Debate Paper – Person Name: Caroline Whitesel Period: Quarter Resolution: Competition is necessary in the learning process Are you pro or con? Rebuttal: To begin, my opponent stated that competition is a part of everyday life But, just because it is a part of everyday life doesn’t mean it is effective According to Harvard Business Review, China and The United States need each other to thrive and be successful, but both countries have different political views This is one example of how working together is much better for everyone Situations like these can happen in a school environment too Children shouldn’t be taught to compete but to work together for an end result My opponent also stated that competition inspires students to their best In cases such as Kathryn Dewitt, competition does more harm than good According to the New York Times, Kathryn was a college student who attended University of Pennsylvania and was involved with the school, through extra curricular activities, and jumped off a building, killing herself around April 2015, because she couldn’t deal with the stress and pressure of trying to be the best During her high school career, Kathryn was a straight A student who was at the top of her class, and intended to stay there, however college was a different story Kathryn once said, “Everyone around me was so spectacular and so amazing and I wanted to be just as amazing as they are.”(New York Times) Competition doesn’t just affect those in college and high school, but younger children too According to Child Trends Research, a nonprofit research that is dedicated to improving the lives of children, 35% of eleven-year-old girls and 44% of eleven-year-old boys felt pressured in school Finally, my opponent stated that it helps develop a sense of sportsmanship However, this causes resentment and bad character Take for example, cheating Cheating is one of the most immoral things you could By cheating you are lowering your standards and setting yourself up for failure The Josephson Institute Center for Youth Ethics surveyed students in both public and private schools on cheating They found that 95% of students admitted they cheated in some form, by copying homework to cheating on a test (Plagarism.org) Cheating is the exact opposite of sportsman ship, cheating is dishonesty Closing statement: My partner and I’s first point was that learning should not be competition School is one big competition and it shouldn’t be that way There are multiple statistics on how competition affects a student’s brain and how this affects school life Students would rather get the work done and be on top then to learn something but be on the bottom Our second point was everybody learns at a different pace With competition in a classroom, it is expected that everyone is the same, and should learn the same way Some students have specific learning disabilities and it wouldn’t be fair to set them up to impossible standards they can’t achieve Competition sets standards extremely high, as in each student must top the previous person and so on Finally, our third point was competition causes psychological damage The need to be On top, to be the best, takes a toll on a person Competition causes many mental illnesses, such as depression and anxiety, which are severe diseases that don’t just go away In all, competition does more harm than it does good (ad lib why we won the debate) Clincher: Teresa Amabile, a psychologist at Brandeis University, asked a small group of children to create fun and silly collages Some of the children were competing for prizes while others weren’t Then, seven artists independently judged the collages Her final results stated that children who were competing for a prize produced a collage that was much less creative, spontaneous, complex, and varied, then the others ... student must top the previous person and so on Finally, our third point was competition causes psychological damage The need to be On top, to be the best, takes a toll on a person Competition causes