This article reminds me of the statement: 2 heads are better than one. Team work can go a long way. But to some extent I don’t think having competition or a competitive attitude is necessarily a bad thing. I think what’s more important is to have a balance of cooperation and competition. And yes I believe there can be a balance. In response to the statement: “scientists who consider themselves cooperative tend to have more published articles than their competitive colleagues. Cooperative businesspeople have higher salaries”, it would have been impossible for the scientists and corporate people to achieve their status and publications without some sort of competition, whether it be from colleagues or other scientists and companies.
With that in mind I do agree on the fact that we need to be taught more on cooperation.
Competition only benefits certain types of personalities. On a sporting field competitiveness is a benefit for your team. Especially if the team is aiming to play in specific sporting competitions and tournaments. For those high performance athletes competition is the key motivational factor. Speaking as an athlete I believe competition gives me a confidence boost, I like the idea that if I fight for something I know I will get it and I earned it truly. Even if I don’t end up getting my goal, I know I took a step forward towards it and I have the confidence to work harder and compete more so that next time I will get it. On the other hand having too much competition can definitely be a negative, if we look at the classroom situation: I believe competition can cause bullying, and jealousy and fights between children, especially young boys.
Thus this state of mind is not for everyone I must admit. In a class room situation you are expected to have different personalities, so, let’s be real, not everybody is going to be a high performance athlete. I guess in those instances cooperation works best, because for kids it is essential they feel included. For some children competition may be intimidating, especially if they are not confident in the skill they are asked to perform, it may be more beneficial for them if those children who are more confident take a step back and help the less confident children. This intern promotes peer support, a sense of belonging, and external motivation in the gym.
There are many more benefits to playing cooperative games; it’s not just about ‘let’s play cooperative games so that we don’t hurt somebody’s self-esteem.’ Those kinds of games promote good leadership skills, team work, communication, confidence boost, peer support motivation as well as many other things.
As an athlete I do believe that elite athletic sport should be promoted in schools. It all depends on the age group once again, with elementary students it is key that they “participate” in sports, whereas with the older children they tend to know whether they want to pursuit an elite sport or not, so they become more accustomed and understanding of a competitive environment, if they chose an elite athletic sport. I believe that elite sport is a great opportunity for children to be active, as an athlete I believe it’s very rewarding, you learn how to become self-reliant, and you learn to appreciate the efforts of people around you, like coaches, community, and parents. Both cooperation and competition have positives and negatives. With elite sport promotion: yes it should be promoted in schools, but children and parents must understand that it is a competitive an environment and it might not necessarily be for every child.
As I said before, for this system to work the important thing is to find a balance between competition and cooperation. Playing a team sport I understand how important this balance is, because you have to able to rely on your team mates, trust them and cooperate with them, and at the same time you must compete, with and against each other to produce the results that you are looking for. And I believe the same principle can be applied to the corporate world, and as with gym class, I agree that yes the competition does need to be cut down a little bit. But it all depends on the group, and what your aim is for the class. It’s hard to make assumptions because all class groups, teams and children have different abilities, so we must do our best as teachers to account for every child’s needs.
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