Is Competition In School Helpful or Harmful To The Students?

The school environment provides students with different kinds of competitive activities in different areas. Competitions that exist among students in school include; reading competitions, quiz competitions, debates, sports, games etc. Some individuals believe that these activities help to improve the students mentally and physically, while some others think that they actually serve as a source of discouragement to low competitive students. This article will try to highlight some reasons or factors that propel my decision into supporting that competition in school is actually helpful to students in the discourse that follows.

When we consider some of these activities, where students compete among themselves such as quiz competitions and debates, we will notice that the students are always striving to surpass each other, and in so doing, they succeed in improving their mental capacity and building their Intelligence Quotient. This improvement could not have been very effective without the competitions. It is a clear fact that debates help students to measure their ability to defend or support a subject or topic they claim to have much knowledge about. Debates also help students to learn how to be bold in public while expressing themselves. It also helps students to measure their convincing power as a result of the marks that are being awarded to each speaker for their efforts to convince a moderator. On the other hand, quiz competitions help students to measure their extent of knowledge about a particular subject in comparison to their fellow classmates. Students also build their Intelligence Quotient with the help of quiz competitions.

Sports and games help students to be agile and physically fit. The competitions that normally exist in sports and games help students to learn how to work as a team and individually. It is during sports competitions that students measure their abilities and how good they are in a particular sport; as a result, students use the knowledge of their proficiency to build successful careers on those sporting activities they are good at. The competitions that exist in games like the game of chess help students to learn how to develop winning strategies individually with the use of meticulous thinking. Just like any other school competition, sports and games actually help students to develop sharp thinking and useful strategies as a result of the need and urgency to win. Students’ true capacity in any sports will be unknown without the presence of competitions.

In contrast to some people’s opinion that competition in school is harmful to the students, I strongly believe that it actually encourages and challenges students to do more when they witness the prowess of their fellow students in any school competition.

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