By Thornton McCamish
THE AGE (Melbourn, Australia, Daily Newspaper.)
IN A WORLD WITHOUT LOSERS, WHERE EVEN PARTY GAMES ARE RIGGED WITH REWARDS FOR ALL, ARE OUR CHILDREN BEING CHEATED OF THE RIGHT TO FAIL?
They don't play pass the parcel like they used to. Go to a kid's party these days and you'll see that the host parent has rigged the parcel so that each time the music stops and a layer of wrapping comes off, a chocolate frog pops out. It's a fiddle. Every child wins. By the time the real prize is revealed, the orderly circle has disintegrated into a chaos of smeared chocolate and the screaming of sugarised toddlers.
As I recall it from 25 years ago, pass the parcel used to be a strictly one-winner affair. And it's not just pass the parcel that's gone soft. There are blatant rorts of the piñata, too. I've seen toddlers held up and given a free hit at the donkey. And aren't you supposed to wear a blindfold? It dawned on me recently, as I watched a roomful of fathers sweatily whaling away at a piñata, that childhood has changed.
It's the grown-ups who've done it. We seem to have cancelled competition. It's not just parents either. "Improvement in performance," say guidelines on coaching juniors published by the Federal Government's Australian Sports Commission, "should be measured against individual past performance rather than against other children." Prize nights drag on into the early hours now that everyone gets one. It's the rule of modern childhood: you only have to be in it to win it.
When I was a child in the 70s, our district was so short on kids old enough to hold a bat, the only way we could make up a cricket team was to enter us all in the under- 14scompetition. Our opponents were often twice our size. We waddled out to the pitch in leg pads that came up to our ribs and batting gloves that swallowed the entire forearm. We lost all the time. I remember year after year fielding on the boundary, while St Colemans' opening batsmen filled their boots with runs.
There's no surprise ending to this tale: we just kept on losing. And I'm not sure that I learned much from this over-generous lesson in defeat except that while it might be nice to win some time, it wasn't going to happen until we were good enough. Perhaps we developed a sort of precocious stoicism to cope with each Saturday's thrashing. We certainly learned that none of us was going to play for Australia. Not until we grew,anyway.
Somewhere along the line we've become squeamish about exposing kids to competition that might include failure. In Kanga cricket, losing doesn't come into it. One school's coaching policy for Kanga cricket spells this out: "Because all children are not identical in size, strength, ability and personality, game co-coordinators should adopt a flexible attitude to enable every player to have success."
When did we decide that competition was too tough for kids?
I remember my father telling my brother and me when we were eight or nine that he didn't care what we did in life. We could be garbos, nurses, explorers or rocket scientists, whatever. What mattered to him was that we were the best at whatever we did. As a way of encouraging kids to aim high, that was probably a bit heavy-handed, even by the standards of the late 70s. But an equally devoted parent probably wouldn't say that sort of thing now. We've become afraid of exposing our children to the possibility of not measuring up.
Now we pretend that comparisons are irrelevant; that every kid is the best at everything. Now that I'm a dad, I find myself doing it too. Last week was my first experience of a school concert-type event, at my kids' day-care center. Our children performed a song with their classmates. We took pictures, cheered; when it was over we raved about how great they were.
I guess nothing fudges the facts like love. In truth, they had both flubbed it big-time. One fled the stage in panic before his song had even begun. The other hid behind a classmate with fingers in mouth and eyes shut, as if she could thus make herself disappear. But still we raved about how brilliantly they'd performed. All the parents did.
In fairness, these are very young children. At this age, the kid-glove approach seems to come from deep in the DNA. God knows, you don't want your child to form a haunting early memory of being useless at thrashing a paper-mache donkey.
But how far should the "everyone's-a-winner" ethos go? Is sheltering children from the reality-check of competition - particularly in schooling - the best way to prepare them for life?
Brendan Nelson doesn't seem to think so. One of the conditions the federal Education Minister attached to the latest Commonwealth education funding package was that states put in place a "quartile" ranking system in which students are graded from the bottom to top 25 per cent of their class. That was the sort of plain-speaking information, he told Jon Faine on 774 ABC Melbourne, "which most parents consistently have told me they would also like to know". His critics called the idea "educationally unacceptable", "back to the '50s" and even nonsensical, given that the bottom quartile of a class at, say, MacRobertson Girls' High School, which has selective entry, might well be the top quartile of a class at a school that takes all comers.
Nelson backed down from his threat to cut funding to states that wouldn't submit to his diktat. But not before, in the view of The Age's Education section, "deriding the education community as ideologues who have hijacked the education bus".
Of course, assessing educational performance is all about ideology. Why go out of your way to rank students against their classmates - as distinct from statewide benchmarks - unless you believe that a competitive atmosphere in the classroom is a good unto itself'
"The nature of life itself," Nelson told Faine, "is that all of us are being compared to one another."
The way we think about competition in schooling reflects deeper views about the individual in society. To the Tory mind, firewalling kids from the rigor of competition and comparison is just slack liberalism, the sacrifice of excellence for participation. What disturbs lefties, on the other hand, is the prospect of publicly consigning some kids to a dummies' gulag at the bottom of the class.
To me, an educational approach that broadens the categories in which students can achieve, and is supple enough to recognize a range of qualities, sounds like a great leap forward over the dux-to-dunce approach that pertained when Nelson was at school.
