Of the dominant ideals of the nineteenth century, some have survived into our age, and some have not. Those that have survived have, for the most part, a more restricted field of application in our day than they had a hundred years ago. The ideal of competition is a good example of such a phenomenon. It is, I think, a mistake to regard the belief in competition as due to Darwinism. The opposite is really the case: it was Darwinism that was due to the belief in competition. The modern biologist, while she still believes in evolution, has much less belief in competition as its motive force than Darwin had; and this change reflects the change which has come over the economic structure of society.
Industrialism began with large numbers of small firms all competitions against each other, and at first with very little help from the State, which was still agricultural and aristocratic. From industry, the idea of competition seeped into other spheres of life. Darwin persuaded men that competition between different forms of life was the cause of evolutionary progress. Thus, educationists became persuaded that competition in the classroom was the best way to promote industry among the scholars—the word “industry” is carries the weight of the above sentence. Moreover, belief in laisser faire competition was used by employers as an argument against trade-unionism. Truly, the motto of the capitalists has been: “United we stand, divided they fall.”
In education, the ideal of competition has had two kinds of bad effects. On the one hand, it has led to the teaching of respect for competition as opposed to cooperation, especially in the field of international relations; and on the other hand, it has led to a vast system of competitiveness in the classroom, and in the endeavour to secure scholarships, and subsequently in the search for jobs. One of the worst defects of the belief in competition in education is that it has led—especially with the brightest of the students—to a great deal of over-education. At the present day, there is an extremely hazardous tendency to inflict upon young people so much education as to be damaging to the imagination and intellect, and even to physical health. Not surprisingly, it is the cleverest of the people who suffer most from this tendency—in each generation, the best brains and the best imaginations are sacrificed upon the holy altar of competition. Note that I do not mean to disregard the impact on every single pupil, however those with a greater capacity to process knowledge and innovate in a particular realm of study are the ones that account for greatest lost opportunity, in my opinion. To learn without ceasing to love learning is difficult, and educators have not found a solution to this dilemma.
The first thing the average educator sets to work to kill in the young is imagination. Imagination is lawless, undisciplined, individual, and neither correct nor incorrect; in all these respects, it is inconvenient to the teacher, especially when competition requires a rigid order of merit. The problem of the right treatment of imagination is rendered more difficult by the fact that, in most children, it decays spontaneously as interest in the real world increases.
A word has to be said about cooperation and forced identification. There is substantial evidence at hand to indicate that not everyone is of the same intellectual level given any arbitrary field of study. So, I may be decent at mathematics but not so decent at cartography. At present, almost none of the educational institutes at large take this view into account. It would be of tremendous benefit, both to the individual and society, if pupil with a greater than average competence in a particular field is placed along with similar pupils, as opposed to a generalised institute where a variety of intellectual streams pour into one pot.
I say this because with the recognition that one has an unusual amount of competence in a field, it makes logical sense to encourage the further buildup of technical skill required to master the field, assuming pupil’s interest. This, in my view, cannot be done in a general atmosphere, like the present day education system. The idea that rubbing up against all and sundry in youth is a good preparation of life is utter rubbish, I think. This is not a contradiction in my thesis of cooperation. It is akin to being told that all persons ought to eat meat regardless of whether one is vegetarian or not. This is at heart of the education system. If one is much competent in the art of physics, one should be able to have the resources at hand to develop their skills at a rate faster than any other person with not the same level of interest and skill—it is only a logical consequence following the acceptance of certain propositions that, in my view, are truisms. One cannot call it cooperation if everyone is forced into learning physics without regard to one’s interest—this is forced identification to say the least. It is certainly cooperation to help one another get better at what one wants to further explore, and one ought to take a pupil’s competence and interest into account while assessing how one can establish such a dynamic.
Competition is not only bad as an educational fact, but also as an ideal to be held before the young. What the world now needs is not competition but organisation and cooperation. Even if competition were useful, it is not in itself admirable, since the emotions with which it is connected are the emotions of hostility and ruthlessness.
Photo credits: Education/Indoctrination via flickr (license)
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