I want to provide a different perspective, because it seems to be missing from there.
Fathers-to-be, please do your damnedest to send your kid to the best school that he/she qualifies for, no two ways about it.
The society doesn't value how moral or upright a person is (I'm not saying it's not a virtuous thing, I'm just saying it's undervalued), and if you are unable to inculcate these values at home, don't expect the school to provide that. To put this aside, it means that the pure duty of the school is an unadulterated academic experience.
Do not, for a moment, think that perceived cutthroat schools have drawbacks on character development. In fact, if anything, by growing up in a competitive environment, it builds up character and resilience.
My parents made the (to me) wrong decision to send me to a sub-par neighborhood school, and in that I missed many opportunities when I was young. It doesn't matter if you graduated first in the entire level for PSLE (I did), but the opportunities were just not around. The financial funding of the school is laughable; we had no money for the lithium batteries for our robots, so we couldn't outlast the faster robots from richer schools in competitions, for example. No money for the lab equipment, no money for better computers, for the software... and this wasn't an isolated problem for my CCA.
It's never just about letting nature take its course. When there is a paucity of resources, you are limiting your kid in every imaginable way possible.
And who is to be blamed? You.
I scored high enough to be awarded a scholarship to attend any independent school in Singapore, and yet my parents didn't feel that I could compete with the best in Raffles and Hwa Chong. I scored well above the median score of students getting into those schools, but to them, I was limited because coming from a poor background, I wasn't just good enough for those schools.
They put me in a school where they thought I would be more comfortable, but the only comfort came in that I had literally no competition. I cruised through the levels, got excellent grades, and had to fight for opportunities that were handed to my peers in Raffles. So much struggle, for?
Why do you want to make a choice to limit your kid's potential, and watch him struggle while others just go onto the freeway for success?
Overcoming unnecessary obstacles, and what happened after I got out of those years? Got scholarships and universities offering their most prestigious programs, took up one, graduated with the highest honors from one of the very best university in the world. You could say that the outcome didn't change if I had gone to Raffles, but what you didn't see are the tears and the pain because the school simply couldn't support you when you need them.
Why do you want to make the task difficult for your kid? My parents made the wrong choice. Don't make it.
You are speaking from real life experience...