Education

Education
Negative
By: Landon Frame

When Elliot Aronson tried out a model of cooperation learning in elementary schools, her found that participating students “developed greater self-esteem than children in traditional classrooms”. Another sociologist Ruth Rubinstien, used a written measure of self-esteem with children between the ages of ten and fourteen who attended either a competitive or non-competitive summer camp. Self-esteem did not change significantly in the former camp and increased in the later. The father of modern research on competition in social psychology, Morton Deutsch, of Columbia University has found that self-esteem is “more negative under the competitive as compared to the cooperative grading system” Anatole France once said “Nine tenths of education is encouragement.” As we saw from the previous quote Cooperation promotes encouragement more then competition does. When a child is torn down they are less motivated to excel. When you push someone to do something they will try harder but in competitive education a person will be pushed to far. In competition there is always a winner and a loser. In most cases the same person will win all the time and the same person will lose all the time. In a competitive school system imagine how the losing child (who is expected to win) feels. They are disappointed and let down.

Also in a competitive education system the winning children won’t be as willing to help the losing children. In the cooperative education system self-esteems are built up and the losing children will be helped by the winning children. My Mom is a teacher and in her experience she how found the self-esteem and cooperation plays major roles in education. She has see times when the high grade kids have tried to help the low grade kids. When this happens she saw the grades of the lower grade kids increased dramatically along with their self-esteem.

Studies have found that in a competitive education systems the kids that don’t learn t compete right become “bullies” who will do anything to gain “power”. A teacher known only as Pam said about cooperative learning: “It works! The kids are receptive because I’m helping them get what they want.” Like many school teachers Pam skillfully created a cooperative and caring education community. The students feel a sense of connection and belonging in such an environment. Her student’s grades improved and they behaved better. She said “It is much easier to deal with these kids when they are using a cooperative behavior instead of a competitive behavior.” Her reduction as we can see lead to increased grades and good behavior. This is just another example of how cooperation leads to excellence more so then competition.