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            Whenever I read about educating American students so they can “compete and succeed” (usually followed by “in a global marketplace” or some such), I think of a story I once heard about Americans introducing football to Samoa just after World War II.  As the story goes, the Samoans took to football instantly, which seems entirely plausible, given the fact that Samoans are now 56 times more likely to play in the NFL than other Americans (yes, they are Americans). 

            The strange (and admittedly unconfirmed) part, is that the Samoans played with one difference: they played for a significant length of time, and when the score was tied after enough play, they happily stopped, while their U.S. teachers tried to explain that the purpose of the game was for one side to win.

            True?  I’m not at all sure.  But there are many other cases where we know that the European-American view of competition and winning clashed with other cultures’ views of cooperation and sharing.  Think of the Native Americans in Manhattan and elsewhere, who thought they were agreeing to share land and exchange gifts, while the colonists thought they were buying exclusive rights.

            Last week I talked about what it would mean to prepare all children equally by giving them equal access to health care, education, technology, nutrition, and personal safety.  I can’t help but think that, aside from the enormous amount of money that would demand from the wealthy, there is also an underlying fear of truly unleashing millions more highly capable people into American law, business, medicine, and other lucrative fields. 

            That fear assumes that a large majority of these young people would be eager to compete, and to compete for the same things.  But if that were true, would anyone go into the clergy, teaching, social work, health care (other than the highly paid specialties), or any of the hundreds of jobs that do not promise large financial rewards?  We know it’s possible to make people want things they wouldn’t ordinarily – look at the power of marketing and advertising in America today – but the fact that the number of humanities majors has dropped by almost half since 1970, while the number of business majors has risen by almost three-quarters, is only proof that our wants are conditioned, not innate.

            More and more research shows that people, and many of our near and even distant mammalian cousins, are more cooperative than we once thought.  From mirror neurons, which cause us to react biologically as if we are having the same positive or negative experience as someone we are watching, to evidence that people who help others report a greater increase in happiness than those they helped, it is becoming harder than ever to see either nature or ourselves as entirely red in tooth and claw.

            So don’t worry, millionaires and billionaires. Even if every child in America had a clear path to becoming a Donald Trump or a Bill Gates, the majority of us would still be content with entirely different lives, based on entirely different definitions of success.  Frank Lloyd Wright, who worked for a number of them, once said “Many wealthy people are little more than the janitors of their possessions.”  It might be better to be a real janitor, but be in possession of your life.