The spirit of competition
Written by Tim Higgins | | letters@toledofreepress.comThe president is half way around the world this week, meeting with some of our Asian allies (and creditors) to discuss world economies, and America’s position in this changing marketplace. Back here at home, America wonders how it will compete in what is becoming an increasingly competitive world market in the heady days of its economic recovery.
The questions are extremely important ones, since America appears no longer to be the manufacturing giant of its past, nor can it remain the world consumer of recent years that those that have replaced it now require.
While thus involved, they might also consider that sad fact that America is increasingly a country that abhors the very competitive spirit that it once sought to foster and that was once the defining principle of its economic growth. One could reasonably now ask how a nation can expect to compete when in so many ways it seeks to eliminate competition?
Dodgeball has been banned because it causes a few bruises (like life doesn’t) and because more importantly, it can cause low self-esteem. Red pencils can no longer be used to correct papers because red is a color that carries negative connotations (you know, like this is wrong). Neither A’s nor F’s can be handed out for classroom work because its unfair to set one classmate above another and because pointing out work that’s substandard might hurt little Johnny or Jill’s feelings. T-ball has replaced baseball for the youngest so that everyone can get a hit and feel good about themselves; not that it matters, since no one is supposed to be keeping score anyway. And at the end of the season everyone gets a trophy no matter what they’ve done in order to foster a healthy self-image.
Many will point out that while all of the above is true, we still have a strong competitive spirit exhibited through sports. Football, Baseball, Basketball, Soccer, and Hockey continue to exist as amateur sports for our children as they go through the educational system in the hopes of fostering a spirit now largely absent from their academic life. Sports likewise exist on a professional level in this country for us to champion the true spirit of competition.
Increasingly however, both the college and professional ranks are accepting an influx of foreign players. Pick your sport of choice and you can name the top foreign born stars that are becoming a increasing part of it.
Additionally, we find a strong movement to remove such athletic activities from our schools’ curriculums, claiming that little money remains for such extra-curricular activities with education budgets already stretched beyond the breaking point. We spend thousands of dollars per pupil to educate our youths (much of it apparently to meet government guidelines), leaving little or nothing left to instill a competitive spirit either academically or athletically. At the college level, progressive professors continue to complain about diversion of funding from more academic pursuits to athletics in spite of the fact that most college programs are self-supporting.
It sometimes seems that the entire education process is bent on drilling little more than a few government approved facts and figures into the heads of our young at the expense of teaching them how to survive. Intent on instilling a positive self-image and self-esteem, the educational process has lost sight of providing them with the ability to withstand the rigors of a dog-eat-dog world once they leave that all too soft academic life.
And while we “older folk” tend to write them off as mostly useless nonsense, thank goodness for bad old video games. For awful as they might be, they appear to be the last place left where someone can win, lose, perform on an equal footing with their peers, and yes, even suffer the consequences of their actions.
Perhaps the young are telling us something by their demand for such “toys”. Perhaps there is some genetic root to the competitive spirit within human beings that these toys appeal to. Perhaps, left with fewer outlets for a drive to compete that is increasingly stifled in this country, the demand for such “entertainment” is simply a cry that will not be denied.
The rest of the world has not failed to notice. Countries around the world where competing is still a necessity for survival and who have for years sought competitive advantage over the United States have taken note of the change here. If we are to prove ourselves able to compete in this world of the future in both the realm of ideas and the sweat of producing, if we are to win in the game of world economics, we might first try to return to teaching those who follow us the spirit of competition.
Tim Higgins blogs at http://justblowingsmoke.blogspot.com/.