But the flare-up over the "quartile" ranking idea reveals a genuine unease about the messages we're giving children.
We're not being entirely candid with our children when we shelter them from the reality of competition. Because the world they're growing up in is competitive, and becoming more so. In governance and economics, the word "competition" is itself a synonym for vigor and health. To describe something as "competitive" - a game, an environment, a race, a jobs market - is to praise it as honest and lean. Heck, humans love competition. It's in the gut of the species. Magazines and newspapers print lists of the week's winners and losers, as if there's nothing in between. Comparisons may be invidious, but they're a lot of fun. If Gore Vidal was wrong when he said "whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies", it's only because there's a fragile splinter in all of us that quails at anyone's success.
Pretending the world is otherwise is a beautiful lie. Or a snow job, depending on your point of view.
What's strange is that it's a fib we adults seem to be telling for our own benefit. Kids seldom need to be told how they're doing: they know already. Another kid is always going to be better at catching; someone will have a cooler backpack. Even in an egg-and-spoon race, several people are going to come - how shall we put it? - non-first. Besides, for many of us, the first and most lasting experience of competition is with our brothers and sisters. "The hideous complexity of sibling rivalry," as the writer Paul Theroux describes it; "struggling like crabs in a basket."
So why are we so chary of letting kids risk winning or losing in structured competition? Perhaps because losing, and even winning, seem properly to belong to the register of adult experiences, like sexual relationships, drinking or managing a credit card.
But children have to try it sometime. The ones who've never struggled to achieve something difficult are easily spotted on, say, the audition rounds of Australian Idol. They're the ones who come in, sing in voices that could crack glass, and then sob indignantly when they don't make the cut. You can see the violated sense of entitlement on their disbelieving faces.
Perhaps failure wouldn't hurt so much if they'd had a chance to experience it a bit sooner. Since they're going to be doing so much of it as adults, why not let children practice winning and losing? The Australian Sports Commission guidelines on junior sport might seem a little over-protective, but they still acknowledge that "competition can be extremely motivating and help children feel good about themselves". In his book Secret Men's Business, children's author John Marsden argues that it's important that a boy eventually beats his father at something that matters to them both. "By defeating him you free yourself to go on and achieve the great things that life holds in store for you," he writes. Sure you might lose. But it's a risk worth taking for the exhilarating experience of finding out what you're capable of.
What impact will shielding kids from losing have on them? It's probably too early to say. What's certain is that if we take real competition out of schools, children will learn about winning and losing from the culture. And Australian culture has a monomaniacal focus on winning.
This wasn't always true. I grew up in the 70s thinking of the country's sporting status as pretty much in parallel with the fortunes of my under-14s cricket team: we usually lost. When an Australian won an Olympic gold, when Australia II pinched the America's Cup in 1983, it was like a happy miracle.
After the Montreal Olympics of 1976Australia's sporting nadir - the government decided it had had enough of losing. We got the institute of sport in 1981 , and the cricket academy in 1987. The government paid for sporting excellence, and got it. Soon we were winning all sorts of stuff.
But did we lose something? Now the back pages are so thick with the latest gold-medal victory that there's hardly room for the more subtle, complicated story of the runners-up; the team or athlete who trained their guts out and still didn't win.
Winning's great. And Australia is rich in gracious, inspiring winners - Pat Rafter, the women's swimming team, for example. But if winning's all there is, it's no wonder that losing feels so damning and bitterly personal, as it obviously does for those AustralianIdol wannabes.
Our narrow focus on winning misses a richer sense of the full story of competition itself. For a society powered by unsentimental competition, we don't like to dwell much on failure. When it happens, it usually gets spun into something else. Take the spectacular self-immolations of John Brogden and Mark Latham: Brogden's demise we smoothly pathologised as depression - inscrutable and too private to contemplate; Latham's we put down to a meltdown in dignity.
Why can't we get our minds around failure? In the quote beloved of modern self-help gurus and manuals, inventor Thomas Edison once remarked: "I have not failed 10,000 times. I have successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work." That might be useful if you live in a laboratory. But using this kind of thing to cheer up flunked adults is just sophistry.
I've lost count of the number of times I've heard AFL coaches say something like: finals is the reason we play the game. It may feel true to the coaches when they say it -they're talking a good game for sponsors and supporters - but it's not. To say that football is only about winning is to ignore the guts of the contest. Every game is a rich experience: the crunch of bodies, the pies in the grandstand, the struggle, the glory, the boredom. It's what sport, and competition, is.
Recently I was at the football with my father. In the Auskick match, the mum who was umpiring took the ball off a big kid who had taken a clear mark and handed it to a little girl who was nowhere near the contest. "What was that for?" I muttered into my pie.
"Maybe," Dad observed, "she's thinking everyone should get a kick before they go off."
Well, quite. We want our young people to grab the excitement of competition with both hands; we want kids to taste success, and to learn that failure isn't the end of everything. But first we've got to teach them that it's fun just to be out on the ground, or in the circle, passing the parcel. They may not win the prize, but with any luck, there'll be a chocolate frog in it.
Thornton McCamish is an author and regular columnist of The AGE daily newspaper in Melbourne Australia
