ABSTRACT
Introduction My purpose in what follows is to reveal some of the virtues hidden in what are typically deemed unqualified educational vices. I am encouraged in this purpose by one of William James’s celebrated Talks to Teachers, in which he urged his hearers not to disparage passions “often…considered unworthy…to appeal to in the young,” but rather to redirect them to good educational use, “reaping [their] advantages…in such a way as to [achieve] a maximum of benefit with a minimum of harm.” Thus, as against Rousseau, who, in his Emile, had attacked the use of rivalry as a motive in education, James defended “the feeling of rivalry” as “[lying] at the very basis of our being, all social improvement being largely due to it. There is a noble and generous kind of rivalry,” James wrote, “as well as a spiteful and greedy kind; and the noble and generous form is particularly common in childhood. All games owe the zest which they bring with them to the fact that they are rooted in the emulous passion, yet they are the chief means of training in fairness and magnanimity. Can the teacher afford to throw such an ally away?”1
