<p>Yeah thats why we have harvard!</p>
<p>America, FU*CK yeah!</p>
<p>I loved the Newsweek article about student motivation.</p>
<p>I read it like 20 times.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure in America education is a right and everyone must attend. In other countries education is a privilege.</p>
<p>I think that the US education system isn’t as good, because it expects less of its students.</p>
<p>In my experience, when students are expected to know more… they know more.</p>
<p>That being said… the American education system is DEFINITELY not a failure. We have a 99% literate society. Compare this with 300 years ago. It wasn’t that long ago that most people didn’t even have a high school education.</p>
<p>The US system does its job. It provides its people with a general education.</p>
<p>" We have a 99% literate society."</p>
<p>This actually isn’t true. The government doesn’t keep statistics on literacy any more. US, and many Western European countries simply make a guess of 99%. </p>
<p>The demographics of America are far different from Asia and Europe. It’s not proper to try to compare us to them.</p>
<p>99% is a fairly good guess. How many people do you know that don’t know how to read?</p>
<p>With education being mandatory for 6-16 (or longer) year olds, most people are bound to learn at least their ABC’s, how to read and write basic sentences and words.</p>
<p>I don’t know many people who can’t read “I see the cat.” (The only ones I do know that can’t read that are very young.)</p>
<p>Go back in history and there were plenty of people who couldn’t read even that.</p>
<p>Even my 7-year-old sister, who is autistic and has been diagnosed with Developmental Delays and has a low IQ can read fairly well. Granted… it’s taken a lot to get her there, but the point is… she can read and write basic English and she learned this through a public school system here in the states.</p>
<p>“99% is a fairly good guess. How many people do you know that don’t know how to read?”</p>
<p>That’s a bad basis for saying something is a “good guess.” Most of the people I know go to Michigan. </p>
<p>[Answers.com</a> - What is the literacy rate in Detroit MI<a href=“Given,%20it%20likely%20has%20the%20lowest%20literacy%20rate%20of%20all%20cities%20in%20America”>/url</a></p>
<p>[url=<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States]Literacy”>Literacy in the United States - Wikipedia]Literacy</a> in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“Answers - The Most Trusted Place for Answering Life's Questions”>What is the literacy rate in Detroit MI? - Answers)</p>
<p>That’s not to say that literacy isn’t higher today than it was 300 years ago, but it’s likely not 99%.</p>
<p>I don’t know anything about Michigan to be honest.</p>
<p>But I do know that where I live… there are very few American citizens who do not know how to read and write.</p>
<p>A) There are plenty of illegal immigrants here that don’t know how to read and write… but they’re not exactly here legally and therefore shouldn’t be a part of the equation.
B) Even in my own family where my mom was the only one to graduate from high school… everyone knows how to read and write. It’s just plain difficult to function in society without that basic skills set.</p>
<p>Plus… What is the definition of literacy? I’m talking minimally basic skills. Anyone who has 3-4th grade level reading/writing skills can easily build on top of that to get more skills.</p>
<p>And are you really citing wikipedia and answers.com? I guess it isn’t much better than my guesstimate… but still…</p>
<p>You guys should all go watch that new documentary film “Waiting for ‘Superman’”. Tackles the questions of why schools/education fail in America, and the like. Saw the trailer for it, and already it showed that even though students were 21st in math, or 32nd in reading, and whatever (random numbers), we were first in self-confidence.</p>
<p>I am currently in high school hosting a German exchange student, and he finds our education system laughable. How little respect students have for teachers, how much busy work we do, how teachers baby us and give us everything we need to know for tests, etc. We really don’t know how easy we have it.</p>
<p>^That goes back to my point… Teachers expect less of us. If they expect more… they’ll get more.</p>
<p>That was the biggest difference that I noticed between public and private school. At my private school, teachers expect more from students than they did when I was in public school.</p>
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<p>I’m not trying to argue, but, you can’t force someone to be motivated. I also think that hard work does not equal success (even though hard work may be necessary for success). My problem with teachers is not that they don’t expect more; you can expect more of someone and still be a bad teacher. The problem is that most teachers don’t, yet, should respect their students. If you respect your students, then you will respect yourself, and if you respect yourself and other people, you’d want to do things proficiently in the classroom on both sides of the arena (students and teachers). Really, if everyone just respected each other and themselves we’d all have world peace.</p>
<p>I’m not sure that by ‘expecting more’ I mean necessarily in terms of just academics.</p>
<p>For example… respect isn’t an academic issue, but it’s something that falls into that idea of expectations. At my school, you’re expected to respect the teachers. If you don’t… it just isn’t normal. Whereas, when I was in public school, it was expected that students wouldn’t respect the teachers, so they had to make provisions so that students would respect the teachers. (This probably made no sense… but it did in my head. lol)</p>
