general position in race after race, that
he is committed to a pecking order, is common knowledge. Why and to what extent he manages
his performance to assure this result is rarely recognized. A recent article suggests that the
pecking order is the result of external forces, chiefly the desire of the existing leaders to maintain
the status quo. In fact, it is engineered deliberately (albeit unconsciously) by the joint efforts of
all participants. Although every competitor claims to want to win, most seem to find greater
satisfaction in standardizing an order of finish. Many make significant progress in their first few
years of racing. Some change classes. Finally, each seems to accept his own perception of his
ability, assumes a position at a particular level in a particular fleet, and repetitively finishes in
that position. Most arrange to beat only those they intend to beat, and to lose to all others.(p.
135)
In other words, even among mature adults who are fully equipped with the skills and
maturity to compete, an odd phenomenon occurs. These individuals settle into a reliable pattern
of performance, a pecking order, and take that pattern to be representative of their skill level.
They stop competing fully. They adjust their effort to ensure a predictable outcome. Winners do
not do this, but everyone else does.
This also happens to children when learning is arranged in a competitive framework.
They become A students or B students or D students and tend to see these designations as
destiny. The expectation is self-fulfilling, and in many cases self-destructive. It is built around
self-imposed limits, and when these students do exceed their expected level of performance they
write it off to luck and, like Walkers adult competitors, they experience feelings of guilt or
uneasiness which will work on them next time to ensure a return to their place in the pecking
order. We humans adjust to whatever we take to be reality, and once that adjustment has been
made our minds and our actions tend to preserve that arrangement. The prisoner, released after
so many years behind bars, engages openly in illegal acts that ensure a return to prison. The
student, once defined by all as a poor reader and a slow thinker assumes these qualities and
resists any outside pressures to change.
This is a good place to raise a few rhetorical questions, to wonder out loud whether every
child in a competitive school environment is affected in the same way by the competitive
arrangement. Do young teen-age girls continue to do their best in school, or does the other
social value of needing to be liked by others set up interference patterns? Do minority children

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do their best, or does the ambient expectation of their supposed inferiority contribute to a
downward spiral of self-governance? Do poor children give way to those whose families are
better off?
If the effects were slight, we would not need to make it an issue. But for reasons we do
not fully understand, some children begin at a very early age to decommission themselves as
learners, to seek refuge in failure, and to define themselves as incompetent before they have even
mastered the basic elements of intellectual culture. 20 million adults in the U.S. never even
learned how to read. Why? It is a skill that even children can master, but somehow a fair
percentage of our adult population gave up somewhere along the way and then became
convinced that they could never learn.
To succumb is not only to lose the game but to lose the purpose, the enjoyment, of the
game. Courage is required, grace under pressure... Succumbing is all too common. Fear arises
and cannot be controlled. Paralysis, confusion, bumbling ineptitude, panic, or just irritability and
preoccupation result. And instead of the best performance of which one is capable, the worst
that one can remember follows (Walker, p 90).
RESISTANCE STRATEGIES; SELF PRESERVATION
Before the civil rights movement it was possible to maintain with impunity that minority
children performed poorly in school because they were inferior. Inferior meant biologically
inferior. Lack of political power translates into this kind of ugly indictment easily. As we move
into the twenty-first century the educational performance gap between children of different races
has begun to converge toward parity. This trend would suggest that the original assumptions
condemning the intelligence of minorities was simply wrong. But, somehow, schools served to
maintain that discrepancy.
Where children of minority status continue to lag behind a pattern has been recognized.
It makes a difference whether the child is from a voluntary or an involuntary minority group.
Voluntary minorities are those who chose to become part of American society. Asians, Jews, the
Amish, and other groups can maintain a distinct minority status without suffering a depressed
level of performance. Native Americans and Black Americans are prominent examples of
involuntary minorities, people forced into association with the dominant Anglo culture, and then
relegated to a subordinate status historically. It is important for teachers to recognize the
peculiar social dynamics such groups find themselves in. Group identity and solidarity is often
defined through deliberate opposition to the dominant social group. When black children enter
public schools they are being schooled into the standards of the oppressors culture, often in
opposition to the standards of their own community and culture. To succeed in school then is
tantamount to betrayal of their own community. Black children are accused then of becoming
Oreos like the cookie, black on the outside but white on the inside. Indian children are
similarly accused by their peers of becoming apples. Under these peculiar circumstances, the
logical response is actually self-defeating: resist the dominant culture, fail at school, put up a
struggle. The result is relegation to a vague and disquieting no mans land between two
mutually antagonistic worlds.
While these patterns of resistance are prevalent in the case of involuntary minorities, any
child can be conditioned to a pattern of failure, and when that happens he or she is likely to
reverse course, and not only stop trying but to exert energies against the positive force of
schooling. Children may become actively engaged in their own failure.
Having said that, we should also recognize that the school is not always a benign force in
the lives of all children. A child who fights in school may be fighting for his life. We would like

