I shook my head.
"No competition! I won't have it. It makes the chap at the top of the class a prig, and gives the poor chap at the bottom an inferiority complex. No, we want to encourage not competition but co-operation. Competition leads naturally to another world war, as competition between British and American capital is doing now."
Then Duncan floored me.
"And would you discourage football because it introduces the idea of competition?" he asked.
"Of course not," I replied
"Then why discourage it in arithmetic?" he asked.
It was an arresting question, and I had to grope for an answer that would convince not only Duncan but myself. That every healthy boy likes to try his strength against his fellows is a fact that we cannot ignore. Mr. Arthur Balfour's desire to beat his golfing partner and Jock Broon's desire to spit farther than Jake Tosh are fundamentally the same desire, the desire for self-assertion. And I see that the man who comes in last in the quarter-mile race is in the same position of inferiority as the boy who is always at the bottom of the class. Yet I condemn competition in school-work while I appreciate competition in games. Why?
I think I should leave it to the children. Obviously they like to compete in games and races, but they have no natural desire to compete in lessons. It appears that some things naturally lend themselves to competition—racing, boxing, billiards, jumping, football and so on. Other things do not encourage competition. Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton do not compete in the output of books; Freud and Jung do not struggle to publish the record number of analysis cases; George Robey and Little Tich do not appear together on the stage of the Palladium and try to prove which is the funnier. Rivalry there always is, but it remains only rivalry until The Daily Mail offers a prize for the biggest cabbage or sweet-pea, and then competition seizes suburbia.
I should therefore leave the children to discover for themselves what interests lend themselves to competition, and what interests do not. I know beforehand that of their own accord they will not introduce it into school subjects. This is in accord with my views on the authority question. I insist that the teacher will impose nothing; that his task is to watch the children find their own solution.
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