no win situations
No-Win Situations1
Alfie Kohn
1.I learned my first game at a birthday party. You remember it: X players scramble for X-minus-one chairs each time the music stops. In every round, a child is eliminated until, at the end, only one is left triumphantly seated while everyone else is standing on the sidelines, excluded from play, unhappy…losers.
2.This is how we learn to have a good time in America.
Competition
3.Several years ago, I wrote a book called No Contest, which, based on the findings of several hundred studies, argued that competition undermines self-esteem, poisons relationships, and holds us back from doing our best. I was mostly interested in the win/lose arrangement that defines our work-places and classrooms, but I found myself nagged by the following question: If competition is so destructive and counterproductive during the week, why do we take for granted that it suddenly becomes benign and even desirable on the weekend? (Opposing view) 4.This is a particularly unsettling line of inquiry for athletes or parents. Most of us, after all, assume that competitive sports teach all sorts of useful lessons and, indeed, that games, by definition, must produce a winner and loser. But I have come to believe that recreation at its best does not require people to to try to triumph over others. Quite to the contrary.(main claim) 5.Terry Orlick, a sports psychologist at the University of Ottawa, took a look at musical chairs and proposed that we keep the basic format of removing chairs but change the goal; the point becomes to fit everyone on a diminishing number of seats. (At the end, a group of giggling children tries to figure out how to squish onto a single chair. Everybody plays to the end; everybody has a good time.)Explaining result of evidence; what follows from changing the goal; interpretation 6.Orlick and others have devised or collected hundreds of such games for children and adults alike. The underlying theory is simple: All games involve achieving a
Alfie Kohn
1.I learned my first game at a birthday party. You remember it: X players scramble for X-minus-one chairs each time the music stops. In every round, a child is eliminated until, at the end, only one is left triumphantly seated while everyone else is standing on the sidelines, excluded from play, unhappy…losers.
2.This is how we learn to have a good time in America.
Competition
3.Several years ago, I wrote a book called No Contest, which, based on the findings of several hundred studies, argued that competition undermines self-esteem, poisons relationships, and holds us back from doing our best. I was mostly interested in the win/lose arrangement that defines our work-places and classrooms, but I found myself nagged by the following question: If competition is so destructive and counterproductive during the week, why do we take for granted that it suddenly becomes benign and even desirable on the weekend? (Opposing view) 4.This is a particularly unsettling line of inquiry for athletes or parents. Most of us, after all, assume that competitive sports teach all sorts of useful lessons and, indeed, that games, by definition, must produce a winner and loser. But I have come to believe that recreation at its best does not require people to to try to triumph over others. Quite to the contrary.(main claim) 5.Terry Orlick, a sports psychologist at the University of Ottawa, took a look at musical chairs and proposed that we keep the basic format of removing chairs but change the goal; the point becomes to fit everyone on a diminishing number of seats. (At the end, a group of giggling children tries to figure out how to squish onto a single chair. Everybody plays to the end; everybody has a good time.)Explaining result of evidence; what follows from changing the goal; interpretation 6.Orlick and others have devised or collected hundreds of such games for children and adults alike. The underlying theory is simple: All games involve achieving a