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<p>It’s not only the Third World. Japan and the Republic of China(Taiwan) has been undergoing some controversy for not extending the minimum compulsory education beyond end of middle school. </p>
<p>The ROC is in the process of expanding that minimum to include high school. </p>
<p>*Frankly, students just take the gen ed classes because they are required and have no intention of remembering the material or pursuing it in further depth after the class. *</p>
<p>Disagree. Daughter was a stem major, her school has strict distribution requirements as well as a high bar for graduation ( exam to go on to senior yr & publishing & defending thesis to graduate)
She is now an editor.</p>
<p>*Some * students are perhaps so narrowly focused they do not see the benefits of seeing the connections between fields, not all.</p>
<p>So what was incorrect about my impression was the impression that Finland was different?</p>
<p>MiamiDAP: Which foreign systems successfully prepare everyone for higher education? What percentage of the kids actually get post-secondary, non-vocational education?</p>
<p>^^^^^Or even education through 18yrs old.
In China, rural students are more likely to head to factories after middle school, than high school.</p>
<p>mathmom, I do not know anything about Fins and their school system. I am familiar with school system abroad and it is very possible to prepare every person for college at the much higher level than it is done here in the USA, at the level that students in engineering programs do not groan and moan about college math / science, real college math / scinence, not the lower level classes that American colleges are forced to teach becuase otherwise nobody would be in engineering, all will have to be imported from abroad. I tend to think that it is done on purpose for many reasons and parents are the ones to blame the first, they are payers, they had the power to force the academic level down in k - 12 and THEY ACCOMPLISHED that.<br>
There is no way to resolve the college dilemma without correcting the real problem - one of the lowest academic level in k - 12 in a world, shamefully enough even lower than some countries in Africa. </p>
<p>Citizens of Finland are Finns, not Fins.
See, what a broader based education can teach you?
That’s without a high school diploma!
;)</p>
<p>I’m only really familiar with Germany and a bit with France. I had one friend in Germany who was trained to be a bank teller at 16 and hated it. She ended up getting a bunch of private education so that she could work at a travel agency and later as a secretary. She tried to get the education she’d need to attend university, but ended up getting sick and she never managed to get on track for it. I also knew two kids in our architectural office who at 16 were getting trained to be architectural draftsmen. One had been a pretty mediocre student and I think the experience of working was good for him. The other I don’t think had any real interest in it. </p>
<p>In France there are not only vocational and college tracks, but there are tracks in high school that divide you into science, social studies or humanities types. I’m not convinced that the students in the literary track necessarily know as much math and science as good students in decent US high schools.</p>
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<p>There is NO country in the world where engineering students do not groan and moan about, and struggle with, the math requirements of their degree.</p>
<p>MiamiDAP…we get it. You have posted your opinion about U.S. public schooling and how other countries are so much better. And yes, we all also know that your kid went to a very prestigious private school In your area.</p>
<p>Give it a break. Your way, and your point of view are not the only way and point of view. </p>
<p>I happen to think that our public schools did an excellnt job of preparing both of our kids for college, and I two completely different fields of study. </p>
<p>And what this has to do with general education requirements, I can’t figure out.</p>
<p>As I said upstream. My kids both went to colleges with core course requirements. They had a variety of courses from which to choose to fulfill these requirements. Both of them very much liked the variety these courses offered in their college years. </p>
<p>My D’s public school did a fine job as well @thumper. Wierd how my D ended up with the same HS stat’s (including ACT Score as it has been posted)as another poster, yet didn’t pay for the privilege to say she was the Val of 34 students. Mine was only top 1% of nearly 700. She took a rigorous IB program at her public school, and ended up with the same education. If an American education is lesser than “others”, how did my kid end up the same results as a parent that thinks American schools suck?The same poster may advocate rigorously for the free UG, but paying for private HS is okay? Sounds like talking out of both sides of the mouth. Or something else. :-S </p>
<p>Look, I don’t doubt that the US could do a lot better with its high schools, especially for top students in public school systems (with a few very notable exceptions). But I bristle a little when people keep talking about how much more successful other countries are, when we know perfectly well those other countries are so successful in their testing because they only bother to test 10-20% of any cohort, while the US is testing close to 100% on its basic tests, and about 50% on SATs or ACTs.</p>
<p>We live in a world where subjects overlap. For example, fields of science also include plenty of writing when publishing discoveries, and the field of politics is riddled with statistics (just to name a few).</p>
