The Need for Competition in Schools
by Jay dubya

Cooperation is emphasized in American public schools while competition is 
generally discouraged. Competition is even being downplayed among the most 
gifted students because educational psychology maintains that competition breeds 
selfish arrogant adults that only care about themselves and not about the needs 
of the less fortunate. Everyone involved in education has to get back to the 
idea that competition is a worthwhile pursuit that is consistent with our great 
free enterprise system of economics. That is why it is so important that public 
school philosophy pragmatically follows the free enterprise economic model 
rather than the current ineffective political democracy model of education that 
squanders billions of dollars annually.

Industry is keenly aware of the need for competition as the true instrument of 
societal prosperity and personal improvement. Surely Nissan and Toyota have 
forced General Motors and Ford to manufacture better cars or else go the way of 
the dinosaur. But our schools just don't get it! Rivalry is the key to 
individual self-sufficiency and to corporate progress everywhere in America 
except in our public schools.

As it is, our schools are eroding away the essential tradition that has made 
America great. Why should students attempt to excel if they are working in a 
democratic sociological system that accentuates grade inflation and the status 
quo? The entire average high school's curriculum is gradually drifting away from 
academic competition toward a median that promotes sociological growth under the 
guises of democratic education and cooperative learning. Instead of group 
adjustment schools should be emphasizing student exploration of individual 
potential, tough grading standards and rugged individualism.

Educational philosophy must reflect the true values of American tradition. 
Americans are more materialistic than they are aesthetic. Our traditions have 
supported the premise that success has more to do with individual pursuit of 
happiness than with group adjustment to happiness. Success in the real world has 
more to do with individual competition than it does with group cooperation.

Philanthropists had to be selfish to accumulate fortunes so that they could then 
become benefactors of society and effectively contribute to the stability of our 
"economic civilization." The wealthy are the biggest contributors to American 
government paying over seventy-five percent of taxes. When schools begin 
teaching students how to better their own lives economically then this country 
will again be steadied on the right track. But high schools persist in putting 
the cart in front of the horse!

The United States defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War because of our free 
enterprise economic system and not because of our educational system that 
promoted group assimilation. The Russians shot a cannonball across America's bow 
when the communists sent up the first Sputnik in 1957. The U.S. knew it was in a 
do-or-die competition for survival so we got tough, developed a space program 
and put the first man on the moon. But it was the threat of competition from 
Russia that brought out the best in America! Competition is good, and as long as 
educational psychology sees student academic rivalry as being the opposite of 
societal needs our educational system is doomed to mediocrity.

For over half a century our American schools have been implementing democracy 
but despite all of this energy and expense crime and delinquency run rampant, 
drugs, AIDS and alcohol are destroying city and suburban teens and American 
society as a whole is degenerating towards disintegration.

Why do kids join gangs and experiment with dope? It is because the group 
pressure exceeds the will of the individual's conscience. And what do schools 
teach students to do? They teach kids how to sacrifice individual will for the 
sake of the group. Peer pressure can make almost any student yield to temptation 
and bad habits. A teenager's friends at age fourteen are more influential on his 
or her development and choices than his or her parents are. Have the wrong 
friends and then a student is easily led down the wrong path and cooperative 
learning in a group is partly responsible for that peer pressure social 
phenomenon.

In the classic science fiction novel The Time Machine H.G. Wells suggests that 
it is man's aggressiveness, his sense of competition geared to his need for 
self-survival that drive individuals to invent, create, explore and discover. 
The novel teaches that it was because mankind became too secure and too happy 
and contented that caused the inferior Eloi race to evolve and be exploited and 
massacred by the heartless Morlocks.

As long as schools pursue making students socially secure and happy our 
civilization will be drifting towards complacency and starting to author its 
self-destruction. It is a testament of history that empires and civilizations 
usually decay and decline from within and not from external attack. That's what 
happened to Russia, Rome and ancient Persia, Egypt and Mesopotamia. If we as a 
nation lose our original sense of purpose as outlined in the Declaration of 
Independence, which is currently being undermined by radical interpretations of 
the United States Constitution, then we are surrendering the essential 
principles that made this country the envy of the world. As long as psychology 
and sociology govern law, culture and education, the decline of this nation will 
continue to accelerate.

Education in America should reflect the values of the adult world. If high 
school students earn good academic grades, the school systems should reward 
their achievements with pay, and the money earned from good high school grades 
could be set aside for future college tuition. All kids understand money but 
many teenagers find high school irrelevant and the philosophy of learning for 
the sake of learning alien to their natural survival instincts. Teenagers as a 
whole don't buy the false teachings that maintain, "You are here for a non-
future because we are not training you to do anything but sit there." Those 
students that can't cut stiff competition in academic courses should not be 
allowed to take them.

