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 disagre

The task of how we educate our youth for future positions in leadership should not be taken lightly. While the job of our teachers is to educate our youth in various fields of knowledge, every teacher (and also parent) has the duty to instill the values that will ensure they are prepared for leadership. Many argue that competition at a young age will help children the best adapt to the intensity of leadership roles in America. When there is greater competitive intensity, our students learn to thrive and excel past previously known boundaries. While competition does have some use value in preparing students for leadership, it does not exceed the worth of cooperation, which should be the main value, with which we imbue our future leadership. Cooperation will ensure that students are have the moral integrity, openess to new ideas, and capacity for international partnership that is necessary for our leaders to suceed.

Leadership requires that our future leaders have a strong moral integrity that can prepare them for the gritty side of business. It is no doubt that our leaders are the greatest source of inspiration for our nation. Traditionally, in times of trouble, we have looked to our leaders, as beacons of moral integrity. For example, the moral integrity of Franklin D. Roosevelt was the reason he decided to entire the Second World War, despite our initial stance of neutrality. Once Pearl Harbor had been bombed, he realized the war represented more than a simple conflict in Europe, but a conflict in world values of democracy versus autocracy. For this reason, the US entered the war under the moral aegis of our leader and helped defeat the Axis Powers, bringing an end to the attrocities and genocides that had occured. There is no doubt that this decision was difficult but it demonstrated the need for moral integrity in our leaders. Such moral integrity does arise from the self-interest of competition, but rather from the value of cooperation. Through cooperation with others, we learn of the various backgrounds and beliefs that inform the world. Moral integrity is a quality that a leader must actual learn through others. For without interactions with others, we could not learn about moral ideas, such as the good of the communtiy or the good of society. Sometimes the good of society requires that we go against our competitive urges, which is also what occured during World War II, as Roosevelt had to work with the Soviet Union our major competitors, to ensure we won the war. Therefore, leadership requires a strong moral integrity that understands the common good of the people.

Leadership, simply put, can never be done alone. No one could ever run an entire, or even a large business, their own way without regard for others in the field. Therefore, we should strive to inculcate our youth with values of cooperation and selflessness that can squash the selfish drive that pure competition can often engender. For example, a leader of a company could not successfully lead unless he understood the various components of his companies. A company is never merely one person, but a complex system of cogs and gears. While it is the leader who provides the overall vision for the company, the business leader must also rely on information from more skilled people inside his business to suceed. For example a CEO of a giant tech company may have little understanding of the technical production of his product. If his idea for a design contravenes with the technical possibilites of production, the leader must engage with the head mechanical engineer in his company to find a way to produce the company's vision. Leadership is, thus, always a cooperation among individuals and can never boil down to one person.

Finally, cooperation prepares us for leadership in a global world that demands international partnerships. For better or worse, we live in a world where more and more US companies find themselves overseas and our government finds itself in large international alliances, such as NATO and the UN. With these international organizations, leadership is defined by the collective whole and never merely by one individual. Global problems cannot be assuaged via competition, as competition is too narrow-minded and self-focused to solve global issues. For example, one issue that plagues our planet today is global warming. The difficulty in addressing the issue is that countries believe that focusing its energy on solving global warming will damage the economy and industry of many non-ecological ways of life, such as driving cars or companies that produce large amounts of collective waste. What leadership demands to solve the most pressing issue of our times is cooperation among nations to ensure that all nations are in agreement on how to move forward with this issue. Only though cooperation could we ensure that we leave a better world for the future.