The other day, I came across this thread and the conversation sparked my interest:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=98496
"What makes FRC a sport?" What a fascinating question, between the assumption that it inherently makes and the question that it asks.
Through this thread, many posters defined sport and qualifies what that means in FRC. And many posters struggled to support the OP's assumption that FRC is in fact a sport. I agree with the assertion that FIRST operates as attempt to find an alternative from a sport and entertainment-based adolescent culture at its core; but I want posters to struggle with a different question. It is apparent in my user title, but I want to address it more explicitly and I hope to spark a conversation.
I've been mulling over this question for perhaps the last year, as a result of both reflection and readings. Is FRC actually a competition? What is competition? What is competitive about FRC? How does the competition in FIRST coexist with the "Win-win" situation that FRC claims to be.
I understand that much of the way one deals with this question deals with a personal understanding of FRC, but I want to develop a dialogue of this.
The first chapter of Alfie Kohn's book on education,
No Contest: The Case Against Competition informs my curiosity. I will offer you an excerpt:
Quote:
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To say that an activity is structurally competitive is to say that it is characterized by what I will call mutually exclusive goal attainment ("MEGA," for short). This means very simply that my success requires your failure. Our fates are negatively linked. If one of us must lose exactly as much as the other wins, as in poker, then we are talking about a "zero-sum game." But in any MEGA arrangement, two or more individuals are trying to achieve a goal that cannot be achieved by all of them. This is the essence of competition as social scientists have observed.
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Some food for thought. I hope you enjoy.
Happy holidays, all and 17 days until Kickoff!