TITANIC
toughts on human competition

A sound competition should have the purpose to fix the different positions in the social hierarchies.
Why so often competition becomes a pure instrument of prevarication?

 

There is violence in competition ?

 

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 one.

Joseph Wax
"Competitition: Educational Incongruity," p.197

 

 

 

the view of Alfie Kohn

Is it advisable to start competition since the infant ?
 
 
 
 
Do we have the same "weapons"?
Who dictates the rule of the game ?

The struggle for life is really the [competitive] struggle for succes. What people fear when they engage in the struggle is not thatthey will fail to get their breakfast nex morning, but that they will fail to outshine their neighbors.

Bertrand Russel, The Conquest of Happiness, p. 85.

There is , so far as I know, no way of dealing with envy except to make the lives of the envious happier and fuller, and  encourage in youth the idea of collective enterprises rather than competition

Bertrand  Russel,  Why I am Not a Christian,  p. 82

 

 

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