A time and place for games
On youth sports, SAT scores, and setting up pursuits that don't reward competition
It is probably inevitable that the institutionalization of youth sports will remain a permanent feature of American culture -- at least for as long as any of us will be around. Just as it has been since well before de Tocqueville wrote about our forebears, the United States has a culture that embraces rough-and-tumble competition and fierce contests to establish winners.
■ If later adolescence and adulthood will remain competitive (which they will), and if past performance is going to remain a source of data by which people will select for new opportunities (which it will), then contests and competitions for youth are here to stay, and most likely to start even earlier and grow ever fiercer. In other words, if the NFL is going to remain elite, then hopeful parents are probably going to keep starting their kids in the youngest tackle-football leagues they can find.
■ Nor is it a situation isolated to sports: We should very well expect robotics competitions and quiz bowls and art shows to remain not just entrenched but to spawn their own pee-wee leagues and summer camps and "enrichment" opportunities. If all of this competition is to be a permanent feature of American life, then we need to institutionalize habits that will help young people to cultivate non-competitive interests that will keep them happy in the long run.
■ At some point, virtually every competitive arrangement evolves into an "up-or-out" situation. Even when someone makes it to the top, there's usually an expiration date on their peak performance -- there are no 45-year-olds playing Major League Baseball, and it's more forgiving than most other sports. Ultimately, the same applies elsewhere, too: The kid who wins the math competition in 6th grade might get tracked into the advanced math classes in high school and go on to leverage a good SAT score into admission at an elite accounting program. But the actuaries will tell you that even if that accountant goes on to earn a spot as a partner at a Big Four accounting firm, they too will someday retire. And then what?
■ There are countless things that can bring people joy, excitement, or satisfaction without lending themselves to competition. If we really mean what we say about "the pursuit of happiness" being a vital American interest, then we need to ensure (at the cultural level) that we don't let those other interests get railroaded just because tournaments and trophies and traveling teams are more natural to build a schedule around. Well-rounded lives need other sources of satisfaction that pay off without making winners and losers.