Only the best students should be paid for attaining honor roll averages in valid 
academic courses that have not been diluted to accommodate mediocre and 
unmotivated students. In other words, academics should be the privilege of the 
minority and not a right of everybody. When that important transformation 
happens there will automatically be more privileged students because teenagers 
will recognize that achievement is rewarded by the high school and that the 
school is more attuned to the way the real world functions.

Educational psychologists tell school systems that children learn from the 
concrete to the abstract. First of all, high school teenagers are not children. 
Secondly, if teenagers were put on the board of education's payroll, then they 
could plainly see the relationship of achievement and academic excellence on a 
concrete basis rather then be perpetually puzzled by the nebulous abstraction of 
"psychological reward" as opposed to the easily grasped concept of "monetary 
reward" being set aside for college expenses.

Get psychologists and the influence of psychology out of education and the 
ponderous institution will automatically improve. Future teachers must stop 
hearing the mantra that "Intrinsic rewards are more desirable than extrinsic 
rewards (money)." When Jesus spoke to the masses, He used parables to express 
His intent. The masses could not grasp His abstract moral principles. So Jesus 
used material references such as sheep, shepherds', mustard seeds and good 
Samaritans to represent His abstractions to His mass audience. Jesus did things 
right by truly going from the concrete to the abstract. 

Students today are a part of mass America. They need reality education and not 
intrinsic, democratic, sociological and psychological preparation for an 
abstract ideal society that they have to build without any training or skill. It 
is about time that education gives both form and substance to the word reward 
instead of emphasizing an elusive phantom known as "intrinsic reward." Then all 
students will finally visualize the concept of reward when it is given a 
material image in the form of money for valid academic achievement being set 
aside for future college debts.

Grade level norms must be established and strictly enforced. Tenth graders 
should not be reading on a seventh grade level and seniors ought to maintain a B 
average in all academic subject areas. Teachers should be allowed to enforce 
rigid standards that don't use grade inflation to dilute educational quality for 
the sake of quantity (passing everyone). But the educational power structure 
avoids grade level norms because precise grading standards would accurately 
reflect the inadequacies of the present sociologically oriented democratic 
comprehensive public schools. At present true grade level norms in various core 
curriculum content areas are cleverly disguised and camouflaged by enigmatic 
standardized test results using difficult-to-interpret terminology like 
"stanines" and "relative skill competency."

Critics promptly state that grade level norms would deprive school systems from 
having their own unique and individual curriculums, which incidentally hardly 
vary from high school to high school throughout the country. Educational pundits 
insist that grade level norms would have teachers teaching for standardized 
tests and not for the individual instructor's personal goals and objectives. So 
why can't teachers pursue both the standardized tests' goals and their own goals 
simultaneously while devising lessons that support both?

The miracle of television along with the radio and motion picture industries 
have more than erased "regional uniqueness" throughout the United States. When I 
was a teenager people in the Dixie states sounded very different than 
northerners did, but today the speakers on radio and CNN television news shows 
originating from Atlanta sound exactly like those Fox announcers in New York 
City. Kids in Palo Alto, California watch the same CBS cartoon shows and MTV 
broadcasts as kids in Emporium, Pennsylvania do. Teenagers in Kalamazoo get on 
the same color and model school buses as kids in Poughkeepsie. We don't need to 
preserve our local eccentricities as much as we need to reinforce our national 
commonalities, interests and beliefs.

It is true that local customs have given way to mass conformity but the 
educational establishment is generating more of this mass mentality mediocrity 
under the cloak of "democracy for individual student development" and the 
"comprehensive (code jargon for not being strictly academic) high school."

Educational gurus flirt with flimsy theories like "The child needs an 
educational environment where he or she can create and experiment." American 
education contains more fantasy than an anthology of Mother Goose nursery rhymes 
and it is really very much akin to a Grimm fairy tale.

Educators really mean re-creation and re-experimentation when they talk about 
student "creation" and student "experimentation." The students aren't really 
creating or experimenting anything at all but they are merely re-enacting what 
mankind already knows and they are merely repeating demonstrations that have 
been performed by scientists and authors millions of times in the past.

Classroom learning (as teachers know it) is really students' re-discovering and 
not discovering and students re-creating and not creating. Sir Isaac Newton and 
Albert Einstein were examples of discoverers and William Shakespeare and Mark 
Twain were examples of creators. Anything that students do in the classroom is 
really only imitation of what true creators and true discoverers have already 
accomplished. So in that respect students (no matter how talented) are not true 
creators or true discoverers at all. They can only be re-creators or re-
discoverers or else they would be masters instead of students.

Experience is often not the best teacher' as many believe. A student could do 
something wrong a hundred times and have plenty of experience without performing 
a particular task successfully. True creativity (like authoring this book) and 
true experimentation are a lot of hard work and should not be easy chores that 
can be achieved by simply following a procedure that has been duplicated 
millions of times before. Big projects, writing books and great accomplishments 
require years of labor. Failure is an inescapable characteristic of true 
creativity and true discovery. Schools expose students to certain learning 
devices and after several superficial tries (designed to build their self-
esteem) they succeed in completing a certain easy task. Educators prematurely 
label what the students have done as discovery and as creativity.

Most authors have to go through dozens of painful publisher rejections before 
their works are available to the public. Scientists must develop tests that fail 
hundreds of times before that one test achieves an objective or accurately 
diagnoses a disease. It was Thomas Edison, who had eloquently said, "Discovery 
(a genius) is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." True 
creativity and true discovery involve years of dedicated research, hard work and 
plenty of rejection and failure. When learning is made (or disguised) to come 
easy kids get the wrong impression of what adult life and real success are 
really about.

By isolating students from failure in public schools, educators are insulating 
and protecting them from what they need to know most: how to adjust to failure 
and rejection and how to reconstruct the spirit after failing so that confidence 
is built and not self-esteem being continually reinforced. Democracy in 
education and modern school psychology are obsessed with the objective of 
eradicating failure from a child's experience to make watered-down learning come 
easier to him or her. By eliminating the student's "right to fail" individual 
accountability is being sacrificed for the promulgation of student 
irresponsibility in school, at home and in the society.

But to accommodate administrators, college professors and school psychologists, 
academic tasks are reduced to simple sociological experiences. And after a 
student has completed a task that has been performed millions of times before 
educators proudly declare that the child (even if he is eighteen with a beard, a 
tattoo and long bushy sideburns) has "created" or "discovered."

American education makes a big mistake when it gives little Johnny Jones in the 
first grade of Happyville PS #1 the same credit for discovering that 4 + 3 =7 as 
we do Christopher Columbus for discovering America or Marie Curie for 
discovering radium. If we mean learning or re-discovering when we say 
discovering, then I insist it's time for educators to call a spade a spade.

Leonardo DaVinci and Michelangelo were bitter rivals and that competition 
motivated each to attempt out-creating the other. True creativity is basically a 
selfish enterprise and has little or no sociological implication. I often wonder 
if Picasso painted because he wanted to share his fame or his inspiration with 
other less-motivated painters or if Thomas Edison was inspired to invent while 
being motivated to share his ideas with other less motivated or less gifted idle 
dreamers.

The truth is that most great contributors to civilization preferred to think and 
to work alone. This is why only advanced academic students should be involved 
with creating and experimenting because they are the only students in the high 
school remotely capable of creating and discovering anything. American education 
slyly conceals its own failures by disguising them in fancy terms like 
discovering, creating, sharing, cooperative learning and self-esteem, all of 
which have little or no application in the dog-eat-dog real world that's out 
there after graduation.

The American educational idea' of sharing (as generated by airhead college 
professors and impractical school psychologists) is actually more Marxist (share 
all wealth) than it is Jeffersonian (individual pursuit of life, liberty, free 
enterprise, happiness). 

Kids are babied and doted on by parents that want to be their child's friend. 
Schools don't demand too much of the already spoiled students. Teachers must 
dilute their academic courses to accommodate students that have sound-byte minds 
that give up too easily on hard items that require time, hard work and energy to 
solve or complete. Schools discourage competition and encourage sociological 
cooperation and group activity to keep slow-learners and unmotivated kids on the 
old "academic escalator."

High schools only ask of students to participate according to their ability and 
don't demand excellence by raising the bar. "Students must be understood and 
given assistance and support to build self-esteem," the Educational Aristocracy 
preaches to teachers. "The curriculum must be adjusted to meet each student's 
individual needs." Now let's pause for a minute, take a deep breath and analyze 
what evils are being perpetuated all across America.

"From each (student) according to his ability; to each (student) according to 
his needs." Does that sound familiar? This country's educational system has gone 
topsy-turvy! The slogan for dialectic materialism (communism) has become the 
hallmark of American democracy in education. This is George Orwell's 1984 
revisited.

That eighty percent gray area that psychologists and Constitutional lawyers have 
created has erased most of the distinctions between right and wrong, between 
good and evil and between smart and dumb. Love is hate, peace is war, truth is 
falsehood, and democracy is socialism. Nothing has clear distinct definition 
anymore. Everything is everything! So that is why it is so easy for liberal 
educational philosophers and psychologists to easily corrupt the entire American 
public school educational system.

A turtle hardly seems to move at all. But after wandering for fifty years in a 
certain direction, that tortoise will definitely be far from its original 
starting point. And that is exactly what has happened to American education in 
the last half-century. It has moved slowly step by step until school curriculums 
are more socialistic than democratic and more sociologically cooperative than 
academically competitive. The public has not felt this fifty-year pendulum shift 
because it has been happening too gradually, too slowly yet very deliberately.

