Prompt: SOCIAL & POLITICAL

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 with the claim. In developing and supporting your position, be sure to address the most compelling reasons and/or examples that could be used to challenge your position.

Preparing young people for leadership positions at all levels of society requires more than just instilling in them a willingness to cooperate with other people and nations.  While willingness to cooperate is a necessary condition for good leadership, it is not alone sufficient.  In order to understand this argument, one ought to reflect on two different categories of expertise that all good leaders should possess: know-how and know-what. 

The former of these two areas of expertise is sometimes called, by cognitive psychologists, procedural knowledge.  Tying one’s own shoes in the morning is a mundane example of procedural knowledge.  These aspects of daily expertise are learned, and as result lead to prereflective operative life skills. Put differently, knowing how to do something is often accompanied by a level of unawareness about how one goes about doing the task.  On the other hand, knowing what, or declarative knowledge as cognitive psychologists name it, is a form of explicit, often times linguistic, knowledge.  Make no mistake, these two forms of expertise overlap.  Knowing how to tie my own shoes, I could bring my prereflective practice into the domain of conscious, declarative knowledge and teach a child the same set of capacities.  Good leadership skills require both the declarative knowledge that cooperation is necessary, and a procedural knowledge of how best to coordinate the many parts of an organization.  While some parts of an organization might benefit from the spirit of cooperation, others might benefit from competition.