school does suck. or rather, is does most of the time. i think outside of school also sucks most of the time. what i mean is, those rare instances of mentoring

school does suck. or rather, is does most of the time. i think outside of school also sucks most of the time. what i mean is, those rare instances of mentoring, nurturing, collaboration, sharing--those can happen anywhere. maybe they tend to happen outside of school more often. i don't know. but many times, people view each other as being on opposing teams. competition is great--i love being motivated by a sweet prize, pushing myself towards some awesome goal--but false competition, in which people strive to one-up each other needlessly, hoarding knowledge and putting others down to lift themselves up, really sucks. we can accomplish a lot more together by helping each other out. i was hoping it would be a presentation on the culture of "we're all learning and getting better" in open source and beyond. nonetheless, this is a reasonable angle; change comes on multiple fronts.