Are elite schools necessary?

This article discusses the question whether it is better for a country's education system to have homogeneous or heterogeneous student communities in schools, i.e. whether it is a good thing that there are a few high performing schools and many low performing ones. This question is discussed through the example of the Finnish school system, which is comprehensive, and results in high performance in competence tests such as PISA, and the Hungarian school system, which is selective, and favours talented students, resulting in poor PISA performance but excellent results at international student competitions. A lecture given in 2015 at an event organised by the Kalevala Finnish-Hungarian cultural group is cited.