How is education in the United States different from education in other countries?

hplss.rmntc: How is education in the United States different from education in other countries?
How is education in the United States different from education in other countries? Which country’s education system do you like best?

Answers and Views:

Answer by Brian K
Here, we make a futile and stupid attempt to educate everybody, whether they want an education or not. In other countries, they value education more, because if you don’t pursue it, they stop educating you and you have to take a menial job and suffer. Parents don’t want that for their children and they push them. Here, when someone doesn’t want an education, we force them to stay in school with compulsory education and we give them the “No Child Left Behind” treatment. We keep their sorry butt in school and let them drag down the whole educational system. The parents don’t have to take the responsibility to make their kid rise to challenges. As a result, our school systems and teachers are swamped with trying to produce even mediocre results from a population that has no reason to care or to try. Pick a developed country in the world, and its educational system will be better than ours, because here our lawyers have determined that we have to try to save people from themselves.

Answer by earanger
hplss,

I can tell you from what I observed living in Greece and Japan, and you’re right – it is different.

In both Japan and Greece kids wear uniforms to school. The school days are about an hour longer, and they go to school 1/2 day on Saturdays.
The teachers I saw were strict, very strict, and corporal punishment was used when the teachers considered it necessary.

One additional aspect I noted – most of the families were two parent families. The central focus of the family during the week was ensuring the kids completed their homework, and backing the school and educating the children.

“Ranger”