Print edition: 
There's no such thing as healthy competition, says Boston author Alfie Kohn.
"We live in a culture where competition is the state religion," Kohn says.
"But research shows that when people compete — at work, at school, at play or at home — everyone loses in the desperate race to win."
Kohn, a nationally known and controversial voice against competition, including test-based school rankings, will speak Saturday at Kapaun Mount Carmel High School in Wichita. His lecture, "Don't Beat Them, Join Them: Exploring the Value of Cooperation in a Society Addicted to Winning," is being sponsored by Newman University.
Kohn is a fierce opponent of standardized testing and the federal No Child Left Behind law. He urges parents to keep their children home on days the tests are administered to "boycott a practice that is slowly destroying the quality of their education."
"The more you know about how children learn, the less likely you would ever be to rely on... test scores" to measure achievement, he said. "That's why the biggest champions of testing are not educators, but corporate executives and politicians."
Kohn said his lecture will touch on the role of standardized testing in schools. But his overall goal is for Americans — particularly parents and educators — to rethink their "obsession" with competition.
That includes youth sports, academic contests and awards assemblies, Kohn said.
"You don't need sports leagues to have fun and get exercise," he said. "You don't need contests for people to be motivated to learn or to do their best."
Kohn also opposes the perennial surveys and rankings that show U.S. students falling behind their peers in other countries.
"When you hear this president or the last president talking about the need to outcompete other countries, there's no interest in helping children... succeed," Kohn said. "Others must fail conspicuously in order that we can run around cheering, 'U.S.A. No. 1!' "
Kohn's latest book, "Feel-Bad Education," is a collection of essays previously published in the New York Times, Education Week and elsewhere. In it, he says he is convinced that "historians will look back at our era of ever-higher standards and increasingly standardized instruction as a dark period in American education."
"Excellence is a completely different concept from victory," he said. "The more people are focused on beating others, the less able they are to reach their goals and truly achieve."
