Everyone is a Winner

Education is one of the most important pillars that shape a culture. In the New York Times article, "My Family's Experiment in Extreme Schooling", Clifford Levy recounts his experience in Russia and sending his three children to a Russian private school in which they were taught completely in Russian and most teachers couldn't speak English. Most of the article is about his children's experience in the school but what stuck out to me was a brief comparison to the Brooklyn public school they had previously attended.

In Russia, "children were graded and ranked, with results posted". However, as most of us are accustomed to in the U.S., his school in Brooklyn "instill[ed] an everyone's-a-winner ethos".

This "everyone's-a-winner" thinking is evident everywhere in a America. Kids on sports teams get trophies simply for showing up and we have devised a system at my high school where grades are kept as private as possible to defuse the competition around academics.

This system has its advantages, however, as Levy noted in his article, tough competition can sometimes be the best motivator. At the Russian school, the grades of all the students would be posted and ranked with categories for the best and worst students. Levy's children comment on this different system and how it pushed them to keep trying their hardest, even when they couldn't understand what their teachers were saying. By the time they left Russia, not only were they fluent in Russian but they were also at the top of the ranking.

In comparison to the system I've grown up in, posting grades seems like a crazy, unhealthy system and I honestly can't imagine how it would change my already hyper-competitive school environment. But, as frustrating and stressful as it sounds, I know that posting grades would definitely push me to work to be the best student I can be.

America is facing the new reality that we might not be #1 anymore with countries like China pumping out smart kids left and right and beating our test scores. People are baffled, wondering how it's happening, but it's all embedded in how we motivate our children and how that supports our education system.

I'm curious, what incentive would propel American students to excel academically? Do American students need intrinsic or extrinsic motivation?