Hacker News Reader

Comment by yomly | Hacker News Reader

While I'm all for the logical/rational ideal of extracting the most amount of potential from people, but competition needs to be treated with care.

How do you propose competitiveness be constructively harnessed? If you are proposing selective schooling etc. there is a danger of creating social segregation which can reduce social mobility and as a result social cohesion. There is also a social benefit to both the talented and less-talented from interfacing - the talented can learn humility while the others can gain inspiration for example.

View on HN

The trouble with competition is that it creates an order of magnitude more losers than it does winners. Yet it is the foundational element of nearly all school systems in the world. Students don't just get accepted to every school they apply to; they have to compete to "get in." The basis of that competition is grades.

If you want to fix competition in education you must first do something about grades and how they influence outcomes rather than learning.

> If you are proposing selective schooling etc. there is a danger of creating social segregation which can reduce social mobility and as a result social cohesion

I get the abstract reason why one might think this in a vacuum, OTOH, we have real societies with selective schooling in place -- is there any evidence from experience to support that in net this hurts social mobility and/or cohesion?

> If you are proposing selective schooling etc. there is a danger of creating social segregation which can reduce social mobility and as a result social cohesion.

In Romania we have elite high-schools where admissions is based on exams (mostly math). This means that the pupils a class will be of somewhat similar intelligence, and makes things easier for teachers. The best pupils are encouraged to participate in olympiads, and the worst usually transfer to lower-rated institutions. I think this system works quite well (apart from the fact that the very lowly rated high-schools are completely useless).

I believe that simply removing the "stigma" on this topic is already a good step in the right direction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com