I confess to being relentlessly competitive, although these days, it is usually limited to a constant battle with myself: whether I can do wordle in fewer attempts than yesterday or the number of steps I take each day.
I suspect I’ve always been the same, although in some ways, I am a more mellow competitor now than when I was a rabid supporter of the All Blacks and Black Caps in my youth.
Competition is an integral part of being human and something we have drilled into us from a young age. It’s a dog-eat-dog world we’re told, and to survive you have to compete. That’s why schools grade and rank students through exams, sort them into bands based on test results and use their achievements to promote their schools.
“In the marketplace, winning can mean survival.”
It’s why schools offer scholarships to games players or musicians or academics, to help promote themselves against the achievements of their competitors. In the marketplace, winning can mean survival. After all, being competitive is a great creative force, a means of giving structure and purpose to life and a driver in moving onwards and upwards.
This is what drives the politicians who keep such a keen eye on the OECD’s PISA tables, which compare the academic performance not of schools, but entire countries. To be at the bottom, it seems, is to “fail to compete” in the “global race”.
And this obsession does makes sense – to a point. Sport, industry, even the creative arts thrive on competition, on awards, on trophies, on profits (albeit at a cost). And even in education, competition is all, the subtle driver of results and achievements.
It is evident everywhere in the school journey, from the very first entry test to setting and streaming, the 7+ and 11+, in GCSE and A-levels – all of which have such a bearing on outcomes.
Yet the way that we label and define children by their ability to pass exams and celebrate the winners is clearly wasteful and wrong. Many with those who “fail” are often more talented, better at creativity, communication and teamwork and hence more likely to get employment
If we want to instil an inner drive for children to be aspirational and ambitious, we should first establish whether the competition is fair, whether dividing children into winners and losers, by league tables or award ceremonies, is not only wasteful but discriminating against those who think and learn differently.
We should also then establish whether the competition is even worth competing in, or whether for many students, it is not serving any useful purpose other than promoting their school.
“The old trajectory with university as the Holy Grail is fast becoming redundant.”
It is estimated that computing power is doubling every 12 – 18 months and that the workplace is increasingly looking for students able to engage in project-based and collaborative work. By any criteria, our individualised system, based on a funnel curriculum, is failing us.
The trajectory of the old pathway with university as the Holy Grail is fast becoming redundant and the relevance of much of what we teach – and how we teach – is being questioned and quietly dismantled.
In the United States, 34 per cent of major US companies have dropped university degree requirements for senior level jobs and this is a trend likely to increase unless schools can change their curriculum to embrace the new technologies and find better ways of assessing students.
“Ranking students by one measure and assuming it tells us everything no longer works.”
This doesn’t mean outlawing competition or quelling the competitive spirit, but allowing children to develop without being tied to a redundant curriculum that is focused on funnelling students into an examination hourglass while squashing creativity, inventiveness and instinct.
Ranking students by one measure and assuming it tells us is what we need to know no longer works. The world is going in a different direction that relies on more collaboration and skills that have little to do with exam results that grade students on a flawed premise.
Until we find better ways of assessing holistic abilities, probably through AI, and recognise the importance of collaborative skills, divergent thinking, and project-based learning, not as add-ons, but at the heart of our learning, and produce a curriculum closer aligned to the needs of the marketplace, we will keep ignoring and wasting much of the talent British society so desperately needs.
To see the 2022 PISA test result launch click here at 10am UK time on Tuesday, December 5. The tests focused on maths and creative thinking.