How Can We Properly Teach Civility, Community, and Trying Again

Families are stronger when parents model how to lose with civility, and strong families strengthen communities, states, and nations. In his article published at Deseret News, Samuel J. Abrams, professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, discussed a loss in a recent championship soccer game.

Abrams explained that the soccer team representing his daughter’s high school “lost its championship soccer game last week.” He continued: 

…The high school team had been ranked number one, and the girls had every reason to believe they could win. They had worked hard, played well all season and earned their place in the championship [game]. But when the final whistle blew, they had lost a very close match.

My daughter and I watched the players fight for every ball and refuse to give up. We watched them maintain their composure, even as the game slipped away in overtime. My daughter was disappointed, as was I. We wanted her school to win, and there was no point pretending otherwise. But as we talked about the game, I realized that what we had just witnessed was an important teaching moment, one that had very little to do with soccer.

Is it really ‘just a game’?

My first instinct was to tell my daughter that it was just a game, that losing wasn’t important, and that it really didn’t matter….

In many respects, it was just a game, but the match itself and the season absolutely mattered: to the girls who had worked so hard, to their coaches and classmates, and to my daughter, who already felt such a strong connection to her school after just a few months. The disappointment was real, and there was no reason to dismiss it.

In fact, it was precisely because the game mattered that there was something important to learn from losing it. Sometimes you can do everything right and still lose. That’s a difficult lesson for adults, let alone children, and I have trouble remembering it myself.

We tell our kids to work hard, practice, listen to their coaches, support their teammates and give everything they have. Do those things, we suggest, and good things will follow. And often they do. But not always. Sometimes the other team plays better, or a ball takes an unfortunate bounce. I don’t think we should rush to tell disappointed children that they are all winners when they lose a hard-fought match. They know the score, and they deserve more respect than an adult’s attempt to make an uncomfortable moment disappear. What we as parents and adults can instill in them is the idea that losing a game and failing as a person are two very different things.

The importance of school sports

This is one reason school sports are so important today, and why we shouldn’t forget that schools are far more than places where children go to learn reading, writing, mathematics and history. They learn to be civil, collaborative and human. Schools are among the most important institutions we have for teaching children how to live with other people and handle moments of both euphoria and sadness.

Of course, some of those lessons happen in classrooms, in assemblies, and in formal activities like Model U.N., but many require more social and inherently collaborative environments. They happen on playgrounds, in hallways, in lunchrooms, during school performances and on athletic fields and courts. They happen when a child doesn’t get the part in the play or the spot in the school orchestra, or when a team that everyone expects to win loses the championship. These experiences are not distractions from formal education; they are core parts of a balanced education.

We often forget that a good coach teaches far more than how to pass a soccer ball or hit a target. Good educators, including teachers, coaches and others who support and lift up our youngest generations, help children understand that being disappointed doesn’t excuse treating others poorly. And a truly enlightened school community teaches children that they have obligations to one another, whether things are going their way or not.

Sports are one way [that] schools can achieve this because they help young people learn to compete under a common set of rules, respect the judgment of referees, cooperate with teammates and recognize that their opponents are not their enemies. Students can want to win and still shake hands with the people who beat them. Losing, however painful, is not the end of the world. You get up, return to practice, and try again. Seasons end and begin again, and there is always room for growth.

There is an important lesson about civility here. Our polarized times and rage-filled culture have created a social and political climate where disagreement often becomes personal, opposition is regrettably treated as something to be hated, and losing is treated as something intolerable. The other team wants to win just as badly as you do, but that doesn’t make them the enemy. Both sides agree to play by the same rules, and those rules don’t become illegitimate simply because you side loses.

That lesson matters in civic life, where we have to accept that our side will sometimes lose but we must still find a way to keep participating. Being disappointed with an outcome doesn’t mean we have to resent or eventually hate the people who prevailed. Nor does losing mean that we should abandon the institutions or rules that made the contest possible in the first place. We can debate and disagree, sometimes fiercely and still embrace the civic obligations that we have to one another. Those are habits our schools must help children develop long before they are old enough to vote.

Schools are more than just the classroom and test scores.

I think we often forget that schools have responsibilities far beyond the classroom and test scores. They are engines of social formation and civic education, and some of that work happens precisely when things don’t go our way.