Discursive of Tunbridge Wells
John McGowan
1576John McGowan considers the horrors of school sports day and suggests a surprisingly simple remedy.
‘Well done darling! You did brilliantly.’ As summer term draws to a close, parents get to enact the timeless rituals of sports day. Cheer, take photos of a sprinting child and celebrate success. The chance to shine in front of the whole school, and mums and dads too. A good thing, no? Rolling up to my own children’s sports day this year though, my eye was distracted by the other end of the proceedings: the kids labouring in while the winners were posing for pictures. I swear they were pretty much the same kids who brought up the rear last year. In fact, I know they were. What, I wondered, is the benefit of sports day for them?
Before I get bracketed as an anti-sport, anti-competition party pooper let me just clear up a couple of things. I like sport. I think PE has its place and should be compulsory and extensive. Also, after a football-dominated youth in Scotland, I’m in favour of PE being as varied and creative as possible. Swimming, athletics, lacrosse, tight-rope walking: bring them on and engage the widest range of children possible. I also like competition. Physical activity can go on without it, of course, but something is definitely lost. Plenty of kids like competitiveness too; trying to stop it is like asking the wind not to blow.
In attempting to unpack why the thought of the kids who regularly lose troubled me so much, I realised it was because they had been made to compete. No choice was offered, even though (very public) defeat felt inevitable. As well as being harsh, this is inconsistent with the way we manage other extra curricula activities. We don’t compel all kids to sing a public solo and we don’t make it even worse by turning that into an X-Factor style competition. Why then do all children (in my experience at least), have to annually run, jump and carry eggs in spoons in a community spectacle? Is there is value in compulsory humiliation?
A rapid straw poll of fellow parents suggested polarised views about sports days. Many I asked hated the whole thing. By way of explanation they usually added a rider about their own school sports scarring them for life or putting them off physical activity for decades. They clearly weren’t the people I needed to talk to. The more positive ones (including a teacher or two), spoke in terms of learning to win and lose and of turning defeat into a better result next time. It’s important that kids participate they said, otherwise they’ll lose interest. Wasn’t the battle of Waterloo won on the playing fields of Eton? OK, no-one mentioned Eton or Waterloo, but they were there in spirit.
While I’d dismiss the notion that public ignominy is character building right off the bat (to use a sporting idiom), I’m intrigued by the notion that defeat can spur you to better results and the idea that it might stimulate your interest in sporting competition. I began to wonder whether psychological theories might throw some light on the matter.
Behaviourism, and its founding father B. F. Skinner, have been out of vogue for few decades. However, what Skinner did supremely well, perhaps better than any human being before him, was to describe how rewards and punishments keep us doing some things and make us stop doing others. Here are three basic behavioural principles with some thoughts about how they apply to school sports days.
Positive Reinforcement
The formal way of referring to a reward in behavioural theory is as a ‘positive reinforcer’. That is, something that makes the behaviour you want to increase more likely. Sports days are a great example. Child wins race (or jumps highest or longest) or simply enjoys the activity or the spectacle. Any of these factors might be rewarding enough to make sure the child engages in sport again.
Negative Reinforcement
This is the type of reinforcement that has confused generations of psychology undergraduates. Stay with me though as once you understand it you’ll realise we apply it all the time. This occurs when a behaviour (for example a child taking out the rubbish) is followed by the removal of an aversive stimulus (such as nagging by exasperated parents). When people suggest losing at sports day is a motivator this, though they may not realise it, is what they mean. Being stung by loss into doing better worked for Lance Armstrong for instance, who hated losing so much that he was willing, as we now know, to go to extreme lengths to win. The more I think about it though, the less convinced I am. My own education was full of teachers who used this tactic, and I’m not aware that it ever motivated me to do anything. The wish to get rid of the feeling of humiliation at losing may be strong, but the obstacles to changing losing behaviour for an un-sporty kid may also be huge. It may work for some but I suspect that, for most, the bad feelings will invoke another key behavioural process, namely…
Punishment
Doing something that produces an unpleasant result means you don’t do it again. For applications see prison, torture, war and much of the rest of human history. In the case of sports day I worry that coming last over and over again essentially gives the message that sporting competition leads to feeling awful. The most likely outcome of this is to decrease participation in sport or competition or group activities or perhaps all three. If you’ve volunteered to be in a race there may still be the pain of losing but there may also be compensations (joy in the activity, feeling good about volunteering etc). It’s harder to see these at work when you haven’t volunteered. Those parents who declared themselves ‘scarred’ or ‘put off’ were describing the effects of punishment.
When you break it down, the notion that losing in a compulsory sporting event is beneficial is tenuous at best. The risk of this having the opposite effect from the one intended (i.e. participation and interest going down rather than up) seems quite high. So why do we go on putting kids in this position? The more I think about it, the more it puzzles me. Do teachers genuinely think it’s for the best?
When the children in my kids’ school put on a play not all of them want to go on stage. The ones who don’t want to perform do the props, lighting and all the other backstage jobs. It seems to work fine. In that spirit I’d like to propose a different kind of sports day: one with proper competition sure, but where children actually opt in to the events. And the children who don’t want to participate? Well, what if they simply don’t? They could be referees, or scorers or just part of the crowd. Would that be so terrible? Would we lose the spirit that built the Empire? Or would we instead offer a more caring and humane experience of school?
