Politics, Education, and Philosophy

So... back to education literature. I'm reading more "up with collaboration", "down with competition" stuff (for examples of this issue discussed in the literature and as it relates to public policy, see http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JTE/jte-v7n1/gokhale.jte-v7n1.html, http://teaching.berkeley.edu/bgd/collaborative.html, http://www.highereducation.org/reports/calcomp/callen2.shtml, http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=36384), and I'm wondering why education literature in a capitalistic society has such socialist/communist themes.

I understand that human survival can depend on both collaboration (alliances formed during times of war - World War I and II, for example) and on competition (only one sperm makes it to the egg), but I don't understand why competition has suddenly become "bad". Even those who denounce competition admit that competition is a powerful motivation for increased performance (healthcare, education, sports, space technology, etc.), although collaboration is thought to encourage more learning and to provide a better quality of experience. It seems to me that we need both.

It also seems to me that an educational system cannot depart entirely from the rest of the culture in which it exists and still succeed. If our society as a whole is driven by competition, can we reasonably expect people to suddenly switch to a cooperative mindset when they are within the educational system? People need to live unified lives. If the philosophy underlying politics diverges greatly from the philosophy underlying the educational system, one of them is probably not going to work very well.