Is competition in school helpful or harmful to the students?

By admin · Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

In order to answer this question of how to educate children, with or without competition between pupils, it becomes obvious that society must answer a metaphysical question of “why do we educate our children?” Why educate them in general? We don’t ask why do we educate our children the way we do, before we ask why we do in general. Having first answered the metaphysical “why” we can see that competition is indeed vital to the education of our youth.

Throughout the course of human history we have been learning, improving, inventing and refining the ideas and artifacts that came before. Before the helicopter, there was the airplane. Before that, the glider. Before the compact florescent lightbulb to light our homes, there was the revolutionary incandescent lightbulb, before that, the lantern. There is a constant march forward. Yet, are we at the end of invention? Likely not. At no point in our prior history did we as a species reach the end of what is possible. What has been created to this point is not perfect and perfection is likely unachievable in a terminal sense. Yet, perfection, understood as a normative goal is completely achievable. Normative perfection is understood to be the most invention and the most innovation possible in a given lifetime. How to create a foundation conducive to this normative end?

In order to push forward, one must understand the past. Harry Truman’s legendary aphorism is particularly important here, “Those who do not read and understand history are doomed to repeat it.” This is unbelievably imperative to each citizen in a democracy, as a vote cast in a booth on election day was informed in the classroom and has relevance on the world stage. So, the question is then, does competition help, or hinder the education of our nation’s students?

If we posit that the point of education is to continue as quickly as possible the normative goal of perfection in invention and innovation, both in artifact as well as policy how does competition affect student performance?

Neil Postman, in his work The End of Education, emphasizes that some gods, previously thought infallible, in fact, fail. What if that was the only idea, or god, on the playing field? What if there really were nothing there to fill the void? How would the next idea come along?

In Ayn Rand’s work Anthem, a society developed by committee, without competition finds itself powerfully stifled by inefficiency. The protagonist, euphemistically named Prometheus, finds

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