AP courses notwithstanding. AP courses were insanely competitive and speaking as someone had been all over the map in my K12 years (AP, accelerated courses, early foreign language, and a touch of remedial relative to grade level) the students in AP were mainly in competition with themselves. That however is just personal anecdote.
I also suspect that most kids, particularly grade schoolers, aren't aware they're competing in this sense. Parents are a different story.
The competition is very obvious in societies with a lot of wealth disparity. In Europe there tends to be less disparity and less competition.
US, China, India, UK, etc, much more disparity so it’s much more important for kids to be ‘top of the field’.
Fully agree.
> The competition is very obvious in societies with a lot of wealth disparity. In Europe there tends to be less disparity and less competition.
Fascinating observation! Wonder if that shows up at the school level as well? For example, In the US the highest/lowest performing schools tend to correlate to high/low income areas and have significant disparity in quality of education, and I expect this is a strongly self-reinforcing trend towards elite private institutions.