Competition is not a bad thing as long as it is healthy. We also need to understand that we can’t always be better than everyone else.
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Sometimes we work very hard to be good at something, while there are people who seem naturally gifted at that same thing, people who are so talented that they don’t even need to work as hard to excel at it.
Honestly, when it comes to school grades, I miss the days when schools used to include students’ positions in class on their results. Those positions, along with the prizes given during end-of-year parties, were strong sources of motivation. The top students would work even harder to maintain their position, while others would tighten their belts and try their best to beat them.
I think it became a problem when parents started complaining. Private school owners, not wanting to lose students, gradually stopped ranking students and only showed grades. In my opinion, this reduced the competitive spirit among students.
When I was in JSS 2, there was a boy who always took the first position in class, followed by a girl who firmly held the second position. No one ever came close to displacing them. It remained that way until we finished JSS 3 and eventually moved to different schools.
Later, my parents transferred me to a public school. A few weeks after I resumed, the most brilliant boy from my former school was admitted there as well. But things were different in this new environment. In my former private school, we were only 14 students in a class. In the public school, we had over 80 students, and many of them were even more brilliant than he was.
There was one particular guy who always topped the class, and no one could beat him until we graduated from secondary school. In fact, during WAEC, our department had a massive failure in Mathematics. Only one person passed the subject, and it was that same boy.
Many of us wondered why he was so brilliant until we heard his story from a classmate who lived close to his house. His father was a strict disciplinarian. After school, the boy still attended extra lessons, which kept him ahead of the class. Meanwhile, people like me would get home from school, drop our bags, eat, and go out to play until night. Most of the time, hard work truly pays. I believe that if I had taken my studies even more seriously back then, I also had the potential to be very brilliant.
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Now, back to the issue of students going to extreme lengths to pass exams, taking hard drugs to stay awake, starving themselves, or overworking their bodies just to read. In my opinion, they are only harming themselves, and the blame should not be placed on schools for setting high standards.
If we look closely at many of these students who starve or overwork themselves during exams, we will often discover that they didn’t take their studies seriously until exam time. Some people will not open their books until just a few days before exams, and then they start doing all sorts of extreme things to try to catch up.
But learning doesn’t work that way. Education is supposed to be gradual. If they had studied consistently from the beginning, they wouldn’t feel the need to stay up all night or rely on harmful substances. At that point, they would only need to revise what they already understand.
So I don’t think schools should be blamed for setting high standards. High standards help produce the best students.
And if someone cannot cope in such an environment, other schools may better match their level. Some brilliant students can thrive in highly competitive environments, so it’s not wise to force yourself to belong where you truly cannot cope.
Personally, I love healthy competition.
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