No Contest: The Case Against Competition (1992) - Plot & Excerpts
AK is an exceptional researcher and author. I wanted to pull my kids out of every competitive endeavor they were currently signed up for. The book is really brilliant. The one drawback to his arguments is this: we as a human species haven't moved beyond war and brutality and until everyone can get along, there are still lessons to be learned in competition. I realize it isn't perfect, but it is fact. P 61 Jenifer Levin cited two studies showing that "when one does compete, intrinsic motivation tends to dramatically decrease, especially for women."Again, this effect is especially salient in the classroom. The late John Holt put it well:We destroy the . . . love of learning in children, winch is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards — gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A's on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean's lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys — in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.'1'1This process is shameful for many reasons, but the one 1 want to stress here is the resultant decline in learning. Performance ultimately suffers from competition just as it suffers from the use of any extrinsic motivator.One final observation: to the extent that an extrinsic motivator can have a positive effect, one of the most powerful motivators is not money or victory but a sense of accountability to other people. This is precisely what cooperation establishes: the knowledge that others are depending on you.6' The only stake others have in your performance under a competitive arrangement is a desire to see you fail.The distinction between trying to do well and trying to beat others is not the only explanation we can come up with for competition's failure. Competition also precludes the more efficient use of resources that cooperation allows. One of the clear implications of the research conducted by David and Roger Johnson is that people working cooperatively succeed because a group is greater than the sum of its parts. This is not necessarily true for all activities, of course: sometimes independent work is the best approach. But very often — more often than many of us assume — cooperation takes advantage of the skills of each member as well as the mysterious but undeniable process by which interaction seems to enhance individuals' abilities. Coordination of effort and division of labor are possible when people work with each other, as Deutsch saw. Non cooperative approaches, by-contrast, almost always involve duplication of effort, since someone working independently must spend time and skills on problems that already have been encountered and overcome by someone else.P 84tWilliam A. Sadler, finally, notes that sports not only are not isolated from daily life (as play must be), but they actively train participants for that life as it is lived in our society.Athletes often are well aware that what they do is not play [he writes]. Their practice sessions are workouts; and to win the game they have in work harder. Sports are not experienced as activities outside the institutional pattern of the American way of life: they are integrally a part of it. ... In other words, the old cliche is true: "Spoils prepare one for-life." The question which must be raised is: "what kind of life.-" The answer in an American context is that (they prepare us for a life of competition.Competitive recreation is anything but a time-out from goal-oriented activities. It has an internal goal, which is to win. And it has an external goal, which is to train its participants. Train them to do what? To accept a goal-oriented model. Sports is thus many steps removed from play.The argument here is not merely academic. Even when they do not talk explicitly about play, apologists for sport like to argue that it offers a "time out" from the rest of life. No matter how brutal or authoritarian sports might be. We are supposed to see them as taking place in a social vacuum. ! His claim has the effect of excusing whatever takes place on a playing field. (While governor of California, Ronald Reagan reportedly advised a college football team that they could "feel a clean hatred for ["their] opponent, it is a (lean haired since it's only symbolic in a jersey. It also has the effect of obscuring the close relationship between competitive recreation and the society that endorses it.P 85tWriting in the journal of PE and Recreation, George Sage observed that:organized sport — From youth programs to the pros — has nothing at all to do with playfulness — fun, joy,. self-satisfaction — but is instead, ,a social agent for the deliberate socialization of people into the acceptance of …the prevailing social structure and their fate as workers within bureaucratic organizations. Contrary to the myths propounded by promoters, sports are instruments not for human expression, but of social stasis.''Sport does not simply build character, in other words; it builds exactly the kind of character that is most useful for the social system. From the perspective of our social (and economic) system — which is to say, from the perspective of those who benefit from and direct it — it is useful to have people regard each other as rivals. Sports serve the purpose nicely, and athletes are quite deliberately led lo accept the value and naturalness of an adversarial relationship in place of solidarity and collective effort. If he is in a team sport, the athlete comes to see cooperation only as a means lo victory, to see hostility and even aggression as legitimate, to accept conformity and authoritarianism. Participation in sports amounts to a kind of apprenticeship for life in contemporary America, or as David Riesman put it. "'The road to the board room leads through the locker room."One of the least frequently noticed features of competition — and, specifically, of its product-orientation — is the emphasis on quantification."' In one sense, competition is obviously a process of ranking: who is best, second best, and so forth. But the information necessary to this process is itself numerical.P 94tIn noncompetitive games, the obstacle is something intrinsic to the task itself rather than another person or persons. It coordinated effort is required to achieve the goal, then the game becomes not merely noncompetitive but positively cooperative. Such coordination invariably involves the presence of