One night a few weeks ago, my husband and I got caught up in a discussion about the American school system. The subject came up after a phone call with my sister. Seems my nephew, who juuuust missed the cut-off age for kindergarten, is totally bored with pre-k, besides playtime. He finishes the work early, then basically just messes around, bugging the other kids. (Note: My sister's been schooling him in the basics for a while now -- colors, letters, basic math, beginner's reading, and so on -- so he's pretty much just going over what he already knows.) When my sister told the teacher that he's bored, the teacher quickly returned with "He's doing fine here" and "He would probably be left behind in kindergarten" without really telling my sister WHY he'd be left behind. Now she's frustrated, and she's a little unnerved about asking the school to push him to the older class as she doesn't want to seem like the "My little Billy is magnificent!!!" type Mom. So, he is still in that class and she continues to tutor him at home on more advanced subjects.

I'm not bragging on my nephew. He is quite smart, and is quite good with words and numbers at five. I can see where a lesson on this is the color red, what is red? would make him antsy. I assumed the teacher thinks he's too rambunctious right now for a higher class -- whether it's the boredom that makes him so, or his general energy-filled self, I don't know.

The grand wizard got CRAZY disdainful about this. If he can do the work, he said, then they should move him up, end of story.

And then, my goodness, the rant. The angry rant! He went on and on: that high school math and science is a joke, based on he saw in my siblings' textbooks when they were still in high school and my brother in law's experience when he was an exchange student, calling it stuff for middle schoolers; that the school system doesn't urge students enough to pursue the academic things they are actually good at as well as enjoy from a young age so that they can go to college or vocational school ready to go; that the fact that standardized tests don't also judge a student's actual abilities as well as retention is idiotic; that having states and local communities determine when and what is learned prevents our country's education system from being unified -- and not only that, is really, really dangerous, since a community can decide crucial things like not teaching kids about sexual health or teaching kids that creationism is a valid competitor to the theory of evolution; that students shouldn't all go to the same schools -- students should test frequently to determine what type of school they end up in throughout elementary and secondary school (i.e., maths, science, languages, vocational, etc.); that having sports as an essential part of school rather than a community activity or only for PE is embarrassing.

"You guys are the opposite of the French," he said. "The French are too rigid -- not enough freedom to move if skills are discovered later in childhood. The U.S. is WAY, WAY too loose. There are children who can't read, can't think critically, believe stupid things, and are no good for anything but McDonald's after high school!"

He went so far as to say that if we had kids, he'd seriously consider moving to another country for their education. He thinks a child who goes to school here, based mostly on what he sees of friends and my family, get out of secondary school with only a rudimentary amount of education, and are so unsure about what kind of career they want, fritter away years of their life and income trying to find something to do with themselves.

Now, I wasn't really expecting the rant, but I was intrigued by his breakdown of U.S. schools as an outsider. So I wanted to ask, does anyone feel that his points were valid?

Yes. We objectively have horrible schools; among the worst in the industrialised world (based upon results).

Also anecdotally, the "get out of secondary school with only a rudimentary amount of education, and are so unsure about what kind of career they want, fritter away years of their life and income trying to find something to do with themselves" pretty much sums up the past fifteen years of my life.

Well, I've never seen the US school system, so I can't comment directly on it. However, as someone who's not good at rote memorisation (we used to call it 'parroting' when I was in school), I would like to mention that I believe it to be a thoroughly bad idea. And not just because I was horrible at it. Because it is a terrible way to test whether someone actually understands what they are looking at. In theory, one can parrot back a passage on quantum mechanics perfectly without being able to tell you whether the charge on an electron is positive or negative.

I have to say, most of this I agree with. I spent my elementary and secondary school years in a Catholic school. They really pushed us and tested us often to see who needed to move up a level, who needed to stay behind, and who just needed the advanced class. When I started a public high school, the entire year was like a review course to just breeze through even though it was one of the better school districts in the area. They just happened to focus more on the sports programs than education or arts.

And that energy is often mistaken as ADHD or even ADD simply because the child is bored.

I had this problem along with several other people I know. The classes generally move too slowly for those who pick up the lessons quickly and the higher classes require you to have taken these lower ones first. Had I been placed in Algebra pre-high school, I would have been able to get through Calculus, but as they thought my ADD and boredom with slow learning was just me not getting the concepts I was held back to take pre-algebra (essentially Algebra I) a second time. It's frustrating for the children and the teachers alike, but our system isn't set up to alleviate the problem.

