Competing and Collaborating

The college admissions game is a very competitive one. But that's really just one symptom of the larger beast: school itself is a very competitive place. Those who have successfully made it through many of school's academic hurdles will be the first ones to say that such competitiveness doesn't end once one matriculates at the college of their dreams. The life of an academic is a constant competition - for grant money, for tenure, to get your paper or book out before anyone else does.

But why all the competition? Is learning a race that needs to be won? Perhaps it's a simple byproduct of the economic realities of higher education: lots and lots of people all want to be granted acceptance to a select few number of colleges. In other words, when it comes to college admissions, supply is low, and demand is high. Or perhaps it has something to do with personal recognition - trying to be the person whose name is selected for this medal or that prize. Or to put a more positive spin on the dilemma, perhaps a degree of competition will bring the best out in all competitors, push students to learn and achieve more than if they were simply given a teacher and a book and told to learn. Whatever the reason, all this competition has turned school (and applying to school) into something quite stressful for students.

Competition is inherent in most of the structures that school utilizes. The admissions process is an enormous competition, especially for top-tier schools (it has also spawned a college admissions industry, itself highly competitive). The types of assessments and grading methods that most schools try to use incite competition. Awards are given out, class rank is calculated, and GPAs are amassed, all to somehow enhance one's chances at future successes. The No Child Left Behind law was written primarily because of concerns of "21st century global competitiveness." And all of this, of course, is modeled in the post-school world, where the United States has been relying heavily on competition to encourage innovation and economic growth, and its citizens take open-market competition as a given in their individual lives.

Small amounts of healthy competition can be good, but competition taken to the level students experience today isn't. Learning isn't a race, and making it into one renders the runners fatigued, edgy, distrustful of their peers, and not always eager to practice. There must be some sort of alternative, one that involves collaborating with our peers and working towards a common end goal, one that involves some sort of shared experience.

This isn't a concept familiar to those of us who have ground (or are grinding our way) through the machinery of our current school system, but it is one for which we should advocate. Thinking globally, it may be the case that schools won't change until society (and what society values) changes, but we can do something. At Tutorpedia, it is our goal to instill a love of learning and a belief that the school experience is itself intrinsically valuable into every student we work with. We put a great deal of stock into the collaborative relationships we form with our students. And in the coming months, we are preparing to introduce a series of small-group workshops in which students will be encouraged to work with each other - not against each other - in order to make, do, and understand things that are themselves very much worth making, doing, or understanding. Experiences such as these in students' lives can be powerful reminders that what we do in school is bigger than what our college applications will say.