We are a resource center 100% dedicated to cooperative play.
. . . Vince Lombardi’s comment—“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”—must be understood not merely as the expression of one football coach’s fanaticism, but as a capsule description of our entire culture.
– Alfie Kohn
Author of No Contest, The Case Against Competition
The 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Elinor Ostrom for her work on the relationship between human cooperation and environmental sustainability. Ostrom’s research applied concepts from mathematical cooperative game theory to observations of resource management in African and Asian communities.
. . . Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, shared with Oliver Williamson, is to be welcomed and celebrated . . . there is much reason to be pleased with the Nobel committee’s decision. The planet urgently needs cooperation, not conflict, in resolving compelling issues such as water shortages and climate change, and in safeguarding our common heritage. Elinor Ostom’s work provides us with the optimism and assurance that this is possible.
– Lyla Mehta and Melissa Leach
Blog, The STEPS Centre (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability, Institute of Development Studies, UK)
The zero-sum game: That’s the way it is if you’re a competitive person and you see capitalism in that way. Zero-sum game implies winners and losers, which I don’t agree with. Somebody has to win and somebody has to lose, it all comes back to zero (minus eight, plus eight). But I don’t agree with that because all boats can rise on a rising sea. Good films can help other films to be open. There’s a different psychology at work. If you’re overly competitive, you’ll be exclusionary and say it’s a zero-sum game (I must get eight and he must lose eight).
– Oliver Stone (adapted)
Film Producer
In schools, the learning climate is enhanced when faculty see one another as resources and allies; when there are collaborative relationships between parents, administration, faculty, and volunteers. Recent decades have seen a significant growth in the influence of collaborations and cooperative approaches to learning, a healthy trend in my view. Cooperation cultivates communication and therefore connectedness. Cooperation tends to facilitate learning. Cooperation reinforces a sense of shared purpose, efficacy, and accomplishment.
– Cheryl Charles
(science educator) Brandewein Lecture, National Science Teachers Association Annual Meeting
One must marvel at the intellectual quality of a teacher who can’t understand why children assault one another in the hallway, playground, and city street, when in the classroom the highest accolades are reserved for those who have beaten their peers. In many subtle and some not so subtle ways, teachers demonstrate that what children learn means much less than that they triumph over their classmates. Is this not assault? . . . Classroom defeat is only the pebble that creates widening ripples of hostility. It is self-perpetuating. It is reinforced by peer censure, parental disapproval, and loss of self-concept. If the classroom is a model, and if that classroom models competition, assault in the hallways should surprise no one.
Joseph Wax
Educator and Author of Competition: Educational Incongruity