First of all, it is well-known that schools are generally closer to a jungle than to a family. Indeed, children with the best grades can attend better schools and learn in better conditions. Furthermore, studying in a famous school can give more opportunities of work and internships, no matter the students’ grades in the school. Therefore, it creates a concurrency between children, which starts in kindergarden in some countries. For instance, Chinese schools are highly competitive and publish reankings for every exam. Some of them even pick up the best student and the worst and emphasize on their differences in front of all their classmates. This triggers serious problems of health, especially depressions, which yields school failures or even worse, like life-threatening behaviours. Therefore competitions at school can jeopardize students’ welfare.
However, there are some cases were a moderate competition can increase children’s will to prove their knowledge and skills to their teachers and classmates. I personally experienced this process during my studies in middle school. It was unbearable to see how some girls were thinking highly of themselves and looked down on others, while they were cheating for the exams. The only way I found to prove that they were wrong was to obtain better grades, honestly, without any cheat sheet. This quiet fight worked and they became more and more jealous while, in the meantime, their grades fall down. For my part, I managed to enter a correct highschool, then a great university, and now one of the highest selective french school. This illustrates how competition at school can encourage children’s will to learn.
To conclude, even though school pressure can create failures and severe problems in children’s development, it can also, at least in some cases, trigger student’s will to perform and make them achieve great things.