US #4 most educated country in the world

I have no idea why that list was created if it only allows set ways to count. Although these sorts of things are usually biased to whoever thought up the idea to begin with to compare.

Didnt the UN do something similar, personnally i dont believe them either. Too many factors for consideration.

 

Not directly related to the current topic but of some interest never the less, I found on a different search something quite interesting. Nigerian immigrants are the most educated of all American immigrants.

http://www.chron.com/news/article/Data-show-Nigerians-the-most-educated-in-the-U-S-1600808.php

 

How quaint; but today the Germans are welcomed with a lot less sorrows.

Darling, I have attended a different high school each year; I can sum the differences between a good and a bad one ALL up in one word: grades.

 

I thought this was BS. I stumbled across this article...

Sound familiar my little Belgian chocolat? It's amazing what a bribe will get you in a capitalistic society, eh?

 

Btw 'Absolutley' is incorrect', it's 'Absolutely', and the 'a ' is an uppercase A when a formal title is employed.....eh?

Anyway;


The following is a parody and an study in defensive sarcasm .

We join a USA bashing in progress by an USA, hater, i.e. typical anti-American venting about the OT threads study indicating America number four in educational excellence ;

I too am sure of it! The Americans are unquestionably dumber than we are! The world knows…wait we are the world!….ummm’ Lets start over. We know our citizens are smarter and superior to the dumb cretins populating the last superpower! How we know it isn’t important! Who needs poof these days? We pay no attention to the plight of our cities which burn in spot revolutions and protest. Well our currency is ….er’ was strong, now the Euro is teetering on collapse, as are other international currencies…well the dollar is doing pretty good...and its all the USA‘s fault. So there is no way the Americans ranked number four, no way in the world! Wait what comes after four?

Reva daba doo you all’ can’t handle the truth! Eh?

 

I am often amazed with americans like you, so much arrogance but lack any form of humility. Be proud you are number #4 that is a achievement in itself amongst a world of 6+ billion people and over 200 nation states.

It is better than pissing and moaning.

 

I'll see if I can catch that sometime. I think that's an old movie, so it might come around on Crackle sometime.

That said I know most nations have some sort of underclass. Chavs and whatnot. But again, I think we're operating in a different regime. Certainly, and sadly, the murder rates within those communities are on a different level here compared to the eurozone.

Still, if I can come up with it, it might be interesting to compare the spectrum of US schools to the spectrum of other nations schools. I guess it's possible they have equally horrid schools at the bottom and the difference in secondary education numbers comes from something else.

I think we could all agree that comeing to that conclusion requires no brains on the part of the Euro students.

More seriously lots of US schools are quite impressive, and I'd be very surprised to find out that EU schools are commonly better. I still strongly suspect our differences are that poor schools in the US are far worse.

However I have noticed a tendency of Europeans to somehow want to measure educational quality based on knowledge of geography or history outside of the united states or second languages. And this is material that many Americans know little of because the teachers and institutions don't think it's important to teach, the students care even less about, and as they grow up they have even fewer practical reasons to know it.

So it's sort of a silly comparison. But if that's how you want to compare things, the US would come out probably the worst of developed nations.

There's a link to the nearly 500 page study that article was based off of. The link appears a couple times in this thread.

I'd buy that.

As a side note, my wifes family has some old 2nd gen Greek immigrants that are pretty racist. They think Greeks are the best and african americans the worst (they'd use a different term). But upon questioning it turns out that they don't have a problem with actual Africans because of positive experiences they've had with those. They just don't like african americans.

 

You are correct. But that is true regardless of race, income level, or education. So it really doesn't make sense to focus on those areas if you want a more European murder rate.

 

I came to that conclusion through personal experience, as I said. I've had the chance to attend an American school where wealthy Americans put their children, to provide them with a better education than the one offered by the public system...because, as you know, most American public high schools are pretty easy to graduate from...and it was still easier to me than what I had experienced in public schools at home.

 

Let me guess; they calculate this figure based on college attendance and graduation right?

Just another junky NWO statistic boasting the sham that is the education industry that tricks students into paying 100K plus for degrees in nothingness.