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to think of schools as wonderful places where children learn fine things and experience all kinds
of beneficial growth. But schools can also function to mangle a childs soul and to assault his or
her mind, values, and culture. To fight against the school in that case makes sense, yet only the
teacher who truly, truly takes the trouble to find out what is going on with each student will have
any chance of understanding whether a childs resistance and hostility is a legitimate response to
a bad situation or simply a misguided pattern in need of correction. Indian children resisting the
old BIA boarding schools and the effort those schools engaged in to remake them in the image of
their oppressors were not acting in a savage and irrational manner, as the school teachers of the
time may have thought. Their resistance though could only be appreciated as logical and heroic
by someone able to see the world through their eyes.
LEARNED HELPLESSNESS
Competitive school environments require that some students be designated as losers. If
we grade on a curve, just by definition some children have to fail, no matter how high the curve
has been set. In reality, though, schools frequently function is such a way that those few
necessary losers in the class will have surrendered psychologically, given up, and resigned
themselves to being mauled by the daily events of the classroom.
Failure breeds failure if we let it. Recalling a history of past failures creates the
impression that failure is inevitable, and this reduces the motivation to work toward success. We
adjust to what we perceive to be reality. We tell ourselves that our current ability is the limit of
our potential. The minimal standard becomes the limit of our efforts, and we score within or
below that dismal boundary. And when we have experienced a succession of failures we begin
to define ourselves as failures. This means that the whole complex arrangement of our
psychological processes get redesigned around the contingencies of low expectations, the shock
of repeated chastisements, and the belief in our own incompetence. This does not have to be a
deliberate and reasoned position we take; to the contrary, it happens subconsciousless and
automatically, and, like a giant ink-blot test, everything we look at in our world now bears the
distinct appearance of failure and sorrow.
In the late 1960's, Martin Seligman and his associates studied the development in dogs of
a behavioral pattern they called learned helplessness. Animals exposed to inescapable shocks
eventually gave up trying to avoid it, and later they even failed to learn to escape when escape
actually became possible. Originally, Seligmans team attempted to describe this pattern in
purely behavioral terms, but quickly came to the conclusion that cognitive events provided a
mediating influence. The dogs were subjected in a metal cage to a series of electrical shocks
over which they had no control. A buzzer would sound, and a few seconds later the jolt hit them
from the metal floor. After a while, they would just lay there completely passive and take the
shock without even trying to escape. Furthermore, and perhaps somewhat surprisingly, even
when the experimental conditions were changed so that the dogs could escape if only they would
jump over a low barrier, they did not do so. Instead, they continued to accept the shock without
trying to escape from it. The original learning that they were powerless to control the situation
actually interfered with their learning to avoid the shock in later trials. In a modification of
this experiment, two dogs would be paired together. The first dog simply got the shock, with no
way to avoid it. The second dog also got the shock, but was able to turn it off by pushing a
lever. Thus, both dogs received the exact same shock, but the second one actually had control
over it. In these trials, conducted hundreds of times with hundreds of dogs, the outcome was the
same: those dogs that received an electrical shock and had no control over it soon learned to
submit to the shock without trying anything to avoid it. They learned to be helpless.