rules. While competitive activities are particularly dependent on rules — and inflexible rules, at that — it is not the case that the only alternative to competition is the "Caucus-race" described in Alice in Wonderland, in which participants "began running when they liked, and left off when they liked."4' While such an activity more closely approximates pure play, noncompetitive games are generally rule-governed. Thus, the presence of rules does not imply the presence of competition.48Partly because they do have rules, noncompetitive games can be at least as challenging as their competitive counterparts. They are also a good deal of fun, and, like the Caucus-race, can have the happy result that " 'Everybody has won and all must have prizes.' "49 Consider musical chairs, an American classic for small children. In this game, a prototype of artificial scarcity, x players scramble for x — 1 chairs when the music stops. Each round eliminates one player and one chair until finally one triumphant winner emerges. All of the other players have lost — and have been sitting on the sidelines for varying lengths of time, excluded from play. Terry Orlick proposes instead that when a chair is removed after each round, the players should try to find room on the chairs that remain — a task that becomes more difficult and more fun as the game progresses. The final result is a group of giggling children crowded onto a single chair.As early as 1950. Theodore F. Lentz and Ruth Cornelius published their own manual of cooperative games. Among them are Cooperative Chinese Checkers, the object of which is not to move one's marbles faster than the other player but to coordinate the two players' movements so that they reach their respective home sections simultaneously. In Cooperative Bowling, similarly, the purpose is to "knock down the ten pins in as many rounds as there are players" — a very challenging task indeed.' Another good game is bump and scoot volleyball.P 125 product orientation: Play, it was argued in the last chapter, is activity for its own sake. It reflects a "process orientation" — an inclination to do something because of its intrinsic value. Such behavior is rare among adults in our society. We are product oriented. Our work is governed by the demands of the "bottom line" and often is justified as an onerous necessity of life. The time we spend in school similarly is construed as valuable only insofar as it contributes to later employment, with the pleas for relevance in our universities having evolved into a demand for marketable skills. Even leisure activities have come to resemble work: results are what matter.P 135 To win for his team a boy beats his best friend . . . [so] winning means also losing something precious in the relationship with a friend. For it is not likely that the two will compete on the football held and have a close and loving relationship off it, not likely that they can put on a show of invincibility during the game and share their fears and vulnerabilities after it. Not very different, is it, from the world of work for which he is destined? . . . Not very good training, is it, for the kind of sharing of self and emotional support friendship requires-'1"The assertion one sometimes hears to the effect that competition need not interfere with friendship assumes that our orientation toward someone can switch from supportive to rivalries and back again as if we were changing television channels. It is simply unrealistic. I think that the hostility engendered by and experienced during a contest will evaporate into thin air, leaving the relationship between the two individuals unaffected. I do not mean to say that no one has ever had a satisfying relationship with a competitor, but that competition inhibits such relationships, just as it corrodes the relationships we have already developed. This chapter is concerned with the reason this happens and the consequences it brings.ANATOMY OF A RIVALSimply from knowing that competition damages self-esteem, we can predict that relationships will be in trouble. This seems to follow from Harry Stack Sullivan's comment in the last chapter to the effect that it is difficult for me to feel good about others when I don't feel good about myself. I feel my worth is in doubt — it is contingent on winning — so I am unable to extend myself to you. From her research with children, psychologist Carole Ames concluded that just such a connection between self-esteem and relationship exists: "The experience of failure in competitive settings that resulted in depressed beliefs in their own ability ... is likely to affect negatively the child's own feelings of competence and self-worth and potentially interfere with future relationships with othersP 145tInnumerable studies of aggression in children have illustrated that attempts to reduce aggression through the use of aggressive and vigorous play therapy have the opposite effect. . . . Sports participation may heighten aggressive tendencies." says one.1'1 "Engaging in aggressive sports or observing aggressive sports . . . typically leads| to increased rather than decreased aggression." says another.11 "Participation in competitive, aggressive sports . . . may more rightfully be viewed as a disinhibition training that ultimately promotes violent reactions." says a third.'' And from yet another source: " The balance of evidence ... is that sports involvement may heighten arousal, produce instances of aggressive behaviors and their reward, and provide a context in which the emulation of such behaviors is condonedt… sport represents a kind of circumscribed warfare — something pointed out not only by such critics as George Orwell, who called it "war minus the shooting,"' but also by generals: It was Wellington who said that the battle of Waterloo was "won on the playing fields of Harrow and Eton." It was Douglass MacArthur who said: "Upon the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that, upon other fields, on other days, will bear the fruit of victory." And it was Eisenhower who said that "the true mission o; American sports is to prepare young people for war.'” The point is not that athletes will rush to enlist, but that athletic competition both consists in and promotes warlike aggressionp 147 One must marvel at the intellectual quality of a teacher who can’t understand why children assault one another in the hallway, playground, and city street, when in the classroom the highest accolades are reserved for those who have beaten their peers, in many subtle and some not so subtle ways, teachers demonstrate that what children learn means less than that they triumph over their classmates. Is this not assault? . . . Classroom defeat is only the pebble that creates widening ripples of hostility. It is self-perpetuating. It is reinforced by peer censure, parental disapproval, and loss of self-concept. If the (classroom is a model, and if that classroom models competition, assault in the hallways should surprise no onep 198 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, 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.