Encouraging a sense of competition in children or teaching them cooperation?

Competition or Cooperation?

Some people think that a sense of competition in children should be encouraged. Others believe that children who are taught to cooperate rather than compete to become more useful adults.

Give reasons to support your opinion or include any relevant examples from your own experiences or knowledge.

In this day and age, while there is a growing belief encouraging a sense of competition in children is highly recommended, others voice their contrasting opinions expressing cooperation should be taught for them to become useful in the near future. To me, I prefer competition to cooperation as the benefit of competition in shaping a person to the best overweighs the point of learning from others in cooperation.

It is understandable that increasing cooperation among children can open their minds to approach others' sharing. As each individual is the unique one, cooperating is a good way to learn new things from others. Take myself as an example; last year, I had a chance to participate in HVIET, one of the most well-known summer camp in Vietnam. There I met a great number of excellent students from all over the country as well as gifted Harvard students. Though we divided into big groups in order to partake in mini-games, I did not feel competitive at all. Whatever the results of such games were, we created strong bonds in a team to do all tasks given together and made long-lasting friendships in order to exchange useful information and help each other to successfully achieve universities' targets.

However, I agree with the idea that a sense of competition prompts school children to develop to be better. In fact, being competed means having comparison with others and it is the sheer consequence that motivates a person to try their best to get perfection. My younger sister, for instance, has become a hard-working student thanks to competition she has experienced. When she attended primary school, her teacher awarded valuable books to whom attained mark 10 at three main subjects. At first, it was not straight-forward for her at all. However, when her friends made it, she was willing to concentrate on her study more than ever, which then not only brought her worthwhile rewards but also changed her characteristics positively in school work.

In conclusion, the feeling of competitive should be spread in children's learning environments more than cooperation for the aforementioned reasons.
(348 words)
I will be grateful to all of your remarks.Thank you. I am self-learning to get 6.5 or above in IELTS writing.

Since you are self studying, the first thing I want to call attention to is your word count. Always, practice using a timer so that you can find out if you write 275 or 300 words because, believe me, there is no way you can write 348 words during the actual test. Just remember this advice: Write 5 sentences per paragraph. You can't go wrong. That is the magic number of sentences you have to write if you are pursuing the highest possible score for your work. If you use a timer, you will notice that you will always be writing well within this sentence count. Anything more and you go overtime. You won't be able to double check the work for mistakes.

Your first paragraph, the prompt paraphrase should not contain the start of the discussion. This paragraph only focuses on the prompt restatement because of the 5 sentence requirement per paragraph. A more appropriate paraphrase for this statement is:

There is a discussion these days regarding whether or not children should be prodded to compete with one another. While some believe that kids should be inspired to compete, others think that lessons in collaboration between adolescents would offer better lessons that they can apply to their lives when they become grownups. I believe that rivalries offer more lessons to juveniles for several reasons.

My version provides a different version of the prompt discussion and requirements while changing the total presentation. That is the aim of the first paragraph, to show the examiner that you have a sufficient understanding of the English language and a wide enough vocabulary to state the original discussion in your own way. This is where the reading and comprehension skills come into play with the TA score. So you have to make sure to develop a good paraphrase in this paragraph.

Your second paragraph does not support your stance that competition teaches better lessons. The sense of competition in this discussion pertains to single person activities. In your example, you used a group competition example. This runs counter to your position because you had to cooperate within your team to win the game. This was a team competition, which does not function on the same requirements as single person competitions. So this reasoning is not very strong and the example, does not support the correct stance due to the team set up.

The example using your sister is more aligned with the competition point of view because of the way that she was driven to compete by her friend's success. However, it does not show a lesson that would serve her well or provide benefits when she becomes and adult. Therefore, the total body of paragraph discussion does not properly provide the requested information by the prompt.

Based on these observations, and owing to the language errors in the essay, I believe that your essay would get a score of around 4. Don't worry, you are just getting started. If you review the other practice essays at this forum and put the advice given to the other users into practice with your own work, you should get better at responding to the Task 2 essays.