Every community has them: the Chidon ha-Mishnah, the spelling bee, the “who can memorize the most” competitions that schools and parents love to run. They’re exciting, they’re motivating, and kids who win them walk around for weeks glowing with pride. So what’s the problem?
Rav Shlomo Wolbe noticed something uncomfortable when he actually followed the winners of these competitions years down the road. The learning intensity that got them to the finish line didn’t continue. Kids who trained with incredible seriousness to win a Mishnah competition would, almost immediately after winning, drop off sharply in their learning seriousness. The project, as Rav Wolbe put it, never actually paid off in the way it looked like it would.
The Honor That Blinds
Why would winning actually hurt a child’s long-term growth? Rav Wolbe’s answer is a middos analysis, not an educational one. The honor a child receives from winning, he explains, causes a kind of blindness. It distorts their self-esteem — not by making them feel good, but by making them feel good for the wrong reason. They start to associate their value with the trophy, the title, the applause, rather than with the learning itself. Once the applause fades, so does the motivation, because the motivation was never really about the Mishnayos in the first place.
This connects to a sharper warning Rav Wolbe gives elsewhere about parents’ own motivations. He describes what he calls a “self-deception” many parents and teachers fall into: they believe they’re deeply invested in their child’s or student’s chinuch, when in reality what’s driving them is something far more selfish — their own need for kudos, their own pride in being seen as the parent or teacher of a “winner.” The result, Rav Wolbe says bluntly, is that we stop seeing the child for who he actually is. We start seeing an object that belongs to us, a trophy that reflects well on us.
There’s a parallel image worth holding onto here: a rebbi who, generations ago, would put a drop of honey on the letter aleph so a child’s first taste of Torah would be sweet. “That should be the bitterest Torah ever tastes,” he said. “It should only get sweeter from there.” The entire orientation is toward the child’s relationship with the material, not toward how the child’s performance reflects on the adults around him.
How to Check Your Own Motivation
- Notice your reaction to the loss, not just the win. If your child doesn’t win a competition or doesn’t get the grade, pay attention to your own emotional response. Disappointment that’s really about your own image is a signal worth catching.
- Praise the process out loud, not just the outcome. “I saw how many hours you put into preparing” lands very differently than “You won!” One reinforces love of the material; the other reinforces love of the applause.
- Resist bragging about your child’s wins to other parents. This sounds small, but it’s a direct test of whether the achievement is about the child or about you. If you can let a win go unmentioned, you’re probably seeing your child clearly.
- Ask what they loved about the material, not just how they did. Redirect conversations after a competition or test away from rank and toward content: “What was the most interesting mishnah you learned this time?”
None of this means competitions are forbidden or that achievement doesn’t matter. It means the adult’s job is to keep the child’s relationship with the learning itself — not the honor attached to it — at the center. That’s a harder discipline than it sounds, because the honor feels so good to everyone involved, parent included.
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This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.