I suspect that this blogpost is likely to be dismissed as the rantings of some Guardian-reading Lefty but hey ho!
It seems that a particular bete noire of mine from the Eighties has surfaced again - the idea that all school sport should be competitive 'because life is'. I think it's a nonsense promulgated by dullards who can only define themselves by their erstwhile ability to have represented their school or Borough/County at some team sport for a very short period of their lives.
In practice, for most adults, life is horrendously competitive, but sport is often the one area they can actually escape from formal competition. What on earth can sport teach you for the numerous competitions in life? Why schools should be teaching kids sports skills which have no further purpose beyond school?
Take football out of the equation for a moment. Football is unique among sports that it dominates the national discourse and dominates public spaces. It is beautiful because it only needs a strip of land and a ball to make it possible. Fancy kit and equipment are optional extras.
Life is competitive. We compete against other candidates in job interviews and for promotions. Even when not actively seeking promotion we generally want to do at least as well as our peers and often want to out-do them. Not particularly out of pure competition but to get a bigger bonus, more interesting assignments or to ready oneself for a promotion in the medium term - playing the long game.
We often find ourself competing against obstacles. In our paid jobs, or many life tasks such as Do It Yourself, planning a holiday, or fighting chronic ill-health to cope every day. Many of those obstacles come from within ourself, many more from the external environment. If we care enough, we fight to win, if not, we don't bother.
The biggest competition many of us face is in human relations - to win that man (or woman) and then to maintain that relationship, as well as competing for the attention and affections of myriad friends whilst fighting the jealousy when they appear to favour another (or is that just me?)
I have never played hockey since leaving school, and have only played netball and rounders a few times and not for years. I can't find any benefit from having learned those at school.
My chosen forms of exercise are swimming and cycling. For many other people, 'going to the gym' or other forms of 'keeping fit' where the objective is on 'keeping fit' rather than vanquishing another human being.
Even for those - runners in particular - who do compete, they spend a lot more time battling themselves and the elements to get themselves up to standard than they do 'competing'. I do not think that most people who enter Marathons do so in order to win - they do it to conquer the environment and their physical weakness (relatively speaking!).
Playing team sports does not prepare you for this, and for people with no emotional involvement, their motivation is zero and they soon learn it really doesn't matter. As opposed to that competition to get the job, to do the job properly, to get promotion, which always matters, at least up to a point!
I would think that schools and others charged with nurturing children need to equip them with the means to manage adult life. This includes skills such as hard work and determination; teamwork; when to co-operate and when to look after one's self-interest; working towards goals; conquering one's fears; overcoming weaknesses; and having the ingenuity to find alternative solutions and the wisdom to accept one's shortcomings.
Some of these can be taught to a certain extent by sports, be they competitive or not, in teams or solo. For the majority of adults - and children and teens - the greater challenge is to become and stay fit. If that is through country walks or dance classes, that is so much better than forcing lumpy adolescents to charge up and down a hockey field doing a passable imitation of Quasimodo. Someone who learns the art of hiking or gets into a swimming habit young is far more likely to maintain this into middle-and old-age than someone who is taught that physical activity is only worthwhile if you win.
Competitiveness is learnt through numerous activities. For many of us, it's sibling rivalry, competing for parental attention, which then transfers to the classroom and teacher. Some of us competed to out-do our friends in exam marks - this is deemed to be discriminatory against dullards and boys for exactly the same reasons that makes competitive team sports a torture for physical inadequates and girls. We compete in quizzes and board/card-games, these days kids do it with computer games.
Almost anything creative ends up competitive, be it prizes at the inter-school festivals, exams for dancing, drawing competitions. Bright and/or talented non-sporty kids don't need to be dragged down to competing in sports they care little about any more than sporty kids need to be bullied into painting a picture or writing a short story.
I took football out of the equation. I'm going to conclude with an observation about elite football. Following England's shambolic World Cup disaster, Alan Shearer was forthright in his views that there is too much competitive football at a young age. English boys do not learn the football skills that kids from many other nations do because of the obsessive focus on winning and competing.
It made me very sad to hear Alan Shearer, former England captain and one of the most important players of his generation, say this. He's about the same age as me, and when he and I were teenagers way back nearly thirty years, it was an ongoing theme in Match Weekly and Shoot, and on Football Focus. The kids play too many competitive matches, very few have the ball-skills and far too many are exhausting themselves when they should be growing to physical maturity.
Sadly, although is an old problem, it is not one that is being addressed. So it seems even our elite athletes, the footballers who are good enough to play for England, still the Seventh best team in the World, are deemed inadequate because they played too much competitive sport. Surely that must also apply for the part-timers in the depths of non-League and to the hundreds of thousands who play for their pub or works team, reinforcing the argument that schools really shouldn't be playing more competitive sport, but in fact less.
Schools should be on the one hand teaching the skills of the specific sports they favour, and on the other, teaching all pupils how to exercise for enjoyment and to be fit through their life, and to have the determination to push themselves beyond their comfort zones, physically and psychologically.