Other nations and terrorist organizations believe that our country's resolve is 
turning soft because our schools are not demanding student excellence and 
student academic accountability. The powers-that-be in American education are 
too idealistic, too impractical, and too conciliatory and as a result the 
students of today are too wimpy to academically compete and the parents of 
tomorrow will be too wimpy to economically excel. Soon this infection will reach 
lofty places like Harvard and Yale where grades and subjects will have to be 
watered down to accommodate the wimpy nature of the high school student pool 
that will be filtering out of watered-down high school programs.

The frail theories of American educational philosophy are as naïve as a grateful 
Caesar giving Brutus a shiny new cutlery set as an Ides of March appreciation 
gift. Besides grade-level norms for academic college-bound students, high 
schools desperately need a workable two-track system that sorts out and 
separates vocationally oriented students from those going on to higher academic 
education. Each county should have at least two vocational schools where high 
school students could learn viable trades.

A two-tiered or two-tracked system has been attacked by the educational power 
structure for being un-American, undemocratic, un-comprehensive and unethical. 
But this is what is actually necessary to promote the true American way of life 
that is fundamentally based on competition, free enterprise and individual 
achievement.

After eighth grade students should be given a battery of tests and on the 
information gleaned be channeled into two curriculums: the local academic high 
school and the county vocational trades' high school. Grade level norms could be 
enforced in the academic high school and more readily evaluated. Local high 
schools would then be more academically efficient. The brighter kids could work 
independently in experimental labs'. The students that have been sorted into the 
county vocational curriculum could learn skills and trades applicable to their 
later adult lives and then graduate to become productive members of society.

Teachers in the academic high school would not be baffled by such enigmas as 
"motivating" students to learn in a "democratic comprehensive high school" and 
adjusting grades to accommodate "student self-esteem." Discipline problems would 
then all but disappear.

The dual tracked system would not deprive any student of his or her freedom of 
choice. The new two-tracked curriculum would be flexible enough for a student in 
the trades sector to switch back to the academic college preparatory sector if 
he or she can pass a basic language and math skills academic entrance 
examination and then migrate into the other more demanding curriculum.

Vocational students should not be stigmatized or discriminated against. A 
student in the academic college prep' curriculum could also make the transition 
to the trades program if he or she so desires up to the start of the senior 
year. We know that a good plumber or a well' trained electrician could make a 
lot more in the American free enterprise economy than a good teacher or a good 
nurse could. Let's start valuing trades' education in conjunction with corporate 
training to make American education more cost-efficient.

As the curriculum now stands easy general high school electives only pay casual 
lip service to true vocational specialist preparation. Instead of putting the 
onus for learning for all students squarely in the laps of academic high school 
teachers, American high schools and county vocational schools should teach 
teenagers about the wisdom associated with true freedom of choice.

Teenagers must learn the value of true individual responsibility, of personal 
decision-making and of individual accountability for his or her grade 
performance and his or her individual behavior. The ultimate decision of whether 
to be in either curriculum or to stay or to transfer from one to the other would 
be his or hers to make based on the students overall performance and behavior.

As it is now, parents put pressure on school guidance counselors to place their 
sons or daughters in academic college prep' courses and when all the kids can't 
make the grade the teachers feel pressure from administrators and then practice 
course dilution and grade inflation. When too many students fail a course, it is 
the teacher's fault. College is not for everybody! We must elevate vocational 
training education to be on the same plane as the academic high school. The 
stigma connected with vocational education as not being equal to academic 
preparation must be erased.

Upon graduation eligibility the vocational diploma and the academic high school 
diploma should be given equal status. The achievements of each student and well 
as the student's class rank should be listed on either diploma so that 
prospective colleges or prospective employers will know the exact credentials of 
the class valedictorian and the class vagabond in the academic program and the 
class expert tradesman and the class clown in the vocational curriculum. 
Presently a future employer can't decipher anything by reading or examining a 
devalued high school diploma.

College education is no longer synonymous with earning capacity so why should 
the myth be propagated that a college education is advantageous and more 
prestigious than a degree from an advanced post high school trades' academy?

Americans live in an economic society where garbage collectors (excuse me, 
sanitary engineers) earn more money than beginning teachers receive who have to 
put up with more garbage (from administrators and rowdy students) than trash 
collectors do. Absolute democratic freedom without individual accountability or 
the assumption of individual responsibility translates into anarchy and that's 
where the present educational scenario is leading this great nation. Educators 
need to formulate a more practical and cost-efficient model of democratic 
education and abandon the sham that is now gradually bringing our great American 
civilization to its knees. In its present form democracy in education is 
actually socialism in public schools. Free enterprise and fierce competition are 
what has made America the greatest civilization world history has ever known and 
those wonderful aspects must in the future become the hallmarks of our American 
public schools.

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