So who says competition in the classroom is inevitable?

When I talk to my daughter about what it was about school that was so alienating for her, what made her so, so anxious, she has a one-word answer.

Competition.

She couldn’t bear the ranking of individuals. Somehow the lottery of life has blessed this girl with a personality that rejects ranking or assessment of any kind. She can’t even watch the Olympics – actually has to leave the room – because she can’t stand the thought that someone has to come first, second, third, and that someone has to come last. And my girl opted out of the competition early.

She believes it’s natural for kids to be competitive – “Haven’t you seen little kids at an athletics carnival?”

But that’s sport, I say, why can’t education be different?

“It’s just the way that people are. It’s human nature.”

Certainly if you watch kids at a sports day it might seem that way. Think of a child running a race. They crouch, they look up at the finish line, the gun cracks and sparks a whole collection of physiological responses that add up to running as fast as possible. GO!

As they cross the finish line with a blur of other bodies, one thought enters their head.

Where’d I come?

Not: wow, I really enjoyed the feeling of my legs striding out and the powerhouse muscles in my thighs propelling me along the track. Not: mmm, my friend Jack’s had a bad week at school; I really hope he managed a personal best today. No.

Where’d I come?

Kids of all ages understand the predominant purpose of a running race – it is to win, regardless of parents saying, “Just go out there and have a good time.” And there can only be one winner (photo finishes notwithstanding).

The psychology of kids wanting to win a running race seems as reflexive as the psychology of wanting a cuddle from Mum or Dad when they’ve taken a tumble.

But we all know that education is not a sport, right? Sport is sport, and education is something else.

Yet people keep thinking of education and learning as something akin to a race – a simplistic message that reduces the rich and multilayered fabric of 12 years of formal learning to the idea of running in a straight line from A to B.

In personally questioning the role of competition in education I have lost count of the number of people who have said to me, yes, but life is competitive and school is just a training ground for the sort of competition our kids will face as adults in the real world.

Is that what school should be? A warm-up for the main game? A simulation of grown-up life, where we wake up in the morning, put on our armour and go out to compete in a dog-eat-dog world?

Just because getting a university place or getting a job is initially competitive, does that mean that 12 years of education should be too? Is it possible that the firing of young minds can sit outside this paradigm?

It’s understandable that sport – the great contest of human physical endeavour, practised the world over – bleeds into other parts of life. It makes for easy analogies and anecdotes that sum up the triumph of the human spirit if one works hard enough to overcome whatever obstacles come our way. Witness the success of sports motivational talkers on the circuit lecturing schools and corporations.

And competition and contest is everywhere. You can’t turn on the television without seeing people compete with each other to cook the best meal, to survive the most appalling conditions in some bloody jungle somewhere, to be the most alluring and desirable female, to have the best recipe to make a million bucks, to be the best foreman for the job, or to have the best voice according to four people sitting in weird Star Trek chairs.

If they don’t win, they lose: they’re asked to leave the competition, pack their bags and move out of the fancy waterfront mansion immediately; they’re voted off the island; they have their wretched hearts broken because the bachelor chose some other chick; they fail at their tilt at riches beyond their dreams; they can’t sing, after all. Losers.

Take a look at the most popular movie franchise for teens and young adults in recent times – The Hunger Games. Kids fight to the death as they compete for survival in games played out between districts – high-stakes competition to keep the population terrified and obedient. If its dystopian vision is an allegory for what life has to offer, it’s no wonder depression and anxiety is on the rise. It almost makes you nostalgic for the adolescent rumbles of Team Edward and Team Jacob.

Standardised testing – starting at an early age – is central to the problem. The competition and its results give parents and teachers the ability to compare. And despite widely accepted knowledge that children develop and learn and excel at different rates and at different times and at different things, they are pegged early.

Parents, either subconsciously or consciously, know this, and in some cases push their kids along so they don’t get pegged down the bottom. Meanwhile, children learn early whether it’s even worth playing the game, and many, like my daughter, decide it’s not and opt out.

High-stakes competition for kids can do their heads in. It can make them anxious, and depressed, and it can make them feel terrible about themselves.

Think of parents you know who are, shall we say, a little pushy. We’ve all seen them on the sporting field. They stalk their kids like international soccer coaches on the sidelines, pacing around them, talking to them about how to maximise their efforts in their run/swim/jump to ensure they win.

Worse, we’ve all been in the unfortunate position of seeing a child berated by a parent for a less-than-winning performance.

It’s so miserable. Experts are divided about the role of competition in education, but the division isn’t 50/50. Every educational academic I spoke to fell in with the line of thought that tilts towards the conclusion that intense competition in education – largely manifested by high-stakes standardised testing from a young age, endless exams, and the ranking of children – is damaging for all kids, even the successful ones.

And yet almost all the parents I spoke to accepted competition as part of life, part of the human condition; they didn’t even consider that its worth and effectiveness in the school environment is something to be questioned.

Why is there such a gap in the thinking?

‘We compete because we’re raised that way’

Alfie Kohn is the US’s most outspoken critic of competition in education – or of competition, full stop – and has been so for 30 years. He’s written 14 books on education and parenting; he talks at schools and universities to parents and teachers; and he is a provocative thinker on any number of accepted wisdoms − from the value of homework and grades to rewarding and punishing children.

When I meet him at his home in Boston, I find an intense, wry and engaging man who weighs his words carefully. He is precise, and resolutely on-message. He has been for a long time. The first myth he likes to debunk, when it comes to competition, is that it is innate. “Because there’s no point in going further in talking about whether it makes sense if we have no choice.

“Fortunately we do have a choice. We compete because we’re raised that way, not because we’re born that way.”

