Competition is Good

Alfie Kohn is wrong and the "Case Against Competition" is weak

Happy New Year! This is essay #1 on (at least) a four part series on competition.

I have never been against competition, but in the past year I have become more and more convinced that competition is a super power for learning and development.

At its best, competition provides three crucial things:

1. MOTIVATION — a concrete reason to learn specific skills

2. CURATION — clarity on which skills are worth learning

3. FEEDBACK — real signals about what learning strategies are working and which are not

These are not minor benefits. They address three of the hardest problems in education.

What it Takes to Become Excellent

In order to achieve great things in life you generally need at least three things:

TALENT

Some people are naturally better at certain activities than others. This is most obvious in sports: if Michael Phelps had decided to become a jockey instead of a swimmer, no amount of work ethic would have made him world-class. Talent acts as a multiplier on skill development.

GRIT

Deliberate practice is hard and usually not fun. Whether you call it “grit” or just “conscientiousness”, being about to put many hours into improvement over extended periods of time matters a lot. Angela Lee Duckworth, author of Grit, argues grit “counts twice”.

Talent × Hours = Skill

Skill × Hours = Achievement

TASTE

What you choose to become good at matters more than being good in the abstract. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were not just talented—they picked the right problems at the right time.

How Competition Helps with The Three Paths to Excellence

Competition directly addresses these challenges:

• It creates motivation, making sustained grit and effort more likely

• It provides focus, clarifying and curating what skills actually matter within a domain

• It reveals feedback, helping learners discover whether they have aptitude and talent

When I was in college, I briefly majored in both drama and physics. In drama, nearly every student believed they were excellent. In physics, everyone knew exactly where they stood. Competition makes more activities resemble physics and fewer resemble drama.

Why this is Controversial

People have strong opinions about competition. I have found opinions about competition usually fall into three buckets:

1. Competition is great

2. Competition is terrible

3. Competition is good for some kids but bad for others

This essay falls clearly into bucket #1 and it will address and responds #2. The next essay will provide my arguments against the third bucket.

For now, I want to tackle head-on the strongest critic of competition in education: Alfie Kohn.

Strongmanning Alfie Kohn

Alfie Kohn has written 14 books on education and parenting, including:

• No Contest: The Case against Competition

• Punished by Rewards

• The Homework Myth

• The Case Against Standardized Testing

Time Magazine once called him “the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades [and] test scores.” I have not read all of Khon’s books, nor his hundreds of articles, but I asked ChatGPT to give me to summarize his best arguments in the strongest way possible:

Kohn’s Core Claims

1. Competition creates artificial scarcity

   Success is relative; for someone to win, someone else must lose. This trains children to see peers as obstacles.

2. Competition undermines intrinsic motivation

   Kids focus on winning rather than learning, crowding out curiosity and mastery.

3. Competition promotes shallow learning

   Learners optimize for speed, memorization, and tricks rather than deep understanding.

4. Competition harms self-concept

   Losers internalize failure; winners experience pressure to maintain status.

5. Competition damages moral development

   It encourages zero-sum thinking, status anxiety, and rule-bending

[End of AI]

Some direct quotes by Kohn (all bolding mine)

• “…trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things.”

• “Competition… means requiring one person or group to fail in order that another can succeed [and] is inherently counterproductive.”

• “We teach [children] to confuse excellence with winning, as if the only way to do something well is to outdo others.”

• “What rewards and punishments do is induce compliance… if your objective is to get long-term quality … rewards … are absolutely useless.”

If I were building Kohn’s argument I think I would frame it this way:

1. Winning a competition and being excellent are two entirely different things, so using competition to help obtain excellence is confusing the metric with the goal. It also leads to “shallow learning” or “learning for the test” rather than real understanding

2. Competition teaches children the wrong lessons:

   1. We teach children to confuse excellence with winning

   2. Many people think that competition (and grades) helps with motivation, but it actually just helps with compliance. Once the competition goes away the motivation collapses and you are worse off than where you started

   3. Competition pushes kids to “win at all costs” and leads them to become less moral humans

3. Some might argue that the problem is how the competition (metric) is designed, but they are wrong. It is the structure of competition itself that is the problem, and no amount of modification is going to solve that problem

4. Competition should be thought of broadly even if we don’t call it a “competition” — even giving kids grades is sets them up to compete with each other, and has all the downsides of competition structure

If all that were true, I would be against competition as well!

Where I Agree with Kohn

Kohn DOES have some good points:

1. Goodhart's Law is a real thing: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" is true in business, in government, in education — and in competitions

2. Poorly designed incentives can hurt motivation and are ineffective at achieving results

3. Constant winners stop learning

4. Constant losers stop trying

Where I Disagree with Kohn

1. Metrics are necessary

Bad metrics are dangerous—but no metrics at all are worse. Capitalism and democracy are terrible systems…except for all the others. No one runs a sales organization without goals or benchmarks, however flawed. And if you try to learn without any objective feedback you run into a world of platitudes and Pollyanna Syndrome, where no one is doing anything wrong, so there is no need to work on improvement.

