“Quite simply, not enough schools perform like the best. In fact, results tend to hover around the national average.” — A UK government minister explains education
On of Richard Stallman’s points was that software producers need to stop competing with each other in order to ensure our output is the best that it can possibly be. Ayn Rand argued that we need to compete with each other constantly in order to ensure our output is the best that it can possibly be.
The wish to make more things brilliant and less of them mediocre drives a lot of people, from the greatest entrepreneurs and inventors to whichever hapless minister produced the quotation with which I began this article (I was unable to find any source on the web, and I’m forced to admit it may have been apocryphal.)
But the method by which we make the world a better place is a fiercely contentious question, and many of the people on the extremes will, when push comes to shove, put ideology ahead of results. Nothing wrong with that, but it leaves those of us in the middle lacking clear role models when it comes to pursuing a more consequentialist approach. This is particularly difficult to do when we identify strongly with their goals, if not their ideologies.