A PARABLE: An elementary school initiated a new way of evaluating student progress after observing that the individual students’ grades were being compared, that students with low grades were being taunted, and parents were pressing for medal awards to students with the highest marks. Teachers were beginning to recognize that a negative atmosphere was permeating the school after testing times as a consequence.
The plan
they came up with was to put the focus on group—rather than
individual—achievement. They switched to numbered scores on tests, then added
all the scores and gave the school a total score made up of all the
student’s numbers. What was hyped via a huge banner in the hallway after testing
times was this total score and whether and by how much it exceeded the earlier
testing-time’s score. Every student’s grades contributed to a win for the
student body.
It
didn’t work. Grade fours figured out very soon who contributed how much and the
staff realized quickly that the achievers wanted desperately to be recognized
as winners, expected their moment of glory. Despite knowing what penalty the achievement-handicapped
students had to bear so that the achievers and their parents could win gold,
the staff sought other ways to reduce the zero-sum mindset these children were
bringing to school with them. (Zero-sum simply means that every win must be accompanied
by a loss. For instance in hockey, a win is recorded as a +1, a loss as a -1,
the two added together equal zero.)
The winner-loser mentality is endemic to most
cultures, possibly at its most pronounced in Western societies. Not only sports
but politics, economics, justice systems, even education are deeply affected by
the win/lose mentality. Political parties shamelessly campaign to win; success
in commerce is measured by profit/loss numbers with little said about a
business’ community contribution. You’d think restorative justice would be embraced
as a common-sense approach, but no, courts must produce winners and losers.
A final
exam in my Teachers’ College year had only two questions. I aced the one but
couldn’t for the life of me get the other one, which asked me to do a basic Arithmetic
operation like 2,855/75 in the decimal (base 10 numeration system) and in the
binary (base 2 numeration) number systems. My mark, of course, was 50%. I’m
pretty sure that the binary system (which, by the way, is the numeration system
of computing) was never taught to me because my elementary and high school math
teachers also got 50% on basic numeration, probably, and they couldn’t do that puzzling
problem because their teachers in turn hadn’t fundamentally got it. Whether
it’s numeration, or zero-sum thinking or the pros and cons of the parliamentary
system of democracy, we pass our knowledge, our ignorance, and our
misconceptions and biases down, generation to generation.
I
visualize here the proverbial “hockey-mom,” screaming at the coach to put her
boy on the ice, screaming at the referee for putting him in the penalty box,
screaming at her son later for taking a stupid penalty that cost them the game.
Character building sport? Granted, this description is stark and unfairly misrepresentative
of much of the hockey world, but like the teachers trying to help large classes
of differently endowed students to become the best they can be, zero-sum
thinking starting in the cradle isn’t helpful … not by a long shot.
There’s an argument of support for winning/losing in sports, in politics, even in musicianship. Zero-sum competition encourages us to become the best we can be, it says. We need to talk about that: moms and dads don’t become the best parents a child could have by competing with the neighbours; teachers don’t become the best teachers through popularity contests. Furthermore, what application follows from being the one in the whole world who can throw a discuss farthest? And let’s be honest; it’s not about fitness either, which can be had without cutthroat competition.
What it is about is the repeated gratification of our “zero-sum
addiction.” We satisfy our lust for
zero-sum stimulation by watching winners humiliate losers in sports, mainly,
but also in music competitions, elections, wealth accumulation, etc. “Take that,
you deadbeats!” Movies that feature good guys annihilating bad guys are way
more popular than those which climax with a reconciliation.
There
are those whose primary leisure occupation is watching sports on a big screen
TV. Better that then drinking to excess in a bar that features the humiliation
of women by paying them to remove their clothing, I suppose, but we ought to
remember at least these two things:
·
Professional sports, the corporation-driven fleecing
of fans hooked on zero-sum spectacles, is not sport, it’s commerce. A
professional hockey player I won’t name earned almost exactly as much as I did
in my entire 25-year career as a teacher … in one month! And when he was
offered more, he moved to a rival team and left his fans crying.
·
Every Saturday night, a father of elementary
school-aged boys gathers with some work friends on the rec room couch to watch Hockey
Night in Canada, drink beer and eat pizza. Depending on the nature of their
actions and conversation, the boys will absorb their dad’s attitude toward
televised “sports.” Perhaps they will come to believe that zero-sum competition
is where it’s at, bring it to school, and perhaps they’ll feel luckiest as
adults when whole weekends are made up of beer, pizza and wall to wall hockey,
curling, basketball and football … watching, that is, not playing.
THIS MATTERS: The future we’re
facing demands that we continue educating ourselves from reliable sources; it
takes time and effort to be a lifelong learner. We also need to be participants;
doers more than watchers. We’ve got to put more effort into reducing our
demands on the environment, curb our appetites for owning the best, the most,
the “funnest” gadget on the market. We won’t save the planet for our
grandchildren by frittering away our time with beer, pizza and the zero-sum crap
all around us. Above all, we’ve got to stop making excuses for our indifference
to events “out there.” For future generations, the historic imagery of baby
boomers shuffling around the house in pyjamas because “we were just so busy,
busy and so we were so tired, exhausted even.”
We’re not
tired, our aimlessness and the world we’ve allowed to develop in our indolence
has left us guilty, stressed, anxious and feeling tired, and we’re apparently
not smart enough to know that more indolence is not the cure for what ails us.
Our
grandchildren will p*ss on our graves when the full force of our self-indulgent
lethargy becomes apparent, when their world burns, then floods, then refuses to
produce food, and half the planet’s surviving people are refugees. The history
books they study will tell them that even when it came to rescuing and restoring
the planet, our generation saw the dialogue as yet another zero-sum
game. Why not? Perhaps the fossil fuel people won and went jubilantly into their
dotage with their pockets full of money. Those environmentalists are such
losers! +1 + -1 = 0
“Ah,
well. Forget all that. The Olympics are on. Canada’s probably gonna win a gold
medal in the pool today.”
“What??
Canada swims??”
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