No Contest (6 page)

The inculcation of competition in the classroom and on the playing field is a source of unending frustration to some parents. Fathers and mothers who would prefer that their children learn to work
with
rather than
against
others can do only so much to foster this value since they do not raise their children in a vacuum. Even determinedly liberated parents must contend with an elaborate competitive structure outside the home that will frustrate their best efforts at education. “Out there,” doing one's best means triumphing over others. (This is the same struggle that defines parents' attempts to steer their children away from sexism or violence or mindless obedience or unhealthful foods or any number of other things sanctioned by our society.)

Such a clash between the parents and the rest of the culture is exceptional, however. The family generally is an efficient vehicle by which societal norms are transmitted, not a holdout against these norms. Most parents raise children according to the values by which they were raised, and this process perpetuates the larger culture in which it occurs. From our very earliest days, we are busily absorbing an uncritical acceptance of competition. We are being primed for the classroom and the workplace. As we grow, the socialization in the home continues to work hand in glove with the socialization outside the home. There is pressure to make our parents proud—by being not merely good, but better than others, at schoolwork, sports, and almost any other activity in which we take part. If Dad, in his day, had the highest batting average in school, then we must do likewise. If Dad was
not
a superlative athlete, then we must distinguish ourselves anyway: our task is to provide vicarious gratification. If our parents never got very far in school, we must not merely take advantage of the chances they never had—we must be the very best of students. Examples of such pressure can be multiplied indefinitely. Of course some parents, who sport newly raised consciousnesses, may proudly declare to any who will listen that they “ask of Bobby only that he do his best.” But this official posture surely does not fool Bobby. He is fully aware that “doing his best” is a code that means beating his peers. As a result of their own training, most parents, even if sincere, still communicate subliminal messages of disappointment with anything other than victory.

But the family does not merely encourage and sustain competition in the outside world—it manufactures its very own brand. This is particularly true in the nuclear family, which, let us remember, is not the only possible arrangement for child-rearing. One series of field studies in the South Pacific found that “greater rivalrous responses . . . occurred in children brought up in Western-type small nuclear families rather than the traditional extended families.”
⁵²
How does this happen? First, many parents carefully (though often unconsciously) direct a drama of sibling rivalry on the stage of their own homes. Even competition booster Harvey Ruben is appalled by the “‘divide and conquer' theory of parenting” whereby children who are set against each other are easier to discipline. Setting up an insidious race to become Mommy's favorite mostly benefits Mommy. It gets the dishes dried, for one thing. But far more important are the emotional rewards for parents, who are “every bit as much in need of approval, affection, and support as their children, and in many cases, unfortunately, they are able to get this most easily by nourishing divisiveness within the home.”
⁵³

In some homes, it is the parents who compete for their children's love. “Whom do you love more?” is seldom asked aloud, but parental behavior often seems motivated by this concern. The intrinsic sickness of this family pattern, like the terrible consequences for all concerned, will not be considered here. My point is only that such dynamics foster competition. We grow up thinking of love as a scarce commodity—the prize in a desperate contest that we will enter again and again. We associate being loved with winning a race, and this happens partly because of the very language with which we have heard affection expressed (“Who's the best little girl in the whole wide world?”). Beyond love, we will generalize the need to be number one, taking competition with us to any and all arenas.

The process of socializing children to be competitive is sometimes tacit. Few parents, for example, sit their child down and say, “Now, Steven, it's time you learned that you can't have a good time unless you set things up so one side wins and the other loses.” This attitude is taught by example. On the other hand, the idea that people attain excellence exclusively in a competitive setting—that no one would be motivated to work in a noncompetitive economic system—is something we often hear in just so many words. Even more common are expressions of the belief that one has no
choice
but to be competitive: competition is an unavoidable feature of human life, so you might as well get used to it right away. Some parents may sincerely believe this, but others feel conflicted and vaguely guilty about their own competitiveness. If they convince themselves (and teach their children) that one can't help being competitive, they can live more easily with themselves. This belief in competition's inevitability may be insupportable for all the reasons discussed in this chapter, but it soon takes on the shape of a classic self-fulfilling prophecy. By teaching children to act in a way that is said to be inevitable, we
make
the practice inevitable and so make the proposition true. This may well be the heart of the socialization process.

