The best way for a society to prepare its young people for leadership in government industry or other fields is by instilling in them a sense of cooperation not competition Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree wi

Everybody has their own specific opinions regarding politics and leadership. Walk into a random bar at evening and you will encounter the phenomenon of the "bar philosopher", that person that will resolve all struggles in the world with his/her reasoning. Some do this by cooperation with the people surrounding them in this hypothetical situation, others just do it on their own. This banal event that happens on the corner of every street in every town raises the question for future generations if we should prepare them for leadership by instilling in them a sense of cooperation or competition. Although a fine balance between both seems needed, in the end cooperation might be the more important value.

To begin with, cooperation is most of the time the more difficult quality of the two to teach, however it may give the biggest reward. Cooperation comes forth out of empathy, and by creating bonds between yourself and other individuals, they will feel that same empathy for you. In a society where jobs are getting more and more specific, this quality is extremely valuable. If you are for example good at something and you collaborate with other people who can make use of your specific quality, you will be able to count on them if you need their specific area of knowledge in one of your problems. Since most problems are getting more and more complex, by cooperation one can attain more and better results than by working individually.

Although the previous argument is valid, there is an aspect about competition that seems to be forgotten, which is that it brings out the best in people. By promoting competition, you can let people develop themselves to their full capacity. Out of psychological expreiments there has been proven that if 1 men needs to pull a rope with a weight of 1 ton attached to it, he will pull almost twice as hard than if he is set into a group of 5 men to pull a rope with 5 ton attached to it. Therefore cooperation might introduce the habit to slack of and give a lesser result. If one regards it this way, it is clear that competition gains an edge on cooperation.

However all this is true, the most important factor that comes to play is of course modern society itself. Our society is nowadays so complicated in all its problems that working alone is almost impossible, except for the very few geniuses out there. Therefore, the worries of today and tomorrow should be tackled by a group of people rather than one. And even if you put a group together of people who are extremely competitive, they won't work together as good as a group that learned how to cooperate. Therefore cooperation can reach more in this society than an individual can by being competitive even if the group is slacking of as was reasoned in the previous paragraph.

The conclusion can be made that a fine balance between competition and cooperation needs to be found, with an edge given to cooperation. Although there are certain points that can be made for competition, in our society it will be more important to prepare the young people for leadership by instilling in them a sense of cooperation, since the problems that need to be tackled are becoming too complex to handle alone.