Until i arrived in the West, i didn't realize what's possible with the collaborative approach instead of competing against each other.
In west, average people were teaming up and achieving better result as a group than couple of sharp kids in my country where they spent a lot of effort killing competition.
This is my experience, excuse if it's full of bias.
The thing that I don't think most of these countries realize is, if you've spent an entire child's life teaching them to compete with others, and making that a ticket to their success, all you do is enable that behavior and it becomes a habit.
I've met many foreigners working in the West who strongly believe that because they were top performers academically in their countries they are better than everyone and it shows through in arrogance much more frequently than people who we in the West might consider "top performers". What I like about many Western education systems is the emphasis on collaboration. Some Western countries don't have a national entrance exam and that's really for the best. You create a funnel of homogeneity in your academic system by using that as your qualifying metric without much thought to anything else and your economic development persists on that path with those deemed to be top performers looking down on their fellow citizen.
Of course, I do not want to over generalize. This is not ALWAYS the case and I've also met many foreigners who are humble and amazing to work with and Westerners who are arrogant and dismissive.
I also have no idea what do you mean by killing the competition, are children sabotaging each other somehow ?2
As an example of collaboration we were a group a students that we were solving independently math problems and next day we were helping each other on the hard ones that some could not solve, the ones that nobody could solve we would ask the teacher and he was very happy that we were asking, he helped us and then give us a new list of problems to solve. This worked because we were doing this for fun and we were not forced into it, if someone would have been forced into it he could just copy the solution and done.