My 16 year-old sister got her exam results this week. She did brilliantly well, and the whole family were celebrating with her this weekend. Everyone was jubilant, especially as she had often been told by her teachers that she wasn't trying hard enough, that she was going to fail (particularly in sciences) - which she eventually aced. Someone brought out the newspaper and triumphantly pointed out her school, which came number 4 in the league tables of state schools for GCSE results. I then heard her speaking about the other students in her class. She knew what each of them had got, and rattled them off: 'Alistair got 5 A's, 3 B's and a C, the same as Corrie and James, Ellie got 7 A*'s and two A's, the bitch...' then finally this degenerated into 'She got 2 more A*'s than me, but she's got a huge arse, and I know I did well and everything, but all my friends did too and they're thin!'. I should point out that my sister is a beautiful size, perfectly normal and healthy for her age. The culture of competition seems, more than ever, to have pervaded the lives of young people, and the fact that my sister was making a competitive correlation between exam results and arse size really brought home to me - how destructive this attitude really is, and how difficult to escape. Growing up in hippy-infested Islington in the 1980's, I was lucky enough to attend several progressive schools in the area, including the White Lion 'Free School' for a couple of years, where I mostly played table tennis and learned the recorder. There may have been other things to learn, but I wasn't aware of them. I actually didn't realise what a radical educational experiment it had been until I found this book: 'Free School - The White Lion Experience' - by Nigel Wright (http://www.libed.org.uk/freeschool.html) in the library of the Copenhagen Free University in 2004 (http://copenhagenfreeuniversity.dk). I read the book with keen interest, learning that lessons had been optional (I'd never been aware of them, apart from music), and that everything in the school was organised by democratic assembly. Nigel Wright's account of it was extremely cynical and embittered, but very useful. I did a little research online, but was only able to find a few threads - this one was interesting though; http://libcom.org/node/7708 About the 'Brooklyn Free School' and the experience (as a comment) of one teacher at the White Lion. Time seems to have mellowed the bitterness of the experience somewhat. Not much though. It seems that even on libcom - a very progressive blog, attitudes towards non-competitive education are very jaded. This week I happened to listen to a wonderful radio show about E.R.Braithwaite, the teacher whose experience as a Ghanaian school teacher in East London in the 50's was fictionalised in the Sidney Poitier film 'To Sir, With Love'. The radio show 'To Sir, With Love Revisited' (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/ram/fri1100.ram - online for another 4 days) drew my attention to the work of educationalist A.A. Bloom, headmaster of Braithwaite's school 'St. George's in the East' at the time. Very little exists to document his work on-line, apart from an excellent paper by Michael Fielding of Sussex University: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/documents/michael_fielding_-_alex_bloo... from FORUM, Volume 47, Numbers 2 &3, 2005. With many progressive democratic ideas, similar to some of the methods used at A.S. Neill's 'Summerhill' Free School in Suffolk - Bloom practiced radical education in the middle of an overcrowded, filthy and poverty stricken East London and nobody paid fees either. Bloom's pedagogical experiment was carved out of the unintentional freedoms offered by the a two-tiered educational system. The elitist Grammar schools, where high achieving and ambitious pupils were groomed for university tended to be pedagogically conservative - whereas the secondary modern technical schools such as Bloom's gave him a freer hand to experiment with radical democratic and non-competitive methods. As Fielding quotes from Bloom's 1949 Paper: "[B]ecause there are neither carrots nor goads, there will be no donkeys, for when children are treated as we would have them be, they tend to reach out accordingly." Bloom, A.A. (1949) Compete or Co-operate?, New Era, 30(8), pp. 170-172 That in school, collaboration is called 'cheating' certainly sets up some less-than-useful precedents for young people to follow in further education and later life. In today's political climate of resignation to global market forces, the only argument worth making in the mainstream is the argument of greater efficiency in knowledge production. Inconvenient moral scruples aside, is it really more efficient - or more 'competitive' on a national economic level to foster this kind of psycho-social competition in grades and arses? Is this kind of training really going to prepare people for an economy of diffuse collaboration and distributed knowledge production? It might be that the children of the baby boomers, sent to progressive schools will trump the competition-crazed younger generation in the collaborative playground of the networked economy. Perhaps educational systems will begin to inculcate the lessons of copyleft knowledge production and distributed authorship. Or more likely, these are the same kinds of pipe dreams that left the staff of those progressive schools so embittered and disillusioned - and it'll turn out that what we really need for an efficiently functioning knowledge economy are more web2.0 carrots, surveillance sticks and hoards of digital donkeys.