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Good tennis players are those who beat other tennis players, and a good shot during play is one the opponent can’t return. But that’s not a truth about life or excellence — it’s a truth about tennis. We’ve created an artificial structure in which one person can’t succeed without doing so at someone else’s expense, and then we accuse anyone who prefers other kinds of activities of being naive because “there can be only one best — you’re it or you’re not,” as the teacher who delivered that much-admired you’re-not-special commencement speech declared. You see the sleight of hand here? The question isn’t whether everyone playing a competitive game can win or whether every student can be above average. Of course they can’t. The question that we’re discouraged from asking is why our games are competitive — or our students are compulsively ranked against one another — in the first place.