2. Incentives can work

Compliance is an ugly word, but research has shown that well designed incentives DO work (I wrote about Roland Fryer’s work in my Alpha School review essay). Andres Ericsson claims that those who achieve excellence all pass through three stages, and the first two require external motivation.

3. Losing is Necessary

Failure is not merely tolerable, it is REQUIRED for progress. Avoiding loss means avoiding learning (my very personal essay on that here)

What Good Competition Looks Like

My claim is not that all competition is good. Good competition has structure:

1. Measurable and Feedback-Ready

In college, my history grades and physics grades were similar. But I knew that if I re-took my physics exams I would have much better grades; If I re-wrote my history papers my scores would be indistinquishable. Grades or scores need to tell you what you did wrong, so you can focus on learning how to do it better.

The problem is that many people do not WANT to know what they are doing wrong. For decades our society has been pushing back on legibility in the name of “equity”. If we can;t measure things very well, then we can’t know who is better at them. But we also can’t learn what it will take to get better.

Standardized tests predict first year college GPA four-times better than high school GPA. They are also among the least game-able admission tools: Essays correlate with family income twice as strongly as SAT scores. And yet many schools have eliminated the (quantitative) SAT, and very few have eliminated the (qualitative) essay.

That doesn’t mean there is not a place for qualitative measurement, just that we should attempt to be as quantitative as possible with our qualitative measurements. Everest just finished a gymnastics competition. There were clear differences in ability among the competitors, but those differences had to be measured by a team of judges on a standardized rubric. The gymnastics organization knows that standardized, objective judging is extremely important to the integrity of the sport. Players, generally, feel confident that their scores reflex their performance. And coaches know that what they need to do with their students in order to score as high as possible in competition.

2. Tiered

Everest competes in “Level 2" Gymnastics” in the Junior Olympic Program. Other kids her age competes in levels as high as (or higher) than “Level 6”. I watched the Level Six’s compete on the other side of the gym this past weekend. While the the best Level 2’s were doing back bends on the floor, handstands on the beam, single spins on the lower parallel bar, and a flip onto their back on the vault, the Level Six Competitors were jumping and spinning and flipping in ways that were, to my uneducated eye, indistinguishable to what I see in the Olympics (and Level Six is not the top tier — Level Ten was competing in the afternoon).

Within each tier competitors were given awards based on their age. And this was just a regional competition.

The result was that Everest did great — she came in second overall — second out of girls her age competing at her level. If she had been competing against 16-year olds, or against “Level Sixes”, or even against the best Level Twos in the country, she would have been crushed.

Why Tiering Solves So Many Problems

I once asked David Yeager, author of “10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People”, what to do about helping kids who lose repeatedly. Surely those kids are not going to be motivated by competition.

His answer: All kids should be losing half the time.

He argued that the U.S. youth soccer system fails because it concentrates top talent too early. Players dominate weaker opponents instead of losing against evenly matched teams and internalizing corrective feedback. Tiered systems ensure challenge, growth, and resilience for the best players. But tiered systems also mean the weakest players win half the time as well. They know they aren’t competing to be world champions, but when has that ever stopped anyone from enjoying playing a game? As long as one has a shot of winning a specific event, the event can be engaging and fun — even if you lose. It is being blown out of the water than is demotivating.

Why Competition Matters

1. Without some type competition learning collapses into self-delusion. It is very difficult to get real feedback on whether you are actually getting better unless you are up against some type of standardized, external benchmark. That does not need to be a competition, but competition - either direct or indirect is the most obvious way to get that.

2. Motivation almost always requires external structure. Real learning is very difficult. Being at all efficient with learning means keeping up motivation up over extended periods of time. For almost everyone that requires some sort of external incentive. If its not competition, then it will be something else like financial rewards, non-financial rewards, promise of future financial rewards, parental approval, parental punishment, peer approval, societal expectations, status battles— or any number of things. Competition is a very easy tool to use to provide the motivation

3. Shared standards clarify what excellence actually means. If someone becomes the best in the world at casting a baseball into a basketball hoop with a fishing rod, that is interesting — but it is not the same as being the best basketball player or baseball player or even fly fisher. Competition provides shared standards on what matters. If the standards are wrong, that can be bad (participants attempting to master skills that don’t matter), but it is more likely a well designed competition figured out what the meaningful things are to learn than someone who is unskilled in the subject trying to figure out on their own

What’s Next

The next essay will tackle the harder objection: “Competition is good for some kids, but bad for others”

After that, I’ll argue why academic competitions matter more than sports competitions (and that America has dropped the ball on this).

Finally I will dig into which academic competitions I think matter most.

Until then, keep learning,

Edward (and Everest)