Competition Banned In Cool Brittania.

Sport banned in Cool Brittania...I couldn't help comparing the energy, the vibrancy, the camaraderie with another event I attended: a non-competitive team morning at a primary school. Emphatically this was not a sports day: sport, for the head teacher, needed to be eradicated in all its forms, as pernicious an evil as sexism and racism. Sport represented competition at its most corrupting: trying to beat someone else at games was, to this head, morally indefensible.

And so the children were obliged to stand in line, hanging around waiting to do things like tip water into a bucket or sort plastic bricks into colour-coded lines. Running was banned (someone might hurt himself) and winning didn't happen.

**Wow, tip water into a bucket. Now that will really teach them "life skills" that they need for the 21st Centrury.

As the head passed between the rows of children congratulating herself that she had discovered the root of youthful nirvana, every child she passed wanted to know one thing: who was winning.

"Nobody wins here," she'd trill, apparently oblivious to the groans her every remark solicited.

I have never seen such a listless, bored bunch of children. Those veterans at Henley may have been 10 times older, but they had 10 times the spark of these seven-year-olds. What these children wanted was competition.

**Yep, competition is good, from filling in a quiz for a prize in a magazine to applying for a job. Someone wins and someone loses. If children are kept away from that fact that how are they ever going to cope in the real world?

They didn't know about all those long-term, beneficial side-effects the old rowers had enjoyed, they just wanted to pitch themselves against their peers. Yet they were being denied the one thing they craved by an educational philosophy that made no sense.

The image that haunted me was of an 11-year-old girl, who looked like Denise Lewis must have done at that age, all balance, grace and legs like a gazelle, being scolded by the head teacher for running, beautifully and at sprint speed, during one of the challenges.

"We don't do that sort of thing here," she was told, as if what she were doing were a social embarrassment, like picking her nose in public.

**George Orwell was spot on. Big Brother is running each and every part of life. He may have been a few years off but were he around today he would recognise the social engineering going on here.

Far from offering encouragement to help nurture her natural ability, here was the girl's educational mentor telling her that her skill was worthless. All this happened not in the grounds of some expensive boarding school established by utopian loons for the offspring of the Bohemian, but at a bog-standard, mainstream north London primary school.

My memories were stirred this week when Gordon Brown announced his wholehearted support for competitive sport in schools. Of all the things the new man has said that we can cheer (the end of the super-casino among them), this is the most important.

Yet the gap between prime ministerial proposal and reality can be as wide as the space between that head teacher's ears. The non-competitive team challenge I witnessed took place at the tail end of John Major's watch, when the PM was waxing on about warm beer on the boundary, even as great swathes of his education system were treating all sports as if they were a dangerous perversion.

Brown needs to ensure competition is given room on the curriculum, that those many great teachers who appreciate its value are supported, that the facilities are developed in which it can be practised.

Proposals, initiatives, study documents are not enough. We have allowed almost a whole generation to be schooled without sport, marooning them on the sofa, sagged down by their ever-expanding waistbands.

The next generation must rediscover the spirit of their grandparents competing at Henley; and that requires actions, not words.

**This is a problem that has dogged eductaion for some considerable time, the fact that many teachers see their role as not just someone to educate the young with the skills needed to cope, but to instill their own political dogma into the young.

Often it comes on down from the politico's who have their own pet projects for how education should be run, but often from the failed ingrates who having not been able to manage a life outside in the real world have migrated to teaching.

Tags:Cool Brittania
Education
PC
Leftists
New Labour
Tree Huggers
Looney Lefties
Moonbats

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