Portfolio Task 4

          Children need appropriate education to gain necessary qualifications for their future career. Some people advocate that they ought to be taught to become competitive, while others claim that they should learn how to unite with other people. This essay will reflect upon these two arguments.

          Indeed a sense of competitiveness is essential, especially for children to attain better personal performance. If children are taught early to be competitive, they might as well be familiar with stiff rivalries and have a rational perspective. More importantly, competitiveness proves to be a motive to encourage children's efforts in order to be recognized, in other words, be noticeable. Thus, schools often stick examination results on the bulletin board afterwards. Some students achieving top marks may feel proud of themselves; meanwhile, students who gained satisfactory grades will make greater attempts to keep up with their more brilliant classmates. In short, one of the effective ways to stimulate children's initiative is training their competitiveness.

          However cooperation is an indispensible factor for group work, which is demanding team work. Children often have to participate in a number of group activities and when they grow up, they will accomplish many tasks with their colleagues. Inherently, a large amount of work is divided into sections to suit the specialized knowledge of each person and this will make it much simpler to complete. Therefore, if they lack a cooperative spirit, children will become unhelpful and counterproductive in the long run.

          My view is that both competitiveness and cooperation are required from children. Contrary to popular belief in conflict, they supplement each other with a view to generating  highly efficient workforce.