About the author
John McGowan is Academic Director at the Salomons Centre for Applied Psychology. You can follow him on Twitter @CCCUAppPsy.
Quite right. Am sure there were a couple of times I wasn't last. Some other child had the ignominy of losing to me! I'm in your 'scarred for life' category I think.
C'mon! School is about winning and losing and finding your place. We've had competitions since the dawn of time. Putting kids in cotton wool doesn't help.
I agree – as a kid who was sent to school at 4, and was thus often developmentally behind, I tended not to enjoy sports days. It didn't put me off sport, as I have always enjoyed outdoorsy sporty activities, but I think it did give me a sense of being physically somewhat inferior to my peers in the same year group. It was only later on when I caught up that I realised this wasn't necessarily the case! Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" and the study of relative year-positions of professional hockey players was quite reassuring to read! I was always quite impressed by the Japanese sports days I attended. One of the races, which all students take part in, is the random race. The kids are randomly assigned to a lane, and depending on this, they might have to walk on paint tins with strings, push a wheelbarrow or be given a bicycle. The patently unfair nature of the race seemed to serve as a leveller, as it gave a concrete demonstration that we might all start with different capabilities. That said, I doubt winning this race conferred as much social kudos as the 100m!https://www.flickr.com/photos/charlietyack/49561245/in/photolist-4WiFRd-4Wer7t-4WiGuo-4WeqAx-4WerKc-5o1PL-5o1QM-5o1QZ-5o1Qe-5o1QF-5o1Q6-5o1Qs-AejnQ
But we don't have public competitions at school for anything other than sport. So unless you're good at sport, your only experience of public competition won't be 'winning and losing', it'll just be losing. 'Finding your place' will be about consistently finding yourself at the back. In that sense, the only kids who get wrapped in cotton wool are the ones who can run fastest!
I've been thinking about these comments,and a few points made to me in conversations about this piece. I realised I have addressed quite a narrow point. The thing that's troubling me the continuation of school sports competitions that are A) compulsory and B) public (or semi-public in the sense of the whole school and parents looking on). I think there is a broader conversation to be had about PE which, I'm relieved to say seems to be a far more varied, creative edifying experience for my kids than it was for me. (That was basically, 'If you're not one of the cool kids you don't play football so off you go for a smoke behind the bike sheds'). I'm sure there are plenty of people who have written well about what we should be aiming for with school PE (elite athletes, wide engagement etc)and argued for greater time and resources. I also think there are the germs of something important in Geoff's comment about the importance of competition. I think there ARE valuable lessons in winning and losing. I think Betsy put it well though. For some kids it will just be losing. In something they haven't elected to do and in front of many people they know. Of course kids feel bad about all sorts of things. The key point is that I'm struggling to see the potential value in that particular bad feeling in terms of increasing participation or motivation.
Why are public academic competitions (examinations) OK, but not sporting competitions? Have you ever seen the poor kids at the back of the group on results day, those who are not interviewed by the idiot press?
At my children's Steiner School they timed their own time with a stop watch and each time tried to improve it. So it was about running against their own time, not someone else's. Some children will obviously always be faster, more co-ordinated or whatever. When they did their Olympics with (not against) other schools they mixed the school teams together and each had a teacher who observed all their qualities – speed, kindness, strength, generosity, athleticism, helpfulness and every child got a medal for something. Many people laugh at this, but this is the way for everyone to gain self esteem.
But children don’t get to opt out of English or maths. So sometimes those that shine there is a need to watch others shine in different fields. I think all children are cheered for competing and in a positive environment it is good to realise sometimes we have to get on with stuff even if it’s not our things and people will be proud of us for trying.
But neither do we make children enter public competitions in English and maths or singing or anything else. As I said PE is great with me. All kids should do it. I just am against compulsory public competition.
John, I couldn’t disagree with you more on 2 levels. Vicky has already the first point – the child who is bad at a subject has to publicly (in their class at least) endure the poor mark and red pen each week. They don’t get to opt out. If this same child has the chance to shine once a year, but half the class has opted out, that’s a worthless exercise and they have been cheated.
Secondly, having enjoyed 3 sports days this year already, there have been varying degrees of results. But the spirit in which the best were applauded and the last willed over the line were all met with whoops, cheers and positive reinforcement that taking part and competing was a healthy part of growing up. Acknowledging those were better than you and supporting those that weren’t is just another of life’s lessons – learnt in the “public” environment called school.
All for kids having the chance to shine and to explore all fronts Bean. Also great to hear children being cheered. I do however think it’s easy to underestimate the negative effect of trailing in last repeatedly in a public setting. The parents I talked to for the article still felt the emotion of this 30+ years on. One of my worries is that we undo the good effects of creative PE teaching. I’ve been thinking about this idea that people will be ‘cheated’ by not having everyone participating. Really? Making participation voluntary would genuinely devalue the endeavour? This does not seem to be a principle we apply to any other school activity.
Interesting discussion. Just want to throw in a perspective from the inclusive sport movement. There has been a shift in the movement from a focus on inclusion of diversity, prompted from the disability sporting community, to a focus on inclusion in sport. This is an important distinction because it recognises that that all those who are interested and enthusiastic about sport are not necessarily good at it. So many sports organisations which are dependent upon volunteers are recognising that they need to capture this inclusivity to be sustainable. I’m all for John’s perspective. Many people have forged a very successful career in sport with not personal sporting prowess and sport needs them.