ABSTRACT
Competition between schools is seen as essential in the drive to improve standards and inculcate values that support the development of innovation, creativity and entrepreneurial energy that neoliberal democracies celebrate and twenty-first century economies are said to require. This chapter illustrates and explores the desirability and practicability of emulation rather than competition in schools through a case study of one of the most radical democratic schools England has ever seen. As James Hemming, one of the school governors, later to become president of the British Humanist Association, remarked in a letter to the Times Educational Supplement in the debate on competition, 'What is fundamentally stimulating to the child is not competition as such but the experience of achievement in a socially recognized form'. The chapter is one preliminary contribution to the active re-affirmation, renewal and future development of a praxis that both refuses and refutes the demeaning and diminishing presumptions and practices of contemporary capitalism.