To complicate matters further, competition seems to be self-perpetuating. In his long career of studying conflict—and, more generally, social interaction—Deutsch has found that any given mode of interaction breeds more of itself. Specifically, “the experience of cooperation will induce a benign spiral of increasing cooperation, while competition will induce a vicious spiral of intensifying competition.”
⁵⁴
Quite a bit of research on the so-called Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) Game, in which players choose whether to cooperate or defect,
^*
has confirmed this. Moreover, Harold H. Kelley and Anthony J. Stahelski's PD experiments found that people who generally are cooperative tend to resemble competitive individuals when they must deal with them. Competition, we might say, cannibalizes cooperation.
⁵⁶

And what of those who already incline toward competition? Why do they persist in their ways? Kelley and Stahelski found that whereas cooperative individuals realistically perceive that some people are cooperative like themselves while others are competitive, competitive individuals believe that virtually everyone else is also competitive.
⁵⁷
Thus we have another self-fulfilling prophecy: competitive people (falsely) assume that all others share their orientation—and, indeed, those who declare most vociferously that “it's a dog-eat-dog world out there” usually are responsible for more than their share of canine consumption—which impels them to redouble their own competitive orientation. This finding has been replicated by several other researchers.
⁵⁸

Both the desirability of competition and the strategies for implementing it, then, are taught to us from our earliest days. This orientation then reproduces itself. What is peculiar, as Riesman pointed out, is that we should have to contrive such a thorough program of socialization if competition really were part of human nature. (Typically it is those who argue most strenuously for the latter who are, at the same time, vigorously promoting this training process.) Far more plausible is the hypothesis that all of this training is
not
superfluous: we compete only because we have learned to do so.

In order to prove this hypothesis correct rather than simply arguing for its plausibility, one would need some evidence that children can be taught to cooperate. If they take to this approach—learn it easily, enjoy it, continue using it—it would be evident that competition is not inevitable. Longitudinal studies of this kind have not been performed, to my knowledge—unless one regards cross-cultural data as naturalistic evidence along these lines. However, some work in early childhood education comes close.

A few years ago, Gerald Sagotsky and his colleagues at Adelphi University successfully trained 118 pairs of first- through third-grade students to cooperate in a series of classroom games. This was done through a combination of direct instruction and modeling (having them watch someone else be reinforced for engaging in the desired behavior). About seven weeks later, a new experimenter tried a new game with these children and found a significant retention and generalization of the cooperative approach, particularly among the older children. “Overall, the study indicates that a relatively brief and straightforward intervention can effectively train cooperation.”
⁵⁹
Similar generalization has been reported on the part of fifth graders
⁶⁰
and, in still another study, third graders.
⁶¹
Earlier and more primitive research found that children continued behaving cooperatively even when reinforcement was briefly withdrawn.
⁶²
More recently, Aronson not only had remarkable success with a cooperative learning technique but also discovered that teachers continued to use it years after the experiment was over.
⁶³
Deutsch reported that adults, too, taught themselves to cooperate when the game they were playing rewarded such behavior.
⁶⁴

A somewhat more anecdotal account of this effect is provided by David N. Campbell, who reports on his visit to an unnamed British elementary school. When another American teacher on the tour asked these children who was the smartest among them, they “didn't know what he was talking about. They had evidently never thought about it. . . . There were no put-backs, grades, tests, gold stars.
All
stories and drawings were displayed on the walls. Children were not placed in failure situations, forced to prove themselves, to read at ‘grade level' every week.” When he returned home, Campbell resolved to make his own classroom less competitive.

