Student Essay - Do people place too much emphasis on winning? – Sandy, Year 10, Canadian International School

Do people place too much emphasis on winning? – Sandy, Year 10, Canadian International School

What does ‘winning’ mean to people? Does it mean being the best or much better than others? People today like to emphasize on winning. They think that winning is the only way to be recognized. However, is that true? There is a story about a student from Gangnam High School in Korea which proves that too much emphasis on winning can bring tragic results.

In Gangnam, which is well-known as the center of education in Korea, there was an honor student. Since he graduated from primary school, he always achieved the first place in school. He was excellent at all his subjects. However, he had a problem. It was his mother. He could withstand any stress caused by his studies but he could not tolerate his mother’s excessive pressure on him. Although he was the best student in his entire school, this was not enough for his mother. She wanted him to be the best in the whole country. To achieve his mother’s goal, he could not get enough sleep and he had to be watched by his mother every day while he was studying. If his grades did not satisfy his mother, she could punish him by hitting him with a golf club. 

He tried to understand his mother’s situation. She was divorced and lonely. She tried to fill the void with his grades. One day, the unbearable stress reached its limit. On January 18, 2012, the body of his mother was discovered by his neighbours. The boy was arrested and sent to jail. Two years later, reporters went to the prison to interview him. He told them he didn’t regret what he had done. If given another chance, he would do the same thing all over again. 

As this story shows, a lot of people today place too much emphasis on winning. They think that being the ‘first’ is the only way to win. In this story, the pressure that the mother put on her child turned him into a murderer and destroyed his life. What would his life have been like if his mother hadn’t forced him to ‘win’? We don’t know whether he would have done well or not, but we can be sure that he would not have become a ‘monster’ and commit such a violent crime. Through this story, people should realize that not all ‘emphasis on winning’ is good. Sometimes, too much of it could lead to a disastrous ending.