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by itishappy 534 days ago
Why wouldn't it be? Education's job is to prepare students for life in the real world, and life in the real world is often a competition with your peers. When I was in grade school (admittedly close to 20 years ago) we had accelerated and slowed tracks for students starting in 5th grade.
2 comments
TheNewsIsHere 533 days ago
Typically the accelerated/gifted and talented/special education system in public education is designed to prevent students from being variously bored or overwhelmed, leading to poorer outcomes in either direction. It isn’t designed as a competitive construct.

AP courses notwithstanding. AP courses were insanely competitive and speaking as someone had been all over the map in my K12 years (AP, accelerated courses, early foreign language, and a touch of remedial relative to grade level) the students in AP were mainly in competition with themselves. That however is just personal anecdote.

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itishappy 533 days ago
I'm sure it's not designed this way, but the end result is still a competition for resources. Schools aren't accelerating their whole class.

I also suspect that most kids, particularly grade schoolers, aren't aware they're competing in this sense. Parents are a different story.

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MVissers 534 days ago
I mean, they should probably prepare people with knowledge of taxes and investing then.

The competition is very obvious in societies with a lot of wealth disparity. In Europe there tends to be less disparity and less competition.

US, China, India, UK, etc, much more disparity so it’s much more important for kids to be ‘top of the field’.

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itishappy 533 days ago
> I mean, they should probably prepare people with knowledge of taxes and investing then.

Fully agree.

> The competition is very obvious in societies with a lot of wealth disparity. In Europe there tends to be less disparity and less competition.

Fascinating observation! Wonder if that shows up at the school level as well? For example, In the US the highest/lowest performing schools tend to correlate to high/low income areas and have significant disparity in quality of education, and I expect this is a strongly self-reinforcing trend towards elite private institutions.

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