The government is worried about children getting fatter and growing into obese adults. There is clearly a lot we can do about this. Getting schools to play more competitive sport seems like a good place to start.
The left, however, has long been suspicious of competitive sport. The government could have tried to accommodate this in announcing its new proposals. It could have said: look, we understand that there is a real question about whether society is getting too competitive, but tackling obesity is just more important.
It chose not to do this. Instead, it used the backdrop of a successful and popular Olympic campaign to distance itself from what Tessa Jowell called "the politically correct nonsense of the 1980s that competition damages children and sports days are undesirable." Andy Burnham MP, a former adviser in Jowell's department, urged the left to support competitive sport for its own sake. "We can't celebrate an Olympic gold and yet agonise over whether competitive school sport is right or not," he said. "The left needs to accept that sport is about competition."
Are Jowell and Burnham right? Is it time for the left to leave its suspicion of competitive sport behind? In trying to answer this question, the first problem is that the left has not always been clear about what it objects to in competitive sport. Judging from the letters and editorials in the Guardian and Observer since the announcement, you would guess the main objection was that it is humiliating for those who are no good at it. But while this is true, and a shame, it does not really have much to do with sport being competitive.
We need to distinguish being humiliated from feeling bad about failure. Stopping people being humiliated is a desirable aim. But stopping people failing, and feeling bad about it, is not. Almost everything which is worth doing necessarily contains the possibility of failure. And we cannot stop people feeling bad about failure without stopping them caring about success. So we should not even try. Humiliation is different. People feel humiliated when they take failure too seriously, or let it undermine their overall sense of self-worth - or when other people or the system does this to them. We should certainly try to stop this happening, where we can.
But in this debate it is competition itself we should be focusing on, rather than the humiliation it can cause. The problem with competition is the way it makes us relate to each other. It makes us see each other as people to be feared or mistrusted, rather than valued and joined with in pursuit of common goals. On this view, society is already too competitive - and schools should be promoting non-competitive activities, to offset the broader drift towards greater competition. When it comes to sport there are many ways of keeping fit and having fun, some of which are competitive and some not.
Playing football at school should be about enjoyment, learning the game, and fair play - not "getting a result." Putting pressure on schools to play in competitive leagues - another part of the recent proposals - will further encourage their pupils to model themselves on the professional footballers and managers they see on television. These are not good role models. They are cautionary tales about excessive competitiveness, its effects on behaviour and physical and mental health.
If these are the real objections to the government's proposals, how should it respond? As I said earlier, it could concede their force, but insist that tackling obesity is more important. Everyone accepts that children should have to do some kind of sport to keep them fit. If competitive sport is just better at getting them fit, there is surely a case for making it compulsory.
The government could also argue that competitive sport has wider benefits than just health. If we recognise that it is better at getting us fit, we should consider why that is so. It might be that competition helps everyone - not just professional sportspeople - get more out of themselves.
Finally, the government could point out that for reasons of tradition and cost, most competitive sports played in school are team sports, which balance competitiveness with learning about the importance of mutuality and interdependence within the team. The non-competitive alternatives are, by contrast, mostly individualistic. Making team sports compulsory might be the only way to stop the drift away from them and towards individual sports and solitary visits to the gym.
These are strong arguments. But in a sense they miss the point. The left has not really been that hung up about sport. Sport was just seen as the last straw in a process by which schools in general had got far too competitive. After all, sport is meant to be competitive. Education is not. It becomes competitive when children are judged against each other rather than against non-comparative standards or ideals, when education itself is seen as a means to an end, as a way not of improving people's understanding of the world but of improving their prospects in the competition for jobs.
For many on the left, everything that is happening to education - tests, selection, market thinking and now competitive sport - embodies and reinforces the dreary, philistine view of life as one big competition, an endless fight to get ahead. They believe we should be using education to temper society's faults rather than reinforcing them.
But the left has to concede that increased testing is driven not just by competitive concerns but also by a focus on absolute or overall levels of educational attainment. The government has a duty to ensure that as many children as possible learn to read, write and add up. Tests help measure this. They may at the same time foster greater competitiveness, but the underlying aim is non-competitive. The government also has a duty to ensure that increased spending on education translates into better results. Again, this is a non-competitive aim.
It is not good enough for the left simply to complain about the competitive effects of tests - they need to offer alternative ways of achieving the non-competitive aims which lie behind them. They also need to do a better job of explaining how the government is supposed to insulate the education system from the increasing competitiveness of society as a whole. Tests and selection and the encroachment of market thinking into education are not part of a deliberate plan to breed a generation of ruthless competitors. They are the symptoms of a problem rather than its cause. Society just is getting more competitive. Employers and universities are more concerned with getting the best applicants. Parents are more concerned with getting the best schools.
There is a complex social dynamic at work here, involving the growing influence of the market, of ideas of choice and meritocracy, and the effects of those ideas on people's expectations and on their conceptions of success and happiness. Some of the effects of this change are positive - like the belief that people should define their own expectations rather than accepting them from their parents or society. Others are not - like the tendency for competitive or comparative thinking to crowd out other ways of thinking.
The easy answer is that it is the government's job to manage this social dynamic, to capture the good effects and resist the bad ones. But the two may be products of a set of causes which cannot easily be separated. The left rejects the view that whenever government tries to solve a problem it only makes things worse. But it should be wary of the equally dangerous view that it always makes things better. The left needs to ask itself whether it is realistic to ask the government to use education policy to try to resist something as deep-rooted and complex as the shift towards more competitive ways of thinking. It might be better to accept this trend, and settle for the less ambitious aim of channelling it through a fair competition to which everyone has access.
