No Contest: The Case Against CompetitionCompetition may be as American as apple pie, but social scientist Alfie Kohn argues that our struggle to defeat one another--at work, at school, at play, and at home--turns all of us into losers. Contrary to the myths with which we have been raised, Kohn shows that competition is not an inevitable part of human nature. It does not motivate us to do our best. Rather than building character, competition sabotages self-esteem and ruins relationships. Kohn argues that we need to restructure our institutions so that one person's success does not depend on another's failure. For this revised edition, he adds a detailed account of how students can learn more effectively by working cooperatively in the classroom instead of struggling to be Number One.--From publisher description. |
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No contest: the case against competition
Avis d'utilisateur - Not Available - Book VerdictKohn, a journalist whose work has appeared in such publications as The Nation and Psychology Today , has written a timely summary of research and commentary by others on the psychology of ... Consulter l'avis complet
Table des matières
| 1 | |
| 11 | |
| 45 | |
| 79 | |
six | 132 |
SEVEN | 158 |
EIGHT | 168 |
NINE | 182 |
The Effects of Cooperative Learning | 202 |
AFTERWORD | 233 |
Notes | 247 |
References | 289 |
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Expressions et termes fréquents
achievement activity aggressive Alfie Kohn American anxiety argue assumption athletes beat become behavior better chapter Child Development Project classroom compete competitive games competitors contest Cooperation and Competition cooperative games Cooperative Learning culture Deutsch economic effect Elliot Aronson evidence example experience extrinsic motivators fact failure feel Garrett Hardin goal hostility human nature Ibid idea individual intentional competition interaction intergroup competition interpersonal interpersonal attraction intrinsic Johnson and Johnson Karen Horney less losers losing matter means ment Michael Novak Morton Deutsch noncompetitive one's oneself orientation Orlick participants performance person perspective petition play players problem productive promote psychological Psychology question relationship result rewards Roger Johnson self-esteem sense simply situation skills social society someone strategy structural competition task teachers tend thing tion tive trying Tutko values victory winners women
Fréquemment cités
Page 11 - Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences.
Page 26 - 12/16" to the lowest terms, and could only get as far as "6/8." The teacher asked him quietly if that was as far as he could reduce it. She suggested he "think." Much heaving up and down and waving of hands by the other children, all frantic to correct him. Boris pretty unhappy, probably mentally paralyzed. The teacher, quiet, patient, ignores the others and concentrates with look and voice on Boris. She says, "Is there a bigger number than two you can divide into the two parts of the fraction?
Page 61 - We destroy the disinterested (I do not mean wninterested) love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards — gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A'a on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean's lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys — in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.
Page 39 - The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.
Page 81 - Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside "ordinary" life as being "not serious", but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings...
Page 155 - Yugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators. I do not, of course, suggest that sport is one of the main causes of international rivalry; big-scale sport is itself, I think, merely another effect of the causes that have produced nationalism. Still, you do make things worse by sending forth a team of eleven men, labelled as national champions, to do battle against some rival team, and allowing it to be felt on all sides that whichever nation is defeated will "lose...
Page 26 - Well, who can tell Boris what the number is?" A forest of hands appears, and the teacher calls Peggy. Peggy says that four may be divided into the numerator and the denominator.
Page 21 - Struggle is sometimes involved, but it usually is not, and when it is, it may even work against rather than toward natural selection. Advantage in ... reproduction is usually a peaceful process in which the concept of struggle is really irrelevant. It more often involves such things as better integration into the ecological situation...
Informations bibliographiques
| Titre | No Contest: The Case Against Competition |
| Auteur | Alfie Kohn |
| Édition | illustrée, révisée |
| Éditeur | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1992 |
| ISBN | 0395631254, 9780395631256 |
| Longueur | 324 pages |
| Exporter la citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |