Competition In Schools: Quality Vs Quantity

I think most of us have been in that class in school, where everyone’s getting that class lesson, when all of a sudden, that troublemaker makes a joke to the person next to them. Or he’s not paying attention at all. Of course, we can all act like we don’t care at all, but we do. The kid gets in trouble, we all look towards the kid, and class is wasted. It’s a vicious cycle. Bad thing happens, teacher verbally tells to stop, class wasted. Everyone is trying to just get by to at least pass this class. But it’s hard to do so when this happens so often. So how do we fix this?

I think that the source of the problem is not much motivation to do well. If students just get through their core classes with a 70, well, then they’re through. This usually isn’t that hard to do. Some people would even say it’s difficult even just to try to fail. But making classwork harder won’t really make a difference. That just results in frustration towards the topics and even less motivation to do well. So what if we instead try to pick up something else: the competition?

So what do I mean by competition? I mean that maybe schools should implement more harsher passing grades, or, more extreme, just taking the top 70 percent of the class out of middle school, then the top 50 percent of the class out of high school, then the top 80 percent out of college, or something like that. If we use methods like this, maybe we can get through to more youth and children that schools is a priority to help them in their life. But there’s a problem with this method. It’s slightly an elitist ideal. If school has one clear goal, it‘s to try to get as much people to succeed as possible. Unfortunately, these methods would make it harder to produce more for the workforce. So, as this always beat my swim team for years, quantity over quality (don’t worry, we started winning later).

So is competition the right way to stir up student’s ability to just grind and study? Maybe. But is it fit for the ideals on which school was built on? No. If you thought that these solutions seemed at least good for serving a purpose, well, it may work efficiently. But it doesn’t morally feel right, which is why it was never implemented in school. Because it seemed elitist. And elitist ideals just go against many things, but it goes against one word mostly: equality. Thanks for reading this thing if you did.