Highest Schools Competition (HSC)

Publication of final high school exam results (Higher School Certificate) in New South Wales (such an inaccurate metaphor in that original naming of the colony) each November, produces an orgy of comparative tables of school results and glorification of the highest achievers in each subject. 

I don’t remember this happening in my end of school era, but these days it has assumed bizarre proportions and is never questioned as an unhealthy, competitive obsession. Or is that obsessive competition? Does it come from our quasi-religious sporting ethos? And what about the other students, who’ve also toiled honestly, and the virtues of modesty and solidarity? I don’t reckon this is Tall Poppy Syndrome, as we’ve created these vainglorious podiums.

Such display of scholastic ‘winners’ is unknown in France and Germany, and I suspect in the rest of Europe, where it would be seen as wholly inappropriate and intrusive. And maybe because of an unspoken need to temper our worst instincts, explained by Rousseau in 1752 in his treatise On the Origin of the Inequality of Mankind:

“I would show how much this universal desire for reputation, honours and preferment, which consumes us all, exercises and compares talents and strengths, how much it excites and multiplies the passions, and in making all men competitors, rivals, or rather enemies, how many reverses, catastrophes of every kind it daily causes by leading so many contenders to run the same course. I would show that this ardour to be discussed, this frenzy to achieve distinction, which takes us beyond ourselves, that we owe what is best and what is worst among men, our virtues and our vices, our sciences and our errors, our conquerors and our philosophers: that is to say a multitude of bad things for a small number of good things.”

(Berlin Wall – East End Gallery)