Pennington School speaker makes a case against competition

CommonGround lecture

By John Tredrea
   Time Magazine has called Alfie Kohn "perhaps the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades and test scores."
   Mr. Kohn’s 11 books, including "The Homework Myth," "Unconditional Parenting" and "The Case Against Competition," have been translated into Chinese, Malaysian, German, Swedish and a half-dozen other languages. He has been featured in stories in "USA Today" and "Educational Weekly" and appeared on Oprah on television.
   A dynamic, highly persuasive public speaker, Mr. Kohn delivered The Pennington School’s 2006 CommonGround lecture, in the school’s gym on Oct. 24. His talk focused on the negative effects of competition, particularly in children of school age.
   Citing dozens of research studies during his hour-long talk, Mr. Kohn, who studied at Brown University and the University of Chicago, said: "In our culture, winning is the state religion." That’s a mistake, he said, because competition is not only bad for the individual, it is bad for groups because it lowers the quality of work they produce. "Studies across cultures, ages, activities and grades in school show that the absence of competition increases excellence of product," he said. "Noam Chomsky defined competition as training in anti-social behavior."
   "Competition undermines creativity," Mr. Kohn said. The first study he cited involved asking two groups of children to construct collages. One group was told "to have fun. The other was told that the child who did the best collage would win a prize."
   The collages the two groups did were evaluated in-depth by a panel of artists. "Far and away, the artists rated the collages done by the group told to do them for fun as far superior to the collages done by the group that was told the student who did the best collage would win a prize," Mr. Kohn said.
   "We compete because we’re raised that way, not because we’re born that way," Mr. Kohn said. "We’re shaping our children to believe that other people are an obstacle that must be overcome if they are to succeed. The purest form competition means that one individual’s success depends on another individual’s failure. Why would you set children against one another in schools with grading systems, as most schools do now? In the work I’ve been doing in this and related areas since the early 1980s, I’ve yet to find a shred of evidence that competitiveness is an integral part of human nature."
   To his audience of about 100 people, Mr. Kohn declared: "Parents and children, your job is to understand that competition destroys everything in its wake. It is most tragic when children are its victims."
   He said a 2002 study of 11- and 12-year-old boys and girls in an area demographically similar to Hopewell Valley attributed a significant amount of alcohol abuse in boys and depression in girls to "anxiety about being accepted by a top college. I know kids who have been prepared for Harvard from their earliest days — a process I call Preparation H . . . their parents are grooming them as if they were resumes on legs."
   He said he is not alone in recognizing the dangers of competition and endeavoring to do something about it. "Seven hundred colleges no longer require SATs," he said. "Many of them are very fine schools. Some high schools are getting rid of Advanced Placement courses."
   Mr. Kohn said he asked admissions officers at Princeton and Brown years ago if they would give as much consideration to a student from a high school that did not grade students as they would to a student from a school that did grade students. "Both Princeton and Brown assured me they would and, in fact, they said they would probably look at such a student even more closely," he said.
   "What do people say their long term goals for their children are?" he asked. "They want them to be happy. But we’re saying one thing and doing another. Kids need our unconditional love. They must know we love them for what they are, not what they do – not what grades they earn in a competitive school environment, for example. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote 50 years ago: ‘Few parents have the courage and independence to care more for their children’s happiness than their success.’"
   Mr. Kohn was at his most eloquent when describing children who he said have been victimized via being pressured from an early age to dominate the academic world. "These kids express their sorrows in different ways," he said. "They cut themselves. They medicate themselves with alcohol and other drugs. Some of them have killed themselves. I’ve worked with gifted kids who don’t know what it’s like to read a book for pleasure."
   The problems endemic to competition extend to the adult world, he said. "A lot of us know that the number one complaint of employers about their employees is that ‘they don’t know how to work together.’ If a company gave bonuses but never set them up as a competition in which ‘I have to beat you’ to get the bonus, then they would have taken a giant step forward."