Let's break the rest of this down piece by piece:

It really is a joke. Biology, chemistry, algebra, geometry...all of them are taught in middle school and even elementary. High school just expands on them individually. Personally, this is something that, unless you have a vested interest in a single one, the Bio and chem could be merged or cut down to a semester each and the same with algebra and geometry. Unless you plan to focus on a single subject for anything, there's no use wasting it one someone who isn't going to need it. A mathematician does not need chemistry. Physics could be a semester as well, but it's not really taught beyond it's existence pre-high school.


Everything is so standardized right down to putting everyone on the same level as what they should know whether they like it or not. I get the even playing field, but there aren't even enough options once you get to high school to pursue something you're passionate about. I could have taken more art classes. I like art and I could have gotten better at it, but I only had so many classes to choose from outside my core classes and choir took up two spaces once I reached my third year and got into the highest level choir we had. I was good at it, but I was required to take 3 years of a foreign language that I didn't even like. I just had a head start because I took Spanish I in middle school.


This is really problematic. Not everyone learns the same way, nor do they need to be judging knowledge based on memory regurgitation. Just because you can memorize it, doesn't mean you know how to apply it and use it.


You know I never even got a sex ed class in high school? They've started relying on middle schools to teach it and what 10 year old is going to grasp that concept? I think the only reason I even know about creationism is because I was in a private Catholic school for 8 years. There is no theology in public schools even though so many of the students have religious beliefs. They completely cut a huge chunk of knowledge out and just tell the kids to ignore it like it doesn't exist. I may not support religion based on peer pressure and the like, but I do support the option for learning about the different beliefs so that the children can draw their own conclusions.


I have so much hope that this will happen. A guy I know lives in India and he's still about 16-17 and studying to start a path to med school.


Millions of dollars go toward sports programs out of the school budgets when they could easily use those to start more technical type classes or improving other programs. I know fine arts could be moved to community programs too, but what community in Texas is actually going to put any importance on something that isn't sports related? At least my high school offered an off-campus PE option for those of us already involved in something. My competitive horse riding counted as well as the gymnasts and the people who were national teams.


As sad as it is, we are so loose with how we teach our children that I'd be willing to put my son into a Catholic school just to make sure he gets the best education available.

To be fair, it doesn't actually matter whether you say the charge on an electron is positive or negative, as long as you're consistent about it.

Listening to our nation talk about even simple problems like the effectiveness of vaccines and their supposed link to autism, I find it hard to believe we don't need more mathematics, chemistry, and biology than we are getting. They should be different, undoubtedly, but not less.

My point was that these classes in high school are just an expansion on what we are taught in elementary and middle school. They could easily be taught as semester classes to provide a little more insight and freeing up class space to either take something else that a student is more interested in and possibly more suited for or go into another math/science class they are interested in, but I'm not saying they shouldn't still provide the higher levels. If a student has an interest in mathematics or the sciences then they can go into a higher level class that is more specialized. There are plenty of students that just take the classes because they are required and have no interest in them whatsoever. College course guidelines have you taking very specific math or science classes sometimes or else it's a take your pick and move on.

I've just got one thought to offer, and that's on America's long resistance to any form of national curriculum (and often state curricula). Objections are often phrased in terms of opposition to "teaching to the test", which squashes creative and critical thinking and forces students to just memorize a bunch of crap that they'll forget 10 seconds after handing in their exam papers.

These objections arise primarily because the tests are poorly designed and don't actually measure what they purport to measure. Those multiple-choice fill-in-the-bubble tests are the worst. As are tests that only test the ability to regurgitate knowledge. There are plenty of ways to structure a test so that they assess useful things. Even a short written answers test will more adequately show whether a student can apply their knowledge to a question. A timed essay test requires a lot of complex skills, including the ability to think critically on the spot, form a coherent argument, and express yourself on paper. And there are plenty of non-exam based forms of assessment that are more useful. Write a research paper. Do an experiment and write it up. Sure, you can't just run those things through a bubble-detection machine, and you need, gasp, human beings to mark them. But that's an argument for better-designed tests with adequate manpower behind them, not an argument for no testing at all.

I feel the same way about school as I went through (class of '94) but, having teachers in my family, I've also seen the changes being made to the education system and some of them are quite good.