<p>Educated people are notorious for their diverse and clear understanding of society and the world as a whole. This would not occur if they were overly focused on a specific subject. Employers are looking for well-rounded AND knowledgeable candidates, and this accomplished through a diverse, yet in-depth, higher education. </p>
<p>For these reasons, as well as plenty of others, I believe that general education requirements may be tedious, but they are ultimately important in students’ abilities to be progressive members of society. </p>
<p>A lot of people seem to have the impression that a GenEd core is completely rigid, and that’s not really true. It has a rigid outline, but what you do within that outline is pretty much wide open. You have to take two humanities, two social sciences etc., but there are many options within those. A social science can be sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, economics, geography, political science, archaeology, linguistics, etc. A humanities course can be anything from philosophy, art, art history, music, literature, religion, performing arts and all kinds of other stuff. If you can’t find a couple things off of each of those lists that interest you, then you really need to broaden your horizons a bit. </p>
<p>GenEds like English and communications are a bit more rigid. Everyone has to take English composition. But that’s an important class. Knowing how to write and do research on a topic is an essential life skill. Knowing how to effectively communicate is similarly an essential topic. </p>
<p>Clearly not everyone needs to know how to do advanced calculus, but I can basically guarantee that everyone is going to have some use for the skills that come from learning basic math and at least having a basic understanding of the problem solving skills used in science courses. </p>
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<p>In countries where one’s admission is determined by one’s prior chosen subjects for HS specialization/school leaving exam and scores attained from them, I’d doubt that based on what I’ve heard from engineering/CS from those societies. First, the math requirements wouldn’t be onerous due to the admissions process which admits strong math students and second, doing so…especially in front of one’s fellow engineering/CS peers wouldn’t be done as it will result in loss of peer respect. </p>
<p>Especially when their thoughts of the complainer of math requirements is likely to be more along the lines of “WTH did you expect when you decided to choose the HS specialization/school leaving exam to emphasize engineering/CS related subjects and become an engineering/CS major?” along with eyerolls or their cultural equivalents. </p>
<p>Got to observe a bit of this in my STEM-centered public magnet between recent immigrant classmates coming from countries with much more stronger and advanced math curricula and the complainers who were almost always native-born Americans or immigrants who came from comparable/worse educational systems and/or those who left their home countries before they were of school age. </p>
<p>DS is a STEM kid in an LAC. He chose it because he wanted a strong core. In shadowing physicians he has started to notice a correlation between the personalities and whether they went to a research-heavy school or whether they went to and LAC or majored in something other than science. Across specialties, ages and gender, he notes that the more interesting people are those that studied the liberal arts. It may not make them better doctors but they were more interesting people, which made an impact on him, as he is spending several days with them. </p>
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<p>LAC versus non-LAC does not necessarily say anything about core or GE requirements. Compare Harvey Mudd to Amherst among LACs, or MIT to Brown among non-LACs.</p>
<p>I used the LAC versus researched based to mention breadth versus depth. For instance the pathologist DS shadowed last month bragged about taking almost all of his GE requirements in high school so he could focus on science in school. He brags that he doesn’t read fiction, doesn’t like movies or plays and admitted to not fully understanding a political argument that DS was having with the doc’s PA over coffee. He is brilliant but stunted. Part of it has to be personal choice, but it makes me wonder if he would be different if he had been forced to step out of his comfort zone in those formative years. </p>
<p>British schools often run very well without General ED’s. At many places, this means you can get an undergraduate degree within 3 years.</p>
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<p>And again, that’s because in the UK and many other foreign countries…GE courses are taken care of in middle/high school. </p>
<p>Keep in mind the GEs offered for college-prep students in those countries are often more rigorous and demanding than what is offered in even many AP or even some DE college courses here in the US.</p>
<p>The flipside of that is that in such societies, college education is often viewed as something for the top fifth or third of students, not something for everyone. </p>
<p>As long as there are people who complain about labeling the social sciences as sciences, or see no similarity between math and English, Gen Eds will serve a very useful purpose of reminding people that the methodologies of various fields are in fact related.</p>
<p>That said, there are some pretty bad gen eds- state government classes taught by state schools, or oversimplified English classes, etc. Gen Eds can be taught very, very badly, and they often are.</p>