 

I'm guessing you don't have a source for that and you just pulled it out of your tail? I'm quite doubtful, but now I'm probably going to try and see if I can find some info on that in general.

Hmmmm. Well, I don't know about Europe, but I don't think the bar is actually set that high for the minimum to get a HS degree. And I don't know that private schools, in general, are meant to be "harder" some might actually be easier because the parents don't want their kids looking bad.

More often than not they're there to keep kids out of the philosophy that some public schools push and put them into one their parents would prefir.

Though I'm given to understand there are some number that are meant to be "elite" that you have to test into to join.

Regardless I'd consider what makes a school "better" at the secondary level to be more about the quality of education and the opportunities afforded to the students.

In that respect, if I could find appropriate numbers, I suspect the top half of US public secondary schools match up vary favorable in terms of what the students have attained in terms of taking post-secondary classes ahead of time or standardized scores, so long as cheaty things like world history, world geography, and foreign languages aren't included.

 

Many students at my high school were enrolled in university classes. First half of the day at high school, latter half at uni...

It is the only possible reason why my high school was ranked so high as I can attest that many of the teachers were (*)(*)(*)(*). Je suis un ananas. I took French as my foreign language, at the high school, not university, and that is about the extent of my knowledge of that language.

 

I would think one of the best ways to teach your children French, in the US, is to send them to one of the Lycées Français.

The one in LA has a notable alumni, clic on link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycée_Français_de_Los_Angeles#Notable_alumni

 

No need for a "source." If you travel and read a wide variety of news sources this should be obvious to anyone. Regardless of race, income level, or education the murder rate is higher in the United States than Western Europe. The fact that anyone even questions that statement indicates a certain type of bias.

 

Bonjour, tu es une mandarine?

Anyway... so you mean to tell me that there are BETTER ways of learning french than watching a French-Canadian children's program as a class "lecture"?

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K4aTlsC8zM"]Téléfrancais! - Episode 1 - YouTube[/ame]

My link is hands down winner over yours.

 

Oh, I'll bet you have.

I don't know if I'll be able to find info on international ranking criteria for schools at lower than the country level.

But I bet if I poke around I can find things like murder rates for states, and probably some other demographics.

So might you be willing to admit that you're set in a rather twisted bias if it turns out that, say, some states without many big inner city situations have murder rates similar to or lower than European states? Or one of your other boldly made claims doesn't pan out?

Since you're so confident.

 

Simply picking a state at random and then comparing it to a random European "state" whatever you mean by that is not scientific. You need to find homicide rates for different ethnicities, education levels, and income levels in the United States and Europe and then compare. Otherwise you are just setting yourself up for people tearing up your study design. I guarantee you have very little idea about the ethnic makeup, education, and income of any area in Europe let alone an area that isn't a major city.

 

Hey that wasn't that bad. At least these are native speakers. Some kids here watch Dora the Explorer to learn some English; but the French dubbed version has butchered the original one. So we hear some weird story about a choco (being) late?

Anyway, mon ananas, I'm glad you had the fruity parts covered. Let's hear some musical interlude before we move to veggies.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=satMi-rws1A"]Pink Martini - Sympathique - YouTube[/ame]

 

Frodly,...

Sorry, but I am working on something -- and I've done my homework and made all the comparisons.

First of all -- "a European high school degree" does not even excist. Although the Bologna Process is aimed at equalizing standards. If a Belgian or German goes to Spain or Portugal -- well, let me just say that the standard can not be compared.

Secondly, systems in place in Europe differ from eachother -- but they all have in common that they are in a complete different universe when compared with the American system alltogether.

For example,...

You have three so-called "streams": GSE, TSE and VSE.

A GSE-degree (high school) is the equivalent of an Associate's Degree in the States. In Flanders, this is about 30-35% that get this degree when coming out of high school.

A TSE-degree (high school) is the equivalent of an American high school diploma. However, a lot of the students have learned some sort of profession. Most of them continue to get a Professional Bachelor's Degree (3 years). About 35% of the Flemish population get this degree when coming out of high school. Some study directions are really hard (e.g. Industrial Sciences), and some are a bit easier (e.g. Business Economics, etc.) Some others are more aimed at the job market directly (e.g. Secretary-Languages, IT, Baker, Butcher) -- so again, it could be compared with an certificate from a Community College where you learn a profession too.

