Education is set up as a competition - in schools, students compete against their peers in their class, in their school, and sometimes (when it comes to national competitive exams) in their entire country. Often in schools this competition is to gain access to the more desirable higher education opportunities; in tertiary education it is to gain access to desirable employment opportunities. And in addition to the competition derived from actual scarcity of opportuntiies, there is also the manufactured competition in pursuit of various awards that supposedly motivate students to perform better.
But when it is operated as a competition, we have to accept that there can be winners only when there are losers. Of course, it's easy to throw the failures under the bus as "they just didn't work hard enough and make use of the opportunities available to them". Apart from the shocking privilege blindness (especially around class and neuroidentities), "working harder" doesn't really eliminate losers - it can only change who wins in a zero-sum game. Worse still, it just intensifies the competition - the more high stakes the exams are, the more likely it is to see teaching-to-the-test and harm to the emotional, social and physical well-being of the beneficiaries - or is it better to call them victims?
Instead, what if we simply accepted that human capabilities are so diverse that any form of competition is going to advantage some and disadvantage others, and stop trying to compete? And instead we try to support each other as much as possible so that we can all go further to wherever we want to go? It is only with this collaboration that we can unlock Learning With practices.