Competitions for Everyone

Well it seems that at the forefront of student news and issues in this New Year are student competitions - with something for everyone. Poster competitions, architectural design, leadership, research and science competitions, engineering and even the student Oscars! If you aren’t interested in this kind of competition not to worry, competitions for student grants and scholarships are just around the corner and it’s never too soon to start preparing for those.

Is all this competition good for us and do these frameworks instil the value systems that we want in the next generation? Does this kind of global competitiveness nurture the student or lead to unwanted, sometimes tragic, scenarios like those of Japanese and Korean student suicide rates? These are the questions people are beginning to ask in these competition saturated and stressful times; is the fundamental learning and cooperative collusion component of education becoming lost while students fight for dominance in their field? In this light an increasing number of education psychologists are questioning the focus on competition over cooperative learning.  In fact these same psychologists believe that there is more benefit to learning when students are encouraged to excel individually from a beginning point, and noting improvements, thus instilling a sense of individual achievement and a commitment to lifelong learning.

From the perspective of future employment with companies that are seeking the best of the best, these firms may be short-changing themselves by encouraging student development that requires constant reward and neglects to teach cooperation and collaborative effort. Furthermore, in both education and work environments it is often a team effort that is able to produce the most innovative design, interesting research and creative engineering and not the individual effort.  While competition organizers may insist that the promise of reward stimulates thinking beyond the normal scope of the student, others would agree that students motivated by passion who are able to work in a group to achieve a common goal have more merit in school and in employment than students who are motivated by carrots.