Commenting on my previous post, Mel points out something rather critical:

I was grinning when I read “Those other students are the competition.” Are we, really? How does it change things if you say instead “those other students are our future partners, and we’ve got to step up our game in order to be able to really tag-team with them”? Perhaps this is my conflict-aversion tendencies cropping up, but I’ve been far more motivated to do awesome things by “I want to be worthy to hang out with people I think are super-cool” than “I will beat X or he/she will beat me.”

I think Mel is exactly right. The traditional view is to say “There is limited resource, and better I have it than my competitors.” A collaborative world-view dictates that I instead say “Value is increased if I am the equal of my collaborators.” At the root of both is the notion of bettering oneself; in the case of the latter, it reinforces the fact that bettering yourself is not a zero-sum game.

And, a digression…

Put simply, a “zero-sum” game is one where every point I score means a loss for my opponent. Recently, I heard David Brin talk about this kind of world-view in terms of a simple question:

You may have one wish, and it will be visited double upon your worst enemy.

Someone who believes in positive-sum games (where things that benefit me benefit everyone, and visa-versa) would wish for whatever they want, knowing their enemy will receive twice as much. “I wish for enlightenment” is an example of a positivist wish that does no harm to either party. A zero-sum wish is harder to formulate—one that benefits me but benefits my enemy might be “I wish we had twins.” While I would have twins, my enemy would have quadruplets—a clear strain on their resources without explicitly being a bad thing. If I wanted to make a negative-sum wish, I might say “I wish I only had one eye.” Clearly, when visited double on your enemy, this wish is truly dire.

So, as Mel points out, putting educational outcomes in competitive, or zero-sum terms, is perhaps the wrong message to be broadcasting to our students. In fact, it is almost certainly the wrong message. Our students should be learning that they can learn from each-other, and that their apparent competition are actually/also future colleagues. Therefore, their excellence does improve their chances of getting a job/getting into grad school/etc., but bettering themselves also means that they are better positioned to collaborate with awesome people Out There that they haven’t met yet.

I may update the PDF to reflect this thinking, but I’ll do it as a footnote or appendix; I want the original text to stand to make clear how deeply engrained this kind of zero-sum thinking permeates our views regarding education. Put simply, we live in a country dominated by zero-sum education when it should be positive-sum education.