Follow the mail on Twitter.

• +
• -
• Text size

I went for lunch with a friend the other day and we ended up chatting about the important things in life, (other than football), to a complete stranger. That man, the stranger, was a poet and artist in residence on London’s South Bank. We discussed creativity and how many people struggle to get some of it in their lives. That could, I mused, be a direct consequence of how schools and exam systems do their best to knock it out of kids before they really learn to express themselves in any vaguely interesting ways. And we reward them for all the wrong things.

We just seem to want kids to perform in ways that are easy to measure and don’t set them apart from the crowd. In other words we want mediocrity. This has a knock on effect in sport. Why can’t England win anything apart from a few one-day cricket matches that most of the population doesn’t really care about? You can’t actually win anything unless you want to be the best, believe you can be the best, know how to be the best and work at it until you are. So why do schools insist on encouraging activities that everyone can join in and rewarding everyone equally? In an effort to include everyone, we seem to have forgotten that being the best is a pretty exclusive position to be in.

I was at a basketball game recently with my 11-year-old. His school team was thrashing the other team, which I thought was great. They had previously disgraced themselves in a few competitive football matches (worse than the England team against Germany) and at last, a reason to feel good. I found it all rather distressing when the class teacher told the referee to stop scoring our goals, as we didn’t want to make the other team feel too bad. Yes, some of us did! Because in that way our kids would get to feel good about winning and want to go on and get that feeling again.

It is not just schools though. A friend of mine showed me an award his child had received for leaving his football team at the end of the year. He got an award for being a ‘leaver’; an award for leaving the team because his family was moving abroad. Is this an achievement? I thought it was a lifestyle choice, not something to aspire too. It is like going to a school assembly where everyone in the class gets an award. As everyone gets one for something no matter how meaningless, there is very little value for the ones who actually achieved anything worth talking about. I can’t help thinking that England (or Britain) might have more chance of winning something, anything more than a cricket match, if we were to be a bit more exclusive with our praise and encouragement.

Andy Murray seems to me to have the competitive spirit and plays fantastic tennis. But he still has not won a major title and yesterday, his competitive spirit seemed to fail him when it really counted. On the positive side, it was great to see David Beckham on Centre Court at Wimbledon looking smart and cool and gorgeous. It is really difficult to encourage your kids to participate in a sport that is usually only endorsed by the half of the great British public that is embarrassingly uncool: Cliff Richard et al.