ABSTRACT
The olympiads offer themselves as opportunities for teachers to travel and meet their peers from other schools. However critics charge that olympiads encourage teachers to focus on only a few promising students, coaching them for the competitions, while neglecting the rest of the students in the class. In other words, a practice that began during the socialist era is criticised as elitist – geared solely towards gifted students – in the post-socialist period. During communist times, olympiads were celebrated for encouraging ‘socialist competition’ in the service of the common good. The idea was that only the very best would lead; but what constitutes the common good nowadays? As with the previously listed controversies, the arguments against olympiads are framed in terms of modernisation: in a modern democracy all students, rather than simply a few, should be mentored for excellence. According to this argument the only teachers who should be rewarded are those that have helped to raise the performance of the entire class, as opposed to just a few high-performing students. In the end, however, both bonus systems were established side by side: the traditional bonus system, based on olympiads and targeting a small group of high-performing students, and a bonus system based on the OBE contract that supposedly rewarded teachers who improved all students’ learning achievements in a class.