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Similar experiments have been conducted with humans, with comparable results. Here
the test situation is less pure, and cognition mediates against the full force of learned
helplessness, but the results do suggest strongly that humans can acquire the same kind of
acquired disability we see in animals under experimental conditions. Consider the child who
experiences the psychological shock of repeated failure in public learning situations and you
can see where this argument is headed. You can also begin to appreciate why current strategies
in education emphasize active engagement by the learner.
Learned helplessness is associated with clinical depression. The American Psychiatric
Association describes depression as a condition that may include any combination of the
following nine symptoms:
1.
Depressed or irritable mood
2.
Loss of interest in usual activities
3.
Appetite and weight disturbance
4.
Sleep disturbances
5.
Psychomotor disturbance
6.
Loss of energy or fatigue
7.
Feelings of worthlessness
8.
Evidence of decreased ability to think
9.
Recurrent thoughts of death and suicide
When people experience repeated failures they begin to withdraw from the circumstance
that creates those failures. Since children are required to be in school and they cannot withdraw
physically, they withdraw psychologically, distancing themselves from the work of the group
and creating a cognitive landscape that permits them to be elsewhere, at least in their mind.
Schoolwork becomes stupid in their view something they would not lower themselves to do.
The people who strive to do well in school become geeks or brown-nosers. Teachers are
seen as people who orchestrate the humiliations that they are trying to avoid, and so the teacher
becomes the enemy. Sometimes the student is up front about his or her avoidance strategies, but
more often she does not know why she is acting this way, or how to act otherwise. These
patterns of failure have a feeling of destiny about them, and the best the student can do is dignify
them with an attitude of defiance and resistance. A rebel without a cause. An angry young thud
standing up to the man. When groups of such youth seek to fulfill their innate need to be part
of a social group, they find one another. They tend to congeal into underground pairs or groups,
goth, punk, or violent gangs, even predatory wolfpacks. They reframe their behavioral patterns
around violence, ugliness, fierce and anti-social feelings and behaviors, drugs and thrills,
meaningless sex, perversion, and other deliberate modes of violence and self-destruction.
Even before it gets to these extremes, you will see many common examples of the classic
motivation problems. Consider the student who takes only easy courses in high school. The
student who constantly forgets to hand in homework. The student who wastes time, horses
around, or is otherwise distracted when he is supposed to be taking a test. Everyone concludes,
if only he would try, he would do better. But that is precisely the purpose of his behavior. If
he does try hard but does not do better then the full burden of failure will rest squarely upon him.
It is, in an odd sort of way, actually better to sabotage ones efforts deliberately and thus give
some credibility to the notion that more effort would have led to better results. It feels better, for
these students, to give the appearance of being in control of the outcome than it does to put all of
their effort into trying hard and then run the risk of failing, because in that case there are no

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excuses left to hide behind.

Not all cases of passivity are due to learned helplessness. Sometimes passivity is a
logical response to a situation where effort will make no difference. We have raised the issue of
learned helplessness because it demonstrates that a pattern of failure can create a feedback loop
in which subsequent failure is then sustained by the individual. To some degree, this happens to
all of us, even healthy adult competitors in a sport we love. But it also happens, sadly, to
children who are too young to make well reasoned judgments about the relationship between
effort and success, depression and failure, motivation and interest, or other variables. Seligman
reports that patterns of failure can be cured by walking the animal through successive trials in
which the needed activity is carried out. He also reports that an established prior history of
success can to some extent innoculate a learner against the later effects of a helpless situation.
In schools, we should not look with bland acceptance upon competitive academic arrangements
when we know the result, repeatedly, is wholesale withdrawal of interest and motivation by
many students. Such arrangements do not serve any useful purpose.
MASTERY LEARNING
Benjamin Bloom proposed a way of ensuring that every student would succeed. His
assumption was that the typical k-12 curriculum simply is not all that challenging, and that it
does not exceed the capacity of any normal student. Why, then, do so many fail? he asked. His
conclusion was that failure begins small and gradually widens. A student fails to master
addition, but the class moves on, and the following year multiplication is impossible for this
student because the necessary foundation is missing. Now we get real failure. Blooms solution
was to enter into a cycle of teaching, testing, and then additional teaching until mastery was
achieved. He believed that success is a matter of time spent on learning, rather than a matter of a
fixed, innate level of ability. Some students would need more time on certain tasks in order to
achieve mastery. But all students can and should be expected to reach that level.
In practice, the idea did not work as well as Bloom and others hoped. For one thing, the
amount of time needed when a child is hopelessly behind can become prohibitive, so not all
students end up succeeding, even when that is the goal. The approach has also been criticized
because as the class slows down to ensure mastery by everyone the brighter students end up with
lower and lower expectations defining their education. Powerful parents and community
members smell socialism in this lowering of standards. In point of fact, many parents expect the
public school to function as an orderly mechanism to sort all children, and thus to document their
childrens superiority over other peoples children. They demand grades that reflect a range of
performance from failure to success. And they expect their own children to come out on top.
EN-COURAGE; DIS-COURAGE
Through Old French the word courage comes to us from Latin where it meant heart.
The heart was seen as the place where bravery came from, perhaps because of the way it pounds
when we are facing a challenge. Websters dictionary defines courage as the attitude or
response of facing and dealing with anything recognized as dangerous, difficult, or painful,
instead of withdrawing from it.
To en-courage someone is to endow them with the motivation to face a challenge. To
dis-courage someone is to deprive them of that ability. The Adlerian psychologists investigated
the discouraged child carefully, and on the basis of practical experience concluded that we must
work with that child by doggedly encouraging effort. Progress for the discouraged child comes
slowly at first, but the only real hope is that the discouraged child will attempt to move forward,