In his book No Contest, Kohn elegantly destroys the idea that being competitive is “just human nature”, firstly by pointing out how impossible it is to prove that a trait is human nature – and by the way the onus of proof is on those who claim the argument – and secondly by summarising the vast body of thought that says cooperation is likely more pertinent to the perpetuation of the species than competition, although conversely that can’t be proven either.

As he writes, “The human nature argument – which is virtually impossible to substantiate – is very seductive indeed: it fortifies social arrangements, offers a rhetorical advantage in disputes, and makes life easier psychologically.”

Kohn says it is more convenient to think of competition as something over which we have no control – indeed, if we think about it at all – “because then we don’t have to do the hard work of changing ourselves or our culture”.

But is the hard work happening anywhere?

“Oh, it’s happening,” he says.

There are indications that it’s possible and preferable to move beyond competition when you look at the work done around cooperative learning in classrooms; when you look at cooperative games on the playing fields; when you look at different ways of parenting and of managing. In fact, I just got a manuscript to read from someone in California who is looking at cooperative games as a way of helping children grow up healthier and as a way of challenging bullying.

Because competition supports bullying, so the fact that people have done this remarkable work at providing practical alternatives at work, at school, at home and at play completely rebuts the idea that it’s just the way life is. And when you look at the results of those alternatives, it also rebuts the idea that competition provides advantages that can’t be gained in any other way.

In Australia, Big Picture Education, an organisation “supporting school change and influencing the education conversation”, as well as starting new, innovative schools that are in increasing numbers dotted around the country, conduct individual assessment without grades. And I love the way co-founder Viv White describes what they do: children have to “defend their learning”, in other words give a progress report on it:

Competitive behaviour is built into [the current system]. We’ve taken that out of our design. So we talk about ‘getting better at what you do’.

We don’t line the kids up against each other. What they have to do, four times a year, is stand up in front of their parents and their peers and academic mentors, and ‘defend their learning’ by way of a panel.

And four times a year they devise a learning program with their parents in the room, so eight times a year, if you, the parent, don’t come, I’ll be ringing you as your daughter’s adviser and saying, Where are you? You are part of this. Families are enrolled too. And these are not just cute words.

Big Picture schools are small, and organised on a foundation belief that relationships between teachers and students are crucial, and that it is hard to have good relationships when there are simply too many kids in your care.

Likewise, at Templestowe College in Melbourne, a government high school that has successfully thrown out the rule book on competition by introducing personalised learning, principal Peter Hutton has put a cap on his student population at 650, predominantly drawn from the school’s local catchment area, because he doesn’t believe the quality of relationships can be scaled beyond that.

The more we focus on measuring academic outcomes and test results, the more the outcome becomes the goal, rather than a good education being the goal, and a good education is corrupted. And as desperate students feel that the success of their lives depends on the outcome, they will seek success by any means, from finding out what is going to be on the test, rote-learning what is going to be on the test, and then regurgitating the information during the test, to actually cheating on the test.

Kids learn that passing the test is more important than enjoying the material, is more important than thinking creatively, and that it doesn’t matter if they don’t retain the knowledge after the test. You’ve just got to ace that test.

And as teachers are given the message that they must teach to the test, the curriculum narrows towards these test outcomes.

The great shame is that the fun is in the learning, not the grades. This is the supreme clash of objectives in schooling. Indeed, according to Sydney Grammar’s John Vallance, many of his teachers – “particularly in subjects like English and history, where students should be able to explore their own ideas” – often hate teaching the final year of school because of the pressure of assessment, and the necessity to tick boxes.

This is the point, he says, where each student also comes up against the reality that they must “play the game” and do the job of sitting their final exams and operating within the confines of what is expected of them so that they may get the highest score possible. While the two objectives are, in his mind, “irreconcilable”, he says they must – within current systems – coexist.

So you teach the students that once they reach fifth form there’s this job ahead of them that’s called the higher school certificate, and it needs to be done. The government has spent far more money on developing assessment methods than it has on putting the right content into curricula, so we’ll just play that game. There’s no alternative.

At the same time, we’ll do our best to give them an education. I’ve always seen these things as being in opposition, and I’m just starting to think that maybe I have to rethink that. But if you push the education barrow too far, then the pupils end up becoming contemptuous about the HSC. It’s a very difficult line to tread, because if you go around sneering at the Board of Studies all the time, then you’re not going to hurt anyone but yourself and your pupils.

The loudest cheer

Now after I’ve trashed the notion of applying sporting analogies to everything, I have a fitting sporting anecdote about the nature (or nurture) of competition.

I’ve been to more kids’ athletics carnivals in my time than I care to remember, but I’ll never forget this particular one because I heard the loudest, longest cheer and applause of any of them.

It’s the 100 metres race, and the boys are off. One of them, hampered by extreme physical disability, is coming last but giving it everything he’s got as he bumps up and down the track. People on the sidelines are cheering him on as the others race on, but then he stumbles and falls.

Two of the kids in the clutch of able-bodied kids jostling for the finish drop back and help him up, and walk him over the line, one on either side. It’s a long, long and laborious 50 metres. And glorious, too.

There’s not a dry eye in the house, and the cheering and clapping is deafening for this kid who has just overcome something monumentally difficult in order to cross the line … with the help of two of his schoolmates.

We cheer louder in an instance like this because the achievement is that much greater. And also, there is compassion, and cooperation, and a rejection of the need to win in favour of the need to help.

This unifies us, parents of race winners and losers alike, and for a moment we are all touched with deeper meaning about what it really means to be human.

Lucy Clark’s book Beautiful Failures is published by Ebury Press