Chan Chui Yee Tweety

5402 5480
Competition is detrimental to child' s education
' I got barely more than eighty at exams this time. I am not the top anymore.' This thought
was rooted in a bright forth-grader's mind, develop and preoccupy her until it drove her
into the end of her 9 years' life.[1]This pathetic girl Wong , who has always been in A
team since kindergarten, committed suicide after a minor academic setback. All the years,
teachers and parents have tried to use competition as a means to boost performance, selfesteem and learning motivation. Wong's tragedy, yet, prompts us to rethink the
consequences of competition. Is competition a cradle for talents? Or a poison for the next
generation indeed? In the following, I will investigate the impacts of competition to
children's self-image development, learning motivation, emotion and show why it is
poisoning talents instead of nurturing them.
'Competition is to self-esteem as sugar is to teeth,' educationist and author Alfie Kohn
remarked. This is contradictory to what many parents believe about competition. Parents
put their children in contest in hope of victory, and regard victory as evidence of their
children's excellence. Such a belief is self-evident that competition favors the self-image
development of winners, but never losers. Still, one's confidence is not boosted but
undermined when his self-worth is reliant on an external source such as victory in
competition. A seven-year-old tennis champion Kyle stated on a show he has always
taken victory for granted since he started to play tennis at two. But when asked how he
felt when he failed once in a while, he replied, 'ashamed,'. Being racked easily by
occasional failure showed Kyle's insecurity deep down despite his achievement. The
reason is that, the win-lose setting of competition simply tells children they are not good
enough by themselves, but they must triumph over others. Victory replaces children's
intrinsic value as their source of confidence, which can never be certain just as one can
never be certain about whether he is going to win.
The harm of competition to children's learning motivation is just as detrimental. The
excitement of competition is constantly made use of in classroom to capture children's
attention. Attention is raised, undoubtedly, but is it so with learning motivation? In a 1981
study aimed to investigate the relationship between competitions and learning motivation,
eighty students were asked to solve spatial relations puzzles. Some of them asked to solve
quicker than the one beside them, while some were not required to compete. Workers
observed the time subjects voluntarily spent on the puzzles and how interested they were
in the task as a measure of their intrinsic motivation. It turned out that subjects who
worked independently without having to compete were much more intrinsically
motivated. "...they begin to see that activity as an instrument for winning rather than an
activity which is mastery-oriented and rewarding in its own right. " concluded in the
research. Children might be more attentive when put under competition, but their focus is
shifted from the extrinsic motivation, satisfaction from triumph, and have begun to
overlook the content of competition itself. When children are too busy formulating
strategy to win or to calculate their chance of victory, they are already distracted from
what they are supposed to be learning. Worse still, experts also suggest that extrinsic

motivator diminish people's interest in the activity itself. When the extrinsic motivator is
withdrawn, children are no longer attracted to the activity itself. This should not be
surprising, considering the children have already become used to the stimulation from
competitive excitement.

Aside from the negative impact on children's learning motivation, the stress that stems
from competition might take a disastrous toll on their mental health, especially that of the
children with underdeveloped adversity intelligence. How stressful is competition?
Research within behavioral psychology explained that people complete their tasks with
heightened speed in competitive situation because they want to end the competition
sooner and flee from its agitation. It is thus easily conceivable how dangerous it is to
torment children with little experience in handling stress with the great pressure of
competition. Some may argue that stress is essential to elicit people's potential. Such
assumption is in compliance with The Yerkes-Dodson law, which describes that one's
performance improves along with elevating level of stress, until it reaches the optimum
level. Exceeding the optimum stress level, performance goes down the slope steeply.
Unfortunately, competition always creates high level of stress that inhibits performance.
Educationalists across the country have reached the conclusion that competition
jeopardizes children's learning. Among the various reasons, one is that competition make
children anxious and anxiety interferes with concentration. Thus, there is virtually no
reason why parents and teachers should demolish children's happy childhood with
competition.

Competition, though harmful to children in so many aspects as we have investigated

above, is hardly avoidable. After all, even the social comparison theory states that it is
just human nature to evaluate their abilities by comparing with similar individuals.
Viewing competition from social perspective, there is perhaps no more efficient way to
select talents from the pack than competition. However, this does not mean parents and
teachers can sit back. Encouraging cooperation and focusing on the intrinsic value of
children, for example, can go a long way to counteract the impact of competitions.
Cooperation is acknowledged by expert the best substitute for competition as an approach
for goal achievement. A meta-analysis done by David and Roger Johnson reviewed 122
related studies and proved the superiority of cooperation: 65 studies discovered that
cooperation promotes higher achievement than competition, 8 found the reverse, and 36
found no statistically significant difference. But why cooperation outperform competition
in boosting results? While competition works that ' your success depends on others'
failure', cooperation states that' success relies on collective effort'. Therefore, cooperation
allows pooling of everyone's expertise and ability. One's idea inspire idea in another, and
the group archive more than anyone could have alone. Moreover, while the mutually
exclusive goal attainment setting of competition often provoke hostility among
competitors, children learn to admire the strength and value of their peers through

cooperation. Social cohesion in the group is effectively enhanced by cooperation, which

further promotes performance.

Ultimately, the reason why competition affects children so much is that competition
associates children's value to their results in competition. Every triumph and failure
becomes a matter of pride. Handling the issue from its cause, parents and teachers should
try to establish children's' confidence upon their intrinsic value by appreciation. Not every
child can excel in the academic competition, but parents and teachers can always praise
them for their effort and improvement. Besides, not all virtue can be competed.
Helpfulness of teaching classmates to do homework, leadership showcased in group
project cant be measured by competition, but they can be acknowledged by adults to let
children understand and appreciate themselves more. The only truth every child should
learn by heart is: they are valuable by themselves without the need of proof by
competition.