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will begin to accumulate a record of small successes, and will then begin to look upon the
processes of engagement as something he or she can gradually improve upon. The child who
refuses to try, who says I cant is extremely frustrating for the teacher. Our natural impulse is
to punish the child for being stubborn, to ignore that child so we do not have to deal with him, or
to offer false or glib encouragement: You can do it if you try!
The Adlerians insist that it is a mistaken approach for teachers to constantly focus on
student products. Only the highly talented students get adequately validated in those situations.
Successful students can do things better and more easily than unsuccessful students. If all we
see is the quality of the product, we can actually set up a situation in which no student really
ends up trying harder, going further, or engaging in really challenging work. They suggest we
focus on the quality of the effort and work to keep making that effort better, more focused, and
more skillful. Students who learn to focus on effort will tend to continue improving the quality
of the product. If we can make that kind of behavioral pattern a habit, then competence is bound
to keep growing.
SIX SOCIAL DIMENSIONS OF SCHOOLING
It is now possible to introduce a complicated notion that at first may not seem obvious. I
am going to suggest that it is unwise to treat the various social dimensions of the classroom as
separate topics. There are six social dimensions that we should consider: 1) Socialization, 2)
Discipline, 3) Motivation, 4) Interest, 5) Cooperative Learning, and 6) Classroom Management.
What happens when we see these as separate from one another? They become distorted
in their isolation. Take discipline for example. If we regard this in isolation from the other
social dimensions then doing so almost forces us to think of discipline in terms of misbehavior;
we tend to see discipline as the response we intend to have ready when a student misbehaves.
And so discipline gets defined as a series of punishments. On the other hand, if we look at
discipline in relation to those other social dimensions of schooling we can view it more easily as
the manner in which we support student self-control.
When motivation and interest are put into separate categories, the temptation then is to
see motivation as a physiological drive, and interest as a simple appetite. In point of fact,
though, these six variables are intertwined. They form an associated cluster. The beginning
teacher pleads for techniques he or she can use to control the class, even if his or her teaching
is poor. In that case the interest of the teacher has narrowed down to a matter of personal
survival, defined in terms of classroom management and behavioral control. Yet it is far more
sensible to recognize that discipline takes care of itself when the environment is one of
constructive engagement, when students are able to value their positive association with one
another, and when learning is seen as a group project that everyone has pledged to engage in.
You cannot establish this kind of social structure as some kind of afterthought when things have
already gone bad. It has to be done up front.
The real question, therefore, is how to create a community of learners, how to guide them
toward learning experiences that are intrinsically interesting and meaningful, and how to build
up the courage in each student so they will take the risks that further growth demands of us all

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REFERENCES
Peterson, C., Maier, S., and Seligman, M. (1993). Learned helplessness a theory for the age of
personal control. New York: Oxford University Press.
Walker, S. (1986). Winning the psychology of competition. New York: W. W. Norton.

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