A Great Education

cannot be ofund in America...this article I thought illuminated the point very well.

http://www.reason.com/hod/js011306.shtml

While I agree that in the US's case it may be sensible to allow wider opportunities for education, I feel it necessary to make some forewarnings. The government cannot simply parcel the problem off to the private sector and expect everything to be ok. In even the richest societies there will always be students from poor or apathetic families who have the means to do perfectly well inspite of their circumstances.

Maybe America should allow privately run schools (needless to say poorer students will not get in). But if the government does not address the issue of students who can't afford such schools and just think the private sector will invisibly take care of everything they are seriously mistaken. Build bridges for all students, not just those from wealthy and attentive families.

A voucher system will simply increase private school fees. You'll just have to pay the current fees PLUS a voucher to get in.

Increasing monetary demand, with no other action, just pushes up prices.

(It's possible you might get some new entries on the supply side, with cheap private schools being set up at the low-quality end. But generally the higher quality schools will just put up their prices.)

I agree that government monopolies are generally bad in situations where there is profit involved. But pre-universitary education is not one of those situations. I went to school until grade 8 in Romania, in a system that had been setup by a communist regime, and I can tell you that it was much more advanced than the North American system. Once I moved to Canada, I didn't learn anything new in math, science, chemistry and biology until grade 11! I'm fairly confident that a grade 10 Romanian student could pass an SAT equivalent with flying colors.

The problem with the North American system is first and foremost that it is oriented towards giving everyone a very basic education; the student that it has in mind is the mediocre student. The European and Asian school systems are designed with the good students in mind. An average European student is challenged a lot more than an American student. The level of difficulty in the North American education system increases like a parabola, increasingly getting more difficult as time goes by, especially in university. By contrast, the difficulty level in European and East Asian education systems is more linear, so in lower grades they have a huge head start over their American counterparts. The only time that American or Canadian students can catch up is in university.

Every single school system has its problems regarding poor teachers and funding, but I think that these are primarily not to blame for the education of the American students. It is a systemic problem of approach instead.

I went to Catholic schools and an independent (non public) university, and I think I got a pretty good education.  Most of the people I know would agree, I think.

It probably depends on where you are.  Many innercity schools and those systems in the deep south and Appalachia don't have the stronger schools as resources are more limited.

Because of the new push in test scores, public high school kids in my neighborhood are getting homework that is heavier than mine was.  One 16 year old said his daily homework assignments took about six hours, due to AP in his case, and he had cut back on his other school activities.

Another kid said hers were often 5 hours a day or so. 

Well, in Belgium you are very close to populations that speak other languages.  In the U.S., not so.  Languages are a "use it or lose it" skill.  Academic training in languages is probably not going to help you in colloquial conversation as all that changes frequently.  You sound like a dictee in the textbook!

All you French Canadians, don't get upset, but on a trip to Quebec, in a cafe, I was ridiculed by natives because:  "he can't speak French, ha ha ha."  Well, true enough, but it is they who seem to need to speak English to get along.  It was the unfriendly attitude that pissed me off.

After all, the official lingua franca of AE is....English. 

First of all, as a Quebecois, I apolgoize for the bad experience you had here in Quebec. Second, don't generalize your experience to all Quebecois. It's as silly to generalize all Quebecois as "unfriendly" and "language chauvinist" as to call all Americans "stupid" and "religious fanatic" (something that you resent, understandably). And third, you have to understand one thing. There are many foreign tourists and even tourists from English Canada who would walk into a store here and demand being served in English, and when they don't get the "language service" they expect, they would get mad and sometimes very rude and mean. But you have to understand that, even though Quebec is in North America, French is the language spoken here. You, even as a tourist, cannot expect everyone here to speak English, let alone speaking it well.

So while rudeness, whether language is concerned or not, is not a good thing, first of all, it is not a universal phenomenon here, and second, it goes both ways - there are some rude Quebecois but there are also some very rude tourists.

Out here (yes i live in Belgium) you start learning other languages from youth beginning with the second official language (is french) then to english, etc etc... Ive asked once "why do we learn all those languages, cant we survive with dutch?" he replyed "if you wanna improve youreself outside school in factory or somewhere else you must to know it all".

Now i see it myself, i do electronical programming i have to know german to program it (klockner M�ller, Siemens step 7 all in german), if im finished with programming i go (somethimes) to french speaking area's to set up those stuff so ive must know also french (its ok). Plus next month i have to go to czech republic for installing electrical stuff so English is the language to communicate with them...

Another indication of the "systemic" nature of the problem with the American education system is the inflitration of religion into school curricula. Already woefully lagging behind most developed and even some developing countries especially in elementary and high school science and mathematics, the United States is witnessing an alarming trend of elevating pseudo-scientific concepts such as "intelligent design" to the status of "real science", which, according to some "neo-Creationists" backed by the Religious Right of course, should be taught in American schools. The mere fact that the debate of whether schools should teach kids "intelligent design" in schools exists in the United States is just laughable and incomprehensible.

Personally I have no objection to teaching students ABOUT all religions (and atheism) under "ethics" or "religious studies" because whether one likes it or not, religion is an important social institution. But the separation between religion and education should be as scared as that between religion and state. Brainwashing kids with fairy tales like the virgin birth or the resurrection and spreading ignorance like homosexuality is a sin should be jobs that are most fittingly left to churches, not schools. After all, churches have tons of of experience in doing that.