<p>But I mean… If you expect someone to steal, so you treat them like they’re going to steal, then probably they’re going to steal. If you expect someone not to steal, so you treat them like they’re not going to steal, then they’re probably not going to steal. Of course there are outliers and individual cases… but for most people, whatever you expect out of them is what you’re going to get, whether it be positive or negative.</p>
<p>Just because you’re supposed to respect the teacher doesn’t mean you should. My respect is contingent on the way a teacher treats her (or his) students and the way she teaches the class. A lot of times I really don’t care and I don’t have a lot of respect for whoever is attempting to teach (that doesn’t mean I won’t get a good grade or a good LOR).</p>
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<p>It made sense 
I agree 100%.</p>
<p>^its called stereotype threat</p>
<p>Has nobody here heard of the Rosenthal effect?</p>
<p>To OP: Reading To Kill a Mocking Bird does not directly help you calculate the angle of incision, no, but it does educe thoughts that help to develop your mind in ways that will help you understand more advanced courses. Even hard sciences like biology and chemistry have far more depth than a conglomerate of mumbo-jumbo facts and figures. Most classics like TKMB also explore topics like deontology, ethics, and decision making. Try finding those in your biology textbook.</p>
<p>As for the America’s trailing in pre-higher ed, well, that doesn’t appear to be what this thread is about.</p>
<p>SandwichGirl: Chinese students who can’t make it into a normal high school often opt to attend vocational high schools, where they direct all their focus onto one profession and enter it after graduation. The schools usually help them find jobs, although they aren’t very rewarding ones. 48% of middle school students in my city don’t make it to a normal high school.</p>
<p>OP: American education is far better than education in China and I’ve heard lots of Americans say that Chinese students are smart-as*es, nerds, geeks, too book smart, etc. Let me just say that Chinese high schools ONLY offer textbook education. The VAST majority of Hs students in mainland China concentrate on only one thing: The TEST. It’s about 680 points to get into Peking and Tsinghua U every year and just to give you an idea of how it is to get 680+, less than 20 students are admitted to PKU/Tsinghua U each year in the Guangdong Province out of 615k examinees. That’s a 0.003% chance of getting into PKU/Tsinghua U. A student in PKU/Tsinghua is a lot like one in Harvard/Yale - he/she gets very depressed if getting into a top tier college was the only thing on his/her mind in HS. To make matters worse, PKU/Tsinghua’s international ranks are 270 and 310 (approx.) respectively.</p>
<p>In China, most students participate in virtually no extracurricular activities. Their weekends are spent doing homework and/or wasting their time doing meaningless tasks. During the school year, students rarely hang out and the ones that do are almost always the ones that don’t care a lot about their schoolwork. There’s a girl in my class who has spent every minute of every year of her life since elementary school immersed in her studies. We’ve been classmates for almost 2 years now, so I know her routine: get up, eat breakfast, study study study study study study, eat, study study, nap (maybe), study study study study study, eat, study study study study study… sleep, repeat. She can seem like an orator but her speeches have no substance. I remember a mandatory speech competition our Chinese teacher made us participate. We literally forgot that she gave a speech. That’s what China can do to you, I guess. I wonder if she’s going to wake up one day in her forties and realize that she wasted her high school and maybe even college years studying when she could’ve been soaking up everything her life had to offer.</p>
<p>Ever wonder why China never has nobel prize winners and yet manages to win nearly every international math competition? We have a saying here called “Du Si Shu”, which means to aimlessly study. Chinese students are masters in the art of reading, memorizing and taking tests, but when it comes to creativity and innovation, we’re epic failures. Not to **** off any Chinese people, but if you’ve spent your high school years in a god-awful school like mine, you’d know what I mean.</p>
<p>What I’m saying is that other countries’ educational systems aren’t perfect and probably pale in comparison to America’s. America’s higher education is the best in the world so why else would I want to go back there to study instead of slaving my way into PKU/Tsinghua? I wish I could’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird in class instead of memorize ancient Chinese prose. With To Kill a Mockingbird, at least you can use it as an example in your SAT essay(s); but with ancient Chinese prose, you can’t translate that into English and its morals are basically universally understood so there’s no point in using them. Sorry if this post is too long, but I got really irritated.</p>
<p>Learning how to read and write is one thing, but reading books is silly. The authors always have hidden meanings. Usually i think the teacher is just making the stuff up.</p>
<p>Also, in China, I’m pretty sure college professors are not paid that well. I remember distinctly reading an article about how they’re paid about the same as blue-collar workers.</p>
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<p>If someone told me that they expected me to steal, I would confront him and correct that assertion. I guess I’m in the minority on that. Who is anyone to tell you what to do, be, or believe? I think most people are more clueless than they lead on. We live in a world where people don’t know what they’re doing and they just follow the crowd. There’s a story I read about a herd of sheep that fell off a cliff after they followed the herder. Despite our superior intelligence, human beings seem to gravitate towards following the herd (myself included).</p>