O My America — Competition

by Lawrence Bush The problem with American education, says Veronique de Rugy, a columnist in REASON, a leading libertarian magazine (“Free Minds, Free Markets”), is “the lack of competition in the K-12 system.” Public education is a monopoly system, dominated by unaccountable teachers, she says. We need to build COMPETITION into the system and strike fear of the public into teachers’ bureaucratic little hearts. But to solve the problems my wife tells me about from her many teaching residencies in public schools, heightening the pressures of competition has no relevance. They’re already giving standardized tests to kindergarteners, for God’s sake! It’s creative collaboration, not competition, that’s really needed. Some of her kids, for instance, don’t have enough food; the only reliable meals they get are the subsidized or free breakfasts or lunches in school. In Hudson, New York, the teachers have implemented a backpack system in which they send kids home over the weekend with enough food to make it to the next school meal on Monday morning. Ninety thousand kids around the country are going home with these backpacks. Losers! For it’s COMPETITION that we need to be true to the American dream, Obama tells in his State of the Union. “We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” Maybe it’s my age — I’m toddling towards Social Security, hoping that it’ll exist a few years from now — but I’m sick of it. That constant drumbeat of competition, competition, excellence, Super Bowl, don’t let up for a second, strive and strive, reach for the stars, be the best, Karate Kid, winner winner winner, walk that red carpet – when the reality is that most Americans are simply plotzing into their chairs, wanting only to escape the pressures of competition by watching television for four or five hours a night. Man, the only competition I want to have any more is to see who hates competition the most. It was Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, who wrote in 1948 — three years after Nazi ideology raised “survival of the fittest” to new heights of horror — that “what differentiates man [sic] from the beast is that his nature makes not only for survival of the fittest, but aims to make the greatest possible number fit to survive.” Therefore, humanity is “exempt from the law of natural selection, and becomes subject to the law of spiritual selection.” Tell that to the Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Obama.