Please elaborate, this sounds interesting.

it's funny to see Americans complaining that their school system forces people to learn all sorts of general things they don't really need instead of allowing them to focus in detail on things they're interested in. Reason being, in the British education system you have much more freedom to specialise, and it is thus criticised as failing to provide people a general enough knowledge and skills base!

I think part of the problem here is a 'grass is always greener' way of thinking about things. Both education systems can see theres a problem, but no-one really knows what it is. Nobosy, in my opinion, knows how to answer the question 'What is the best school system?'. Clearly, lots of people think they do, which is one reason politicians love reforming education so much (listening to the conservatives recent plans to reform education in Britain only made me realise how many times the curriculum has already been reformed in the decade or so since I finished school), but none of them actually do.

First, you have to question exactly what the point of education is. Is it to provide people with skills they need in everyday life? To give people a good understanding of the world? To enable people to find a job? I'm not even sure I'm clear on what the answer to that should be.

More importantly, we don't know because, as with a lot of public policy, it's not the sort of thing that's ever been systemativally tested. If we could agree on an outcome we're looking for in education, then we could try assigning schools randomly to different policies, and seeing which ones are most effective. Until we do that, we're just aimlessly shooting in the dark with each reform and not really understanding any better how to improve educational systems.

One last point to be considered before anyone pontificates about the best or worst sort of education systems, is to take a look at the educational rankings Freaky provided earlier. The best two perfomers (consistently) are South Korea and Finland. The two country's educational systems couldn't be more dissimilar. Finland's free-learning, cooperative, hippy-paradise style contrasts totally with Korea's authoritarian, traditionalist, rote-learning system. And they both seem to work well, at least at the metrics used in the ranking.

Clearly, this is a complicated issue.

I suspect that primarily it should be to teach people how to be good and engaged citizens (there used to be this little subject called "Civics"). Then probably to give them a basic set of general skills (the "three R's).

Part of the problem, as well, is that University degrees are over-valued, which has tended to try and force specialization to occur ever earlier in the education system


It's also worth noting that the two country's cultures are radically different in general.

In general, I'm of the opinion that any country's Dept of Education should be limited to setting standards for various curricula, and not in the minutiae of how education is delivered. I also think that schools are not one of those area legitimately paid for by taxes. And that the failure of the educational system in general, but the success of private and charter schools, seems to provide empirical evidence that education would do better if left to the market.

Canada has charter schools?

I did not know that.

EDIT: Huh. Canada is rated 3, 5 and 2 respectively on FB's list. Alberta is the only Province I can find with charter schools. So I assume, unless there's a HUGE amount of private schools, public education in Canada is doing quite well for iself.

I think I'm going to delve into just why that is.

You know, between the healthcare system, the general quality of life factor and the school system, I am, for the first time in my life, genuinely considering emigration to Canada. It's not across oceans so visiting family shouldn't be too much of a horror (and it's not like either I or my husband have never been separated by long distances from family), my husband and I are university-trained and plan on continuing our education beyond BS and BA, Toronto and Ottowa seem like pretty sweet locals, my husband's already done the whole immigration thang and doesn't really need to go full citizenship in the U.S. if he doesn't want to, so he can emigrate through his Russian passport...and Russia has better relations with the Canadians than with the U.S. ...hmmmm....

Now to look up the general job market. Perhaps I can convince the husband that attending grad school in the U.S. isn't totally necessary....

Alberta has charter schools. There's a fairly vigorous alternative (i.e., Catholic) school system, a French (i.e., for Quebec emigres...if that's the right term in this context) system and plenty of private schools.

On the other hand, the nature of the various school boards in Canada and of Provincial oversight aren't really directly comparable to those in the US. The US is uniquely bad, for whatever reasons. But even in the US, some places are supremely bad (California, or so I've heard) and some are quite good...so it's not exactly a universal.

The charter school experiment begun in New Orleans after Katrina seems to be producing interesting results - that's for certain.

Over here, we have both private and public schools, and they each play their part in education. The part of the public schools is to ensure that everyone has access to education, whether they can afford the school fees or not (each public school has a feeder area, and they are not allowed to reject applications from pupils who live in that feeder area; and there are circumstances in which school fees must be waived).

A private school, run for-profit, has no incentive to operate in an area where there is a lot of poverty; since it will not make a profit there. I think that that alone is reason enough for taxes to be used to provide schooling.