 

It required only about three weeks for the changes to emerge [he continues]. The first was an end [to] the destruction of others' work. Later a spirit of cooperation and help began to be common. Finally there was what I look for as the real measure of success: children talking freely to every adult and stranger who walks in, leading them by the hand to see projects and explaining their activities, no longer afraid, suspicious, or turned inward. Such changed attitudes developed because we stopped labeling and rank-ordering.
⁶⁵

 

Some of the most interesting work with recreational cooperation has been done by Terry Orlick at the University of Ottawa. After leading children from preschool age to second grade in cooperative games, he found a threefold to fourfold increase in the incidence of cooperative behavior when the children were later left to play by themselves. Control groups, meanwhile, tended to become more competitive as the year progressed.
⁶⁶
Orlick also found that children reported being happier playing cooperative games: “Given the choice, two thirds of the nine- and ten-year-old boys and all of the girls would prefer to play games where neither side loses rather than games where one side wins and the other side loses.”
⁶⁷
In the classroom, meanwhile, 65 percent of a group of sixth graders said they preferred a cooperative learning structure. The total sample here was divided evenly between those who tended to attribute their successes or failures to themselves (“internalizers”) and those who attributed consequences to fate or other people (“externalizers”). Significantly, a majority of both groups preferred cooperative learning.
⁶⁸
As of 1984, a pair of researchers were able to cite seven studies showing a preference for cooperative over competitive or independent experiences.
⁶⁹

I am aware of no studies that found a preference for competition over cooperation—providing the subjects had experienced the latter in some fashion. This qualification is critical: it is not unusual for people to say they prefer to compete but then to change their minds when they see at first hand what it is like to learn or work or play in an environment that does not require winners and losers.
⁷⁰
This, incidentally, has been found to be true of college students, too.
⁷¹
The evidence seems persuasive, then, that children can learn to cooperate and, when given a choice, seem to prefer this cooperative arrangement.

The evidence is far less clear, however, on the question of how old children must be in order to learn to cooperate. The traditional position, following Piaget's developmental schedule, is that children cannot cooperate
or
compete in any meaningful way until they are about six or seven years old and have reached the “operational” stage.
⁷²
This position is compatible with the usual movement of children toward increasing competitiveness. What precedes competition, it is argued, is not positive cooperation but merely the absence of competition (two very different things)—or, for that matter, the absence of any sophisticated goal-directed activity. The ability to cooperate and to compete are said to develop around the same time.
⁷³

The fact that very young children do not compete, then, is not terribly significant. Young children do not have body hair either, but that doesn't mean that body hair is a learned phenomenon. On the other hand, the fact that children normally become more competitive as they grow older
⁷⁴
also means very little because most children have not been exposed to models of cooperative interaction.

Yet not everyone is agreed that young children cannot cooperate. Spontaneous pro-social behavior takes place in infants, as we saw before.
⁷⁵
Anna Freud observed nineteen-month-old toddlers building a tower together, taking turns adding blocks.
⁷⁶
This could mean that Piaget and his followers are wrong. But even if we insist that such collaborative or helping behaviors do not qualify as genuine cooperation, there is evidence that children of only four or five—past the toddler stage but not yet “operational”—can indeed be taught to cooperate. In fact, Orlick has found “young children to be most receptive to cooperative ventures and cooperative challenges.” He proposes that this is true because “the younger the child, the less time he has had in the competitive mainstream of our society and therefore the more willing he is to accept cooperative games.”
⁷⁷
Millard C. Madsen's research seems to support Orlick's view, at least within this country. In presenting an experimental problem that required a cooperative solution, he found that “more younger than older children are successful in solving the problem in such a way as to maximize reward.”
⁷⁸
Sagotsky, on the other hand, found that older children (seven- or eight-year-olds) learned to cooperate more readily than younger ones, which is what Piagetian theory would predict.
⁷⁹
But all of these researchers agree—and the whole of this section confirms—that cooperation can be learned; thus, competition is by no means inevitable.