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).P 208tBut maybe students genuinely find life at school to be a collection of tedious tasks and humiliating evaluations from which any reasonable person would want to escape.If children seem unhappy about going to school, we typically attribute this to the fact that kids just are wont to complain, that they don't like anything — or at least anything good for them. Then we insist that they had better get used to things that aren't any fun. (The premise here seems to be that the chief purpose of school is not to get children excited about learning but to get them acclimated to doing mind-numbing chores.)It is also possible, however, to conclude that the problem may just lie with what happens in school rather than with some character flaw in the individual child. The extent of "on-task" behavior in a classroom, by the same token, may tell us something about the teacher as well as about the students. When a teacher complains that children are off task, our first response should be to ask, "What is the task?" (In the long run, though, individual teachers probably are not to blame, given that decisions about what children must learn and how they must learn it are frequently made by administrators, school board members, parents, politicians, and faculty members at schools of education.) Goodlad ticks off what students are asked to do: passively listen to teachers’ ceaseless talking (in his survey, the average teacher “outtalked the entire class of students by a ratio of about three to one"), submit to close and constant monitoring, work separately and silently on textbooks and worksheets, and so on.How would I react as an adult to these ways of the classroom? I would become restless. I would groan audibly over still another seatwork assignment. My mind would wander off soon after the beginning of a lecture. It would be necessary for me to put my mind in some kind of "hold" position. This is what students do. Intellectual Interaction: most important, CL succeeds because “none of us is as smart as all of us.P 232tMany parents, looking back on their own years in school, may recall a superlative teacher here, a few satisfying friendships there, an occasional moment of excitement when a connection was made or an idea understood. But the background to these pleasant memories may be something much like what Goodlad and Henry and scores of other observers have documented: isolation, humiliation, self-doubt, rivalry, pointless tasks, boredom. All of us for whom this account rings true have a choice to make.www.veggierunner.com
I'm giving it four stars not for the quality of writing -- I found the one-sided rhetoric tiresome by half way through -- but for the importance of the ideas it has. Despite taking an extreme stance in this book, Kohn gives a solid argument with intelligent research backing it. The fundamental idea is that competition is destructive in all its forms, and is built into our society to the detriment of all: it is in our education, our economy, or legal system, and our recreation. He systematically approaches each claim for the validity, giving fair voice to their justifications for competition: that it is natural, that it is character-building, that it produces excellence, and that it is naturally desirable to us. His case against competition is somewhat strong and worth digesting. The suggested alternatives, however, were somewhat lacking. It is in conceiving of solutions that we should use this book as fuel, giving us some ideas of how to convert our environments into non-competitive solutions that will bring the added self-confidence, creativity, and motivation that come from true cooperation. But more I could use more of a picture on a wide-spread vision of cooperation other than his slightly communistic musings and conclusive "competition is evil" voice. Again, a worthy read with some important ideas to consider, even if it is more of a starting point than any kind of ending.
What do You think about No Contest: The Case Against Competition (1992)?
I greatly admire Kohn's ideas about competition, how it is but one model that human-kind has followed for millenia. When looking at games we devise and play, Kohn points out that competition creates an artifical scarcity where none existed before. Instead of having a game where there is a winner and a loser (e.g. football, basketgall to name a few), why not track each player's play and then compare it to that same player's prior playing. This way each player can improve their game and no win/lose scenarios need be artifically created. Each player will be a winner.
—Douglas Larson
A very interesting exploration of the concept of competition. While the concept is greatly admired and idealized in our modern culture, Kohn explores the the negative consequences of competition. The book suggests that competition is much more harmful to us as individuals than is typically thought. As an educational expert, he concentrates on the concept of competition in schooling. While he does talk about some other applications of competition, I would have liked for the book to have examined a little more closely competition in the economic sphere as well.
—Derek
A couple weeks ago, I came home to find the babysitter (my mom) and my daughter playing a matching game with--gasp!--two piles of paired cards. I took my mother aside and handed her this book. She replied, "I could read it a thousand times and it wouldn't change my mind that competition is healthy." I'm equally guilty of pigheadedness, I guess, because I never finished reading the book but I'm pretty sure that I agree with it 100 percent. (Kohn's writing is surprisingly tedious in this one, but I really did like every bit of it that I read--especially the parts about gender differences).
—Marissa Morrison
