There was a time when I would have been on the other side of the page, when I would have agreed that competition is neither for the young nor the tender. You know, children. This was a time when I enrolled my son in a preschool philosophically committed to a non-competitive environment.
Alas, this was also before I started getting notes home from said preschool. Your child bit one of his friends today. Your child hit one of his friends today. My child is the type of kid who gets hysterical when he accidentally kills a lightning bug by catching it too hard, so I was more than a little incredulous. Then one day, I went to pick him up after lunch, and the preschool director pulled me aside. "We're concerned about your son," she told me. She gestured at another boy who had a black-and-blue egg on his forehead. "Your son whacked our friend"--our friend, she said, with all the implications that my boy was something other than our friend--"with a shovel in the sandbox today."
My little tenderheart, brandishing a shovel? How did this happen?
It took months to sort out, but the upshot turned out to be this: This preschool, with its well-intentioned, non-competitive atmosphere, was not a good match for my son. He could not find his place, no matter what he did. When everyone was "our friend," he didn't know who his real friends were. With the three-, four-, and five-year-olds in one class, he didn't know where he stood in the pecking order of age. With everyone learning different lessons, he couldn't gauge whether he was as good, better, or worse at any given task than his peers. He felt unmoored and frustrated.
Competition serves a lot of useful functions, it turns out, and when you take it away, you're playing with fire, or at least an alarmingly waved sandbox shovel.
Kids--my kid, anyway--need to know where they stand in order to feel secure. And it doesn't have to be at the top of the hierarchy, either. I come from a large family. I was never the most athletic; I was probably the least socially adept; I was definitely not the prettiest. But I knew where I stood and knew that I had my own charms (I could read fast and kick ass in Scrabble). I was happy knowing where my place was in this gang of siblings. Sure, we competed. Sure, I was guaranteed to lose on occasion. But someone has to lose so that others can win, and someone has to win so that others can learn how to take loss gracefully.
Competition is the only way to get that immeasurably great feeling that you are the best at something. Knowing you're the best builds confidence, and it has a way of reinforcing interest in whatever the subject may be, whether it's unscrambling algebraic riddles, skateboarding, or reading more library books than anyone else in a school year. In non-competitive environments, this feeling of being the best gets watered down. My son received congratulations for "trying his best," which sounds exactly like a back-handed compliment. He didn't know what to do with it. I noticed that he and a few other kids resorted to roaming around and (mostly) silently judging other children's work, in attempt to get the feeling of winning for themselves, even if it went officially unrecognized.
I know--this sounds really undemocratic. We Americans are supposed to root for the underdog. Even as I type this, I can hear the tsks: What about the kids who aren't best? What about their feelings? What about inequalities that put kids on different playing fields? To that, I'd say that competition itself isn't the problem. Everybody's great at something, and the real problem is getting the rest of our culture to value the unrecognized strengths and recognize the different playing fields. Funnily enough, this is where the non-competitive school is fabulous: Some children were publicly praised for being empathetic and kind, definitely a strength and definitely something one can excel at regardless of background.
Some of us, though, find our strengths in arenas where there are clear winners and losers, and a non-competitive environment can actually foster a Legend in One's Own Mind Syndrome. Competition keeps you in check. A few years back, one study found that the problem with kids who engage in risky behavior wasn't that old bugaboo, poor self-esteem, but rather the opposite: inflated self-esteem. Competition among peers nicely squashes a too-big ego. I'm embarrassed to say that I once sent along with my college application a short story I'd written that I thought was brilliant. I'm embarrassed to say this because once I got to my first writing class at college and saw exactly where I stood in competition with my peers, I knew that I had much work ahead of me. I'm a better writer for that experience.
The biggest problem I have with non-competitiveness, though, has less to do with individual people and individual environments--we're pretty resilient, after all--but with what dismantling competition would do to our culture. Competition is a way of engaging with others, of forming community and communal identity. Through competition, we can inspire (as the Olympics does), we can improve (is there anything like beating the reigning champion?), and we can figure out our own roles in our school, community, country. Of course people can take competition too far. But I don't want to ever be in a situation where we play Scrabble but don't keep score--or worse--play alone.
