Model answer
Written by 8020 teachers. Do not memorise it — take the structure and the way ideas are developed, then speak about your own life.
Q: Is competition good for children?
A: In moderation, yes — it teaches children that effort translates into outcomes and that losing is survivable, which are both useful, resilience-building lessons. But I think it stops being good the moment it becomes the dominant framework children apply to everything, because then self-worth starts getting measured entirely against other people rather than against their own progress. The healthiest version I've seen is competition treated as one tool among several, alongside plenty of activities where the point is simply doing something well, full stop, with no ranking attached.
Q: Should schools rank students?
A: I'm against explicit ranking, mainly because it compresses a huge amount of individual variation — different strengths, different starting points — into a single number that then follows a student around and shapes how they see themselves. Some form of comparison is probably unavoidable and even useful as feedback, but there's a real difference between a student knowing roughly where they stand and a school publicly announcing it. The second version optimises for anxiety about position rather than genuine learning, which seems like the wrong thing to be optimising for.
Q: Does competition improve products and services?
A: Generally, yes, and I think it's one of the clearer cases where competition's benefits are fairly uncontroversial — companies genuinely do improve quality and lower prices when a rival is a phone call away for their customers. Where it breaks down is markets that only look competitive on paper but are actually dominated by two or three players who've quietly settled into not really challenging each other, at which point the appearance of competition stops delivering the benefits. So the mechanism works, but only when the competition is real rather than nominal.
Q: Can too much competition in a society be harmful?
A: I think it can, particularly when it starts crowding out cooperation in areas that actually depend on people working together — healthcare, education, anywhere the outcome for one person shouldn't come at another's expense. A society that treats every interaction as zero-sum ends up spending enormous energy on positioning rather than producing, which is a poor trade even by its own competitive logic. So I wouldn't say competition itself is the problem, more that it needs boundaries around where it's actually the right tool.
Q: Is cooperation more valuable than competition in the workplace?
A: I'd say they solve different problems rather than one being straightforwardly more valuable — competition is good at surfacing who's genuinely best at something quickly, while cooperation is what actually gets complex, interdependent work done once you know who's doing what. Workplaces that lean too heavily on internal competition often end up with people quietly withholding information from each other, which undermines the very productivity competition was supposed to produce. My honest view is cooperation should be the default operating mode, with competition used sparingly and deliberately, rather than the other way round.