No Contest by Alfie Kohn Page A

7, I argued that cheating and other problems result at least as much from competition itself as from the moral failings of the individual. Several recent comments by people in different fields illustrate the naivete of condemning ugly behavior while taking no steps to challenge the basic win/lose framework.
    â€¢    In sports, a safety for the New York Giants points out that he and other football players are
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expected and required to be good sportsmen when we are engaged in an endeavor that is hostile and aggressive . . . to go from being gentlemanly and following the rules of society to people who play violently and aggressively for two or three hours on Sunday. . . . It’s not easy to do, especially when people across the line of scrimmage are literally the enemy. 14
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    â€¢    In politics, a campaign consultant shrugs off the widespread indignation at negative advertisements, observing that
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a political campaign, like a trial in a court of law, has but one objective—to win. Staying within the confines of the truth, a candidate or consultant will use every available legal means to attain that objective. If you don’t play by the rules of the game, your opposition will. 15
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    â€¢    In business, the director of an organization called the Ethics Resource Center says we are kidding ourselves if we think the corporate world is going to be changed by putting business students through ethics courses:
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As long as you have a business culture that puts people in impossible situations—“your division has to grow 7 percent in the next year or else we’re going to be No. a in the field and if we are, you’re going to be job-hunting”—you’re going to have people shipping inferior goods, juggling the books, bribing when they have to, trampling workers beneath them and generally conducting themselves in the time-honored tradition: Results, and only results, count. 16
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    â€¢    In education, seventy-three students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were disciplined for “cheating,” mostly for working in small groups to write computer programs together for fear of being unable to keep up with the class otherwise. “Many feel that the required work is clearly impossible to do by straightforward [i.e., solitary] means,” according to the faculty member who chairs MIT’s Committee on Discipline. 17
    Each of these examples invites us to shift our gaze from maladjusted individuals to a maladaptive system. The problem is that it is easy to suspend an athlete whose aggression slips over the edge of “acceptability,” to condemn the creators of nasty political ads, to jail greedy Wall Street lawbreakers, or to punish students who work collaboratively. It is not so easy to undertake social change of the sort that must follow an admission that something is wrong with competition per se.
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    The growing clamor to make hospitals, schools, industries, and now even government more “competitive” raises once again the question of whether this goal has anything to do with reaching excellence, or whether we have simply blurred the two ideas, overlooking what should be an obvious fact—that beating others and doing quality work are two completely different concepts. Whether the first
leads
to the second is a legitimate question, but the answer, contrary to conventional wisdom, is that it almost always does not. The trouble with our schools, for example, is that they are much
too
competitive, which helps to explain why so little learning is taking place. 18
    A similar dynamic is now at work in the field of health care, where many institutions are being pressured for the first time to become “competitive.” More hospitals and clinics are being run by for-profit corporations; many institutions, forced to battle for “customers,” seem to value a skilled director