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RE: Exhausted.

Author: Bart
Date: 1999-08-27 20:27

After re-reading Penny�s message, and the various replies, I�m still puzzled by what is the driving force behind this competitive spirit.

From what I read, I would conclude that schools are way to actively involved in kids� lives. Yes, there are definitely very valuable skills to learn. But as far as the �extracurricular activities� with a more �leisure� character are concerned, such as sports and music, their roles should be much different from what I understand they are in the US.

To provide some comparison material: when I was in high school (graduated 9 years ago, from a high school in a city some 30 km from Amsterdam), playing any musical instrument to a decent level was not required. There were a school orchestra & a big band, which you could join on a voluntary basis. Same thing for cabaret etc. No grades were given for this, thereby keeping it literally *extra*curricular. The obligatory music classes were about music history etc., for which no special musical talent was required. For one thing, students were not made to stay for practice in school until 8.00 at night. Music competitions at high school level simply didn�t exist.

Learning to play an instrument was/is typically done with a private teacher or a special (subsidized) music school.

With physical education, things were even better. Two hours a week of various sports, with the students� attitude as de facto standard for assigning grades, i.e. did you contribute to a pleasant team environment. Here, as in music, anyone wanting to be active in a specific sport would join a local club of choice. This allowed for mixing with students from other schools as well, rather than sticking to one school community. Sure there was competition, but only to the extent one personally chose.

I feel that schools can play an important role in a kid�s development. But instead of doing this by promoting over-competition and applying excess pressure to perform, they should nurture social skills. Many of which are learned out-side the school situation, for which reason school should not be too time-consuming. Conceptual thinking, theoretical knowledge and applied skills can be achieved by other methods of education.
Participating in leisure activities such as music in an over-competitive school situation would probably have deprived me of much of the fun and contacts I had, doing it on a voluntary basis.

Contrary to Paul, who described his 5.5-year engineering education as a survival period full of woes, I invested 6 won-derful years to obtain my finance degree. Instead of 16 pound - sledge hammer - roughneck labour in the oilfields, I had great fun working behind our fraternity's bar, consuming modest quantities of a renown Dutch premium draught beer, and further developing my social skills.

The people who inspired me the most, in my education, in my profession, in my hobbies, AND in my clarinet playing, have never been the people who were in it to be better than �the competition�. It were the people who loved what they were doing - and showed they loved it. The people who didn�t do it the rough way, but in an elegant fashion.

To get back to Penny�s story: if I were Penny, I�d quit the band and follow some other, less stressful class. This way, I�m sure I would continue to like my instrument / music, and I would not regard my fellow clarinetists as uncoopera-tive & rather-be-without-than-with-you people.

Competition is OK, but I felt that I should provide some counterweight to this philosophy which seems to have gone out of control.

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