[tmotwu]

People need incentives, and being competitive in school-like activities provides them.

Universities have been moving away from evaluating candidates from raw academic or scholastic perspectives. For instance, removing standardized testing from the process. [1,2,3] This has raised concerns and considerable pushback from parents. It raises the uncertainty of admission, even if they raise a child to do everything right and mold them into the standard high achieving student.

Of course, not unwarranted concerns: how do we fairly evaluate a student's external achievements without picking favorites. There is no objective measure to solve that problem.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/us/SAT-scores-uc-universi...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-university-wont-require...

[3] https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/a-special-announcement...

[matt_s]

I was asking how to get kids to explore things where they might find something that sparks them to desire to spend time on "A Project of One's Own".

Competition in school or school-like activities is a fabricated incentive that doesn't have anything to do with kids doing what Paul is talking about with "A Project of One's Own". Chasing a GPA leads to a feedback loop akin to "keeping up with the Joneses" and basically the "plodding along" path in life.

[tmotwu]

Where do you find the balance between spending time maximizing your child's entry into a safe and secure future versus entertaining their passions? Not that being passionate about something and school-like activities are mutually exclusive anyway. Anyway, kids are far too young to decide what they want to do, so college is a good time and place for that already. Most students coming in to top universities come in undeclared.

Maybe Paul's kids have that privilege to go down that riskier alternative. For many others, its non existent and frankly, it is tone deaf.

[TeMPOraL]

> being competitive in school-like activities provides them

To an extent. I keep wondering, wouldn't it be better if schools/universities were structured as PvE challenges, not PvP ones? Trying to elicit a culture of collaboration, instead of pitting students against each other?

I may be strongly biased, because I hate competition outside of games[0], and competitive incentives generally make me stop caring.

--

[0] - Particularly, games in which points are fake and only matter for brief status rewards and after-play joking.

[ItsMonkk]

If I was a Professor teaching the same class to two different sections, it would be really neat to give the entire winning section extra credit based on the difference between the average values of the two sections. This would encourage group study and would ultimately lead to students helping their other classmates out. And since teaching is the best way to learn, everyone would do better.

Maybe you don't even need two sections. Just split the class into two teams? Has this been tried anywhere?

[tmotwu]

Collaboration and competition are not mutually exclusive. Competition does not always result in self-determination. For instance, people mentor others because they might learn something new themselves or grow their network. Thus, you can enjoy collaborating with others while doing so because of your competitive ambitions.