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shows that the industrialised nations which score better than the US are those like Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands - nations which tend to stress cooperation and teamwork in their education systems - and which certainly put much less emphasis on competition than the US system. yet these nations are more competitive - much more in some cases.
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I won't claim to be an expert on the subject, but giving my two cents as everyone is prone to do, I think it's a dangerous association to think that just because X Countries > America that the cause is due to some illogical cooperative model, rather than many other factors that can be attributed to skewing the results one way or the other.
Certainly it MIGHT be the reason, but so could a myriad of other things.
It's wholly counterintuitive, in my belief, to think anything other than struggle and competition breeds the best possible results whereas cooperation and group-think does nothing but stagnate process and reduce it to the proverbial lowest common denominator.
Barron Vangor Toth
www.BarronVangorToth.com