The Competition Disease

Education is just a means. If it is not accompanied by truthfulness, firmness, patience and other virtues, it remains sterile, and sometimes does harm instead of good. The object of education is not to be able to earn money, but to improve oneself and to serve the country. If this object is not realized, it must be taken that the money spent on education has been wasted.
–Mahatma Gandhi [Indian Opinion, 9 March 1907 (CW 6, p. 361)]

If the purpose of education is to improve one’s eligibility for employment, then we run into a problem, because the purpose of a degree is to out-compete one’s peers for a well-paying job.  You see, there’s competition built right into the value system.  This has reached a point in our culture where an activity does not have value for us unless it is ‘competitive’.  If you can’t be better than other people at something, why do it at all?  It’s a ridiculous notion, but it’s built into our culture.  Math can no longer be a hobby alone, as it was for Descartes or Fermat – instead we have nationwide math competitions.  We have large-scale, high-profile competition in nearly every sector of academia, in video games, in sports, in workplaces, in relationships, and even music, poetry, filmmaking.

I’ve been caught up in this sort of competition before, and when I am I have never felt so divorced from the world.  I would separate the world into three categories:  those ‘better’ than me, those ‘worse’ than me, and the singleton set containing only me.  That is an extremely lonely place.  There is no room here for generosity, no room for ‘firmness’ with my ‘superiors’, nor for ‘patience’ with my ‘inferiors’.  Other people, I felt, should be either envied or envious. This is where competition leads.

And this is exactly where our culture is pushing us, from every direction.  It is the task of students and teachers, then, to help each other swim upstream like the salmon towards activities that emphasize “truth, firmness, patience, and other virtues”.

My high school calculus teacher, Laikun Wong, used what is now one of my favorite classroom strategies to this end – letting students teach the class, or teach each other.  This clearly works better with older students, but it emphasizes the idea that knowledge is worth nothing unless you can (and do) share it with others – not to show off, but to help your peers understand it as well as you do.

If you know any other cool classroom (or other) strategies to fight the competition disease, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!