...

In the USA, you basically have one big monolithe of a system where everybody is sent too. The ones that can afford it, buy themselves into a good school district that keep the poor ones out via high property taxes (doesn't excist in Europe either),... or send their kids to private school.

Conclusion: US education system is highly inefficient, ineffective and very costly.

 

How did you get to that conclusion?

Now, I suppose there is the classic communist/capitalist debate over equalization. Lets set that aside for the moment.

Most of your post was about the specialization of EU degrees. Once I thought something like that might be a good idea. But increasingly I'm coming to realize that overspecialization can be a very very very bad thing as shifts in the economy or in technology wipe out entire sectors of jobs.

You need to be able to reinvent yourself and adapt, so a workforce with a somewhat generalized and rounded education is going to be good news for the country and certianly the workers.

 

You started out pretty good but fell on your face in the end. You are quite correct that Europeans that have seen one or two European secondary schools cannot speak for the whole continent. That is absurd.

The US education system is not as simplistic as you describe. Even as so called "good" schools there are terrible students. And as I stated there was considerable latitude to choose what courses you wanted to take in high school. You could easily graduate with me but have a fraction of my knowledge. Motivated children or children from good families often took the more challenging courses. What you get out of the American educational system usually has more to do with what you as an individual put into it than what school or teacher you have.

Just FYI I attended both public and private schools. At one point I chose to go to a public school instead for a private school because it had better funded courses in what I was interested in. Private school≠great education. Public school with a teacher's union≠bad education. You have to evaluate each school carefully and then take the best classes a school has to offer. I frankly didn't notice any difference between the teachers at my public school and the teachers at my private school. They were for the most part excellent and very passionate about teaching.

 

Pretty easily...

And I'm getting way agitaded with all of you Americans: it doesn't really matter what the facts are, y'all keep on believing the best of yourselves and show an obsolute and total unwillingness to address your problems. But I guess 50 years of gross mismanagment in the public sphere is responsible for that...

Tell me, SunnySide, how on Earth would you describe the US educational system if you know that, when compared with other countries, it spends about +30% more money, achieves enormously poor graduation rates (WTF?), and the ones that do graduate underpreform massively when compared with their European peers.

I have not the slightest idea what you are aiming at.

In fact, the US education system is highly totalitarian when compared with systems in place in Europe. As with health care, Europeans can choose what type of education they get, to which school they go to, etc.

I think I've given you the wrong impression, let me attempt to clarify the situation for Flanders -- a region with one of the best preforming educational systems in the world, although it doesn't show in the stats since we are measured in the Belgian context and Wallonia and Brussels are dragging our down. Even the German-speaking community for that matter.

Like everything in life, it is all about balance and harmony:

In high school you have 3 cycles: First Cycle (= Middle School), Second Cycle (K9-10) and Third Cycle (K11-12).

I've spoken about GSE (General Secundary Education), TSE (Technical) and VSE (Vocational), here is what it actually means on the field:

So,...

Again: the US education system is highly costly, highly ineffective and massively ineffecient. Underpreforms massively when compared with other Western nations.

 

I really don't care about the terrible students. There isn't much you can do with them no matter how much attention is paid to them. What I do care about is good students or motivated students wasting their time because so much attention is paid to the terrible students. Where I live, there isn't much of a discipline or poverty problem. The education system is still terrible mostly because so much attention is paid to the few that do have discipline problems or to the half that aren't very good students. Schools should go the pace of the brightest students, not the other way around. In every country, they focus more on the below average students than the good students or they focus on pointless subjects, so every education system in the world is terrible. Get rid of the arts, have more classes on science, engineering, and math, and go the pace of the good students, and you have an education system much better than any other in history.

 

If you wanted, SunnySide, I could post time tables. Heck, I'm just going to do it -- first heading for my last cigarette of the day.

 

That's why I took honors classes. The only people that were in the class were the ones that wanted to be there.

Trust me. Try out the honors classes. You won't be disappointed.