How America Keeps Its Citizens Uneducated

@Mr.Vanvandenburg "Students come to the USA from all over to study and get PhDs at research labs in USA universities."

I would including undergraduate education in that. There are about 1.1 million undergraduate foreign students in USA and about 0.5 million at the graduate level.

None of that means universities at both levels could not be improved, but on the international stage they are darn good.

Seems to be general agreement here that primary and secondary education could be improved a lot.

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@ETC(SS) "We lead the world in money spent per student on education." More about that at:

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2019/10/education-spending-highest-school-brazil-chile-italy-mexico/

 

(Bold added by me).

Just who is doing the sending? The federal government?
The DoEd does basically that. They send the money to the states.
They don’t determine curriculums.

Here is what their role is: Federal Role in Education | U.S. Department of Education
Better check quick before Musk or Trump take it down.

Please note, I agree completely that our educational system gets very poor results.
I also agree it needs to be fixed. I just don’t agree that this is the way to do it.

 

I made an acquaintance many years ago with a visiting professor from China. We have a tiny college in our local town - at that time we lived near the College and one spring day while washing my car I heard someone say hi from the road and it was the Professor taking a walk around town and just engaging people as he took his walk. His views on America were insightful and helped me see our country from a different perspective. I would see him many times after that on his walks past our house and would always look forward to talks with him.

I am curious if you have had experiences with the American Education System and if you would be interested in sharing them and sharing what the education system is like in China?

 

"I am curious if you have had experiences with the American Education System" More than a few But I shall try to be uncharacteristically brief. In primary school in California, to the extent I could assess as a 6 to 11 year old, my teachers knew the basics well. Except for science by a few of them.

Watching an early US orbital flight on TV in class, the rocket appear to go up and down on screen. I asked teacher about that, answer was "that's gravity pulling the rocket back down". This later got an eye roll from my father, an engineer, and sense: "The camera operator was tilting upwards and did not get it always right". No general conclusion can be drawn other than - teacher, say what you know and if you don't know, say that. Don't make stuff up.

Overall assessment of my teachers from K-12 was almost entirely positive. More than a few were charismatic and in this context I think that means they really liked what they were doing. None of them were 'bad'. Your mileage may have varied ...

Much later (circa 2000) I was in California and (more or less on a lark) I took the qualifying exam for secondary school teachers there. By that time I was a full-blown egghead, and actually 'testing the test' as to its assessment of skills. I thought it was well designed. Also, I passed

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I have not had much direct experience with primary and secondary education in China. I have done some 'classroom things', but they are difficult to generalize from because of being a novelty, and my own personality as an entertainer.

But some things are obvious. Chinese writing is, briefly, hard. Learning to draw thousands of characters (ideograms) to the satisfaction of teachers takes up much education space in the early years. In later years, everything is directed towards scoring well on the gaokao exam after secondary school years; results of which largely define students' future paths. Together these mean that 12 years are mostly aimed at meeting defined requirements. There is room for creativity, but mostly on the artistic side.

Colleges in China, opposite to rest of world, seem to me to be less rigorous and demanding than earlier years had been. This is the most damning indictment I'd make, and may explain why parents want their children to go abroad.

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For me this counts as brief.

 

must be the difference between cali and mass