Academic contests are good for students, writes Betsy, who coaches her charter high school’s quiz bowl team. She links to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Rebecca Wallace-Segall, who helps students prepare for writing contests. Progressive private school administrators “will not support their students in literary, science or math competitions,” Wallace-Segall writes. Competition creates winners and losers. Someone’s self-esteem might be dented.
But it’s OK for students to compete in sports, as long as they’re playing in teams and not as individuals.
“Two years after my son left a school that prohibited him from entering a national math competition,” says one mother, “he still writes angry essays about why the jocks in his former school were allowed to compete throughout the city while he wasn’t allowed to win the same honors for his gifts.” Sam, her son, felt uncool in the eyes of his peers, and undervalued (and sometimes even resented) by the administration.
“We don’t want kids to compete individually, put themselves in vulnerable positions as individuals,” explains a leading administrator. “They can compete within teams,” explains another. “So the focus is on community building rather than on personal value.”
Once a middle-school spelling bee coach, Betsy saw this mindset lead to the cancellation of elementary and then middle-school bees.
Then the same geniuses tried to end another lovely competition, Battle of the Books, for which teams of students read books from a list for their grade level and then compete to answer questions from those books. I used to coach that competition when I was a middle school teacher and I just loved to see all these kids reading and discussing the books. . . . A few weeks after the competition, I would come up to those students who had been so upset and ask them if they’d come to grips with their defeat. Invariably, they would say that they had. And then I would tell them to remember that moment the next time that they faced a disappointment. Remember how they enjoyed preparing and competing, how upset they’d been, and, how they had learned that life goes on after a defeat and that they could learn to cope. That is an important lesson for all young people — to realize that life goes on after disappointment and not to become so focused on a defeat that they can’t get past it.
Most kids can handle failure without falling apart — unless they’re raised to be wimps.
Hooray for Betsy and for Rebecca Wallace-Segall!
The notion that we must abandon any competitive endeavor beyond “team sports” that somehow build “community” is one of the more odious elements of the entire PC craze.
I guess we’d all better move to Lake Wobegon, where all the kids are above average.
What about the individual competition implicit in “making the team?”
I’d have thought that failing to make the cut would be more potentially harmful than to be eliminated somewhere along the line during a spelling bee.
Face it progressive-ed folks - competition is a natural element in human society, and is literally hard-wired into our brains. Denying that frustrates children trying to learn.
“But it’s OK for students to compete in sports, as long as they’re playing in teams and not as individuals”…I don’t think it’s about individual competition vs team competition. Many school administrators are hostile *both* to competition and to knowledge. Thus, it makes sense that they would be more hostile to academic competition, which involves both of these factors, than to athletic competition, which involves only one of the factors.
Plus, inter-school athletics is typically supported by influential elements of the community–with whom the administrators are not eager to tangle.
How big is a tennis team?
Ahh, you beat me to it, Walter.