Everyone's a winner, baby!

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0206/S00007.htm

So, they're banning dodgeball in the States, because some kids are better at it than others....

Does it strike anyone else that with the attitude that "everyone's a winner", that it makes it difficult to recognise and celebrate individual differences? I mean - surely excellence should be rewarded? It seems to me that children are being encouraged to aim at conformity and mediocrity...
what do you think?

Interesting article. It was obviously one-sided and was surely written by someone who was never the unathletic kid in a dodgeball game.
I see their point, but you could just as easily argue that the kids who don't have the athletic ability to get their own back in dodgeball could find another avenue to vent this, such as getting a gun and shooting their classmates and teachers.

Incidently, we were never allowed to play contact sports or anything like dodgeball at school, and looking at that I would have to say that if they need dodgeball to stop their kids getting into violence then they've got a lot more worries than the P.E. curriculum.

Ps: I think the whole "everyone's a winner" attitude is arse, you gotta encourage kids to do their best and strive to beat other people, anything else is unnatural and can only lead to disaster.
"We want a hand up, not a hand-out"

I read a study quite a while ago that was announcing the problems of the 'everyone's a winner' attitude taken in American schools. It pointed out that most kids think they're far better at almost everything than they actually are, and also that the heightened self-esteem that was the intended purpose had gone too far and had resulted in incredible arrogance, largely unfounded, from really young kids.

No doubt, screw the everyone is a winner, gotta teach them that to be the best is the only the ans, but at the same time they must have good sportsmanship, no sore loosers..

The whole point about the winner mentality is that it can be self-defeating. If you have 30 kids and only 1 winner people will give up once they know they can't win. What you want is good competition where people are striving to do their best, and all can have success at it. Also working as a team to do better (by that I mean promoting the working together aspect of it, not 1 or 2 doinf it themselves). There is a middle ground here and people seem to be wanting one extreme cause they don't like the other. Something in the middle is much better.

There can be only 1 winner in each facet of school life, that doesn't mean that everyone else has to give up on everything.
Having said that, there probably is a need to do something about the people who do feel there's nothing they can do, as seen in the youth suicide rate.

The point I am making is that we should be trying to have positive rather than negative competition. Sure there may be only 1 "winner" but that doesn't mean that others don't get reward from not winning. Focusing on things like improvement is really important, because anyone can improve, even if they have no chance of winning. The problem with youth suicide I don't see as being so much about winning as being included. Having said that some kids who are really popular can commit suicide. Certainly there is no single reason for it.