The New Right and education

‘Competition has got a bad name in education circles in recent years, but competition is itself a good thing. Moreover, competition is a fact of life. We live in a highly competitive environment, whether we like it or not. School education should help children to learn to cope with competition, it should teach them how to succeed, how to cope with occasional failure. It is futile and cowardly and ultimately self-defeating for schools to attempt to abolish competition … We all know that the Japanese school system is highly competitive and we all know that this can produce stresses for students. But our own system has become far too uncompetitive so that bright students are not challenged.’‘Our education: nothing short of disaster’, editorial in The Australian, 6 January 1988.