Everybody wins

I was listening to a radio debate recently on the topic of non-competitive sports for children. The theory goes that nobody feels excluded as nobody wins and nobody comes last. Every child gets a medal and a pat on the back. Hurrah! We’re all winners!

This is utter bollocks. Life is competitive. I got my job because I was better than another applicant, I beat them. I’ve been promoted in the past, because I strove to be better than my peers. But this is all recent stuff. We are made to be competitive, it’s survival of the fittest for all of the animal kingdom. There is evidence that neanderthals and early humans roamed the earth at the same time. A change in climate and conditions along with the neanderthals inability to adapt led to them dying out and we survived. This was a competition, we were able to eat and they weren’t, we won. In the wild, there is generally a finite amount of food available, those that win live and those that don’t die.

Children are leaving school and coming smack bang up against the harsh realities of the world. Suddenly they’re having to compete for university places and jobs. The shock to the system must be immense. The reasons the schools trot out for this all inclusive attitude is that not all kids are good at sport and those that aren’t don’t feel included and are made to look like like under performers. In extreme cases, kids who are too good are not allowed to play. So does everyone get 100% on their tests? No. Does the best kid at maths get told he can’t do maths any longer, he’s too good? Again, no.

Whilst we should enjoy doing something simply for the sake of it we need to teach kids how to win and just as importantly how to handle losing.

This entry was posted on 29/06/2007 at 09:38 am and is filed under Random stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.