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Education: Does U.S. 'Catch-Up' At The College Level?
nomadic asks: "
Reuters recently published an article about how American scientists, as well as foreign-born scientists who work in America, tend to dominate the Nobel prizes in science; it attributes this mostly to the fact that the U.S. government tends to invest more in science research than its foreign counterparts (the National Science Foundation funded 78 U.S. winners before they got their Nobels), and private and corporate entities contribute large amounts as well. The article talks about the scientific and economic culture of the U.S.; young scientists exist in an extremely competitive environment, where they are encouraged to challenge traditional authority. But it only touches on education a little. Now I've seen some truly venomous attacks on the U.S. educational system on /. by people in other countries, but this article implies while the U.S. is behind in science and math education in elementary and high school, 'there is something that happens on the college level'. Does the U.S. 'catch up' at the college level? I'll be honest, the exchange students I've met from more math and science-savvy educational systems have been well-educated, but not on some higher plane of thought that the media would lead one to believe. It seems commonly accepted (though I'm not sure I agree) that a high school graduate from most countries in Europe is on the average better-educated than one from the U.S. How about a college graduate? Graduate school? Is the U.S. dominance in science only about financial investment in the U.S., or can the U.S. university system take some credit?"
I don't know about the US, but in Canada calculus is simply not covered in high school. In contrast, my british cousins are learning basic integral and differential calculus for their O-levels (grade 10 equivalent IIRC).
At least in mathematics, students in the UK are consistantly two years ahead of their Canadian counterparts.
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After that, it comes down to investment in research, not by the government necessarily, but also by private industry. Britain has experienced many cases of innovators who could not get funding to develop their ideas at home, so left for other countries including the US. The US has yet to experience a significant "brain drain" (as the UK is constantly at risk of), and in fact imports scientific talent from the entire world.
I think the simplist distinction between Europe and the US is that Europeans are enamoured of the status quo, and Americans are impatient with it. This gives the US the edge in commerce and industry at the expense of culture and history.
It's up to each individual to vote with their feet and decide where they'd rather be.
Oooh, a nice controversial topic. But one I thought about over the summer, which I spent at University of Wisconsin. And my conclusion was: during Grad School.
In England, our undergraduate courses are mainly three years, and they are usually just one subject. So when they graduate, our students are typically better (in their major) than in the US.
But after that, we don't have graduate school, in the American sense. We typically just do a 3 year, pure research, Ph.D., immediately after our undergraduate degree, or possibly after a further single-year masters course.
Now in grad school in the US, you have maybe two years of classes and then three years of research. This allows you to catch up -- and possibly even go ahead.
I say 'go ahead' because if you take the same courses when you're older, and when they're directed towards Ph.D. research rather than just passing undergraduate exams, you may have a better attitude towards them, and learn them more thoroughly.
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Japanese is such a tough language to read that 9th grade reading level is considered normal for newspapers. In the US 6th grade is normal because english is an easier language to read. (Note, this is mostly related to alphabit from when I understand, japenese appearently like their one symbol per word written language for most communication, but is means you have to memorize many more symbols - when/if they use their other alphabit system the difference dissappears) This despite the 20 hour a day study habbits the japanise are noted for, they have so much more to learn that they are not better for it.
Speaking of study habbits, you learn more from your books when you spend more time in school. However Most of life's important lessions are gained outside of the classroom. If you are the smartest person in a room with 10 others, you are (Unless you pick a sample well outside the bell curve) still not as smart as their combined intellegence - IF they work togather well.
Finially I question the need to be number one in math. What is the advantage to science if your students can multiply 1325 by 46562 in 10 seconds, and it takes an american over a minute? turns out none because any reasonable person will put that into a calculator to avoid mistakes. So as long as you know how to do arithmatic on very large numbers that you can do it fast isn't a good point, and if it takes away from other time (play, but learning to communicate) it is accually a liability!
Many of the students I went to school with were mentally unprepared to deal with algebra, so as a finial data point, let me suggest that we are better off being behind out of high school if it means the fundamental thinking skills are worked on longer for those students. To re-phase that, it is better to have students who understand algebra then students who partially understand calculas and algebra. (This should be combined with my arithmatic example about, there is a fine line between studing something to death and not understanding it)
Is any of the above correct? I don't know. I know that I'm not convinced that more school is the answer to all complaints that someone else is smarter then me.
When I was in high school, I wrote an article for the school newspaper about this topic. I attended a magnet school for science and math and got interested in how we compared to everybody else. Most of my research came from government studies which showed math skills lacking in the US at comparable ages and such, so that was the tone I took: US schools suck and everybody else is better.
Then I got an interesting reply to my article, which we printed in the next issue. A former math teacher at my school moved to Japan to teach English (Japan had been one of my highest praised systems). He told me that the cultures are completely different. Students in that country are expected to memorize incredible amounts of knowledge, including arithmetic and languages, but, as he put it, "they aren't taught how to think." What he meant by this is that creative problem solving skills are not stressed. The focus tends to be "memorize all you can to pass the next set of entrance exams and that's it".
Later, during my junior year at Rice University, I had a Japanese roommate and got to talk about these issues. He *loved* school in America, and the difference in culture was part of it. He did not advance in his studies as much as he would have in Japan because of language barriers (I explained his Discrete Mathematics notes to him after every lecture because the prof spoke too quickly for him).
Of course, all of this is the "typical" case, and as always, there are exceptions to the rules. But is is interesting to point out the number of American inventions vs. foreign inventions. RCA invented LCDs and decided they weren't useful, then Japanese investors bought the technology and ran with it. Lasers were invented here and we started making bombs with them, Sony went and made CDs. Plastics research was DOW, internal combustion was engineered into assembly lines at Ford, the whole field of nanotech research was started with the discovery of the Carbon-60 atom (BuckyBall) at Rice, transistors, integrated circuits, a lot of core technology in the past and for the future has been American.
Yes, the US has many underfunded schools in urban areas, large numbers of people drop out and cannot function at the "basic" levels in reading or arithmetic. Other countries may have lower percentages in those categories, but it's obvious that at some point, the US system corrects itself to get a university system which bekons students from all over the world. American schools are the standard.
On grad schools. Most European nations do not have a substantial classroom contribution to PhDs. Thus, a PhD is much faster in Europe and the doctoral candidate has had about 2 years less class work than his US counterpart.
On college. I find no reason to think there is substantial difference.
On high school. US students get the short end of the stick. High schools elsewhere are more rigorous, and do not promote students on the basis of age nearly as easily.
On research. Researchers in most of the world are absolutely starved for resources compared to the US. Of course, this is overly general, and researchers in Scandinavia and Japan also do quite well. But when I talk with foreign researchers, I find they spend much more time planning experiments because resources are so tight. We will do 3-4 experiments for every one that they do.
The real difference, as you can see, comes in grad school. The US trained student gets 2 years more classwork and several times the resources for the PhD. This of course attracts a large number of high quality foreign students to get their PhDs in the US.
I speak from my experience in biomedical sciences.