Wringing Success from Somebody's Failure

"Normal" competition. It maybe common place in our society but is it healthy?


R.D. Laing

...In a society where competition for the basic cultural goods is a pivot of action, people cannot be taught to love one another. It thus becomes necessary for the school to teach children how to hate and without appearing to do so, for our culture cannot tolerate the idea that babes should hate each other. How does the school accomplish this ambiguity?

(p. 26-27, J. Henry. "American Schoolrooms: Learning the Nightmare." Columbia University Forum).

Here is another example given by Henry.

"Boris had trouble reducing 12/16 to the lowest terms, and could only get as far as 6/8. The teacher asked him quietly if that was as far as he could reduce it. She suggested he think. Much heaving up and down and waving of hands by the other children, all frantic to correct him. Boris pretty unhappy, probably mentally paralyzed. The teacher quiet, patient, ignores the others and concentrates with look and voice on Boris. After a minute or two she turns to the class and says, "well, who can tell Boris what the number is?" A forest of hands appear and the teacher calls Peggy. Peggy says that four may be divided into the numerator and the denominator."

Henry comments:
"Boris's failure has made it possible for Peggy to succeed; his misery is the occasion for her rejoicing. This is a standard condition of the contemporary American elementary school. To a Zuni, Hopi, or a Dakota Indian, Peggy's performance would seem cruel beyond belief, for competition, the wringing of success from somebody's failure, is a form of torture foreign to those non-competitive cultures."

"Looking at it from Boris's point of view, the nightmare at the blackboard was, perhaps, a lesson in controlling himself so that he would not fly off shrieking from the room under enormous public pressure. Such experiences force every man in our culture, over and over again, night in, night out, even at the pinnacle of success, to dream not of success, but of failure. In school the external nightmare is eternalized for life. Boris was not learning the arithmetic only; he was learning the essential nightmare also. To be successful in our culture, one must learn to dream of failure."...

. This Excerpt, from Massacre of the Innocents, a newspaper article by Dr. Laing.