General David Petraeus defined winning in a radically different way than past generals:

Winning is achieving your objectives. (Petraeus, 2010)

Although Petraeus is talking about how to win a war with the Taliban in Afghanistan, he is making a point that relates to many challenges in life: We win when we succeed in reaching our goals. If we can overcome challenges, we win.

This is not the way I thought of winning as a child. When I learned to play baseball, my team could win only if the other team lost. We had a simple objective: beat the other team.

Baseball was fun. The lessons from sports are valuable, but the model of winning is incomplete and misleading if we think that winning always means beating other people.

The biggest challenges in life are not the people. The big challenges are the limitations we face: time, fear, scarcity, ignorance, poverty, apathy, and all the other barriers to joyful, abundant life. To defeat these enemies, other people can help if we can work together. We need people to help us because we cannot defeat these enemies solo.

If we are going to learn how to defeat impersonal enemies like poverty we need to practice working together with people who are different: people who know how to get out of poverty need to be able to work with those who are in poverty. If we are going to defeat ignorance we need people to work together to share what they have learned. Education works best if people know how to study together (Marzano, et al., 2001).

One way to learn to work together and study together is to play together. Play is a powerful teacher if the play is designed well. But play can be misleading if it designed poorly.

In order to defeat impersonal opponents such as poverty and ignorance, we can use games that challenge us work with the other side. We need games that challenge different teams to work together to score points through collaboration. We need games that help us learn to win together. Games that teach us how to work together with other teams are different than traditional baseball or football. In baseball, a team wins by beating the other team – out scoring the other team. The game does not end until one team wins and the other loses. The objective of the game is to beat the other team.

Games that teach people to win by working together with the other side require a different scoring process than we see on the traditional scoreboard. Petraeus is opening another world of winning. Peoples’ objectives may be different, but they could both achieve their different objectives by cooperation. They might even help each other win.

The Taliban leaders may not understand Petraeus today. It may take generations before they understand him. But eventually, Petraeus’ point will stand. The possibility of different people living together in peace will prevail. And the path to peace is to win by achieving your objectives – and a primary objective is to learn to win together. We can contribute to this progress toward peace by playing games that measure cooperation.

Teachers and parents can use Petraeus’ definition to educate children to win by defeating impersonal opponents such as hunger, ignorance, fear, time, insecurity, and all the enemies that rob the joy from our lives. When children learn to separate people from the problem and see the impersonal enemies, they become free to win by helping each other overcome.

We can start with the games that we give children. For examples of some the games that you can play to learn to win together visit www.enteam.org. Please join the conversation and share your thoughts!

Works Cited

Marzano, Robert J., Pickering, Debra J. and Pollock, Jane E. 2001. Classroom instruction that works: Research-based strategies for increasing student achievement. Alexandria, Virginia : Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2001.

Petraeus, General David. 2010. National Public Radio.