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This roughly matches what is expected of a high level student in The Netherlands. Note that The Netherlands (and I think Germany as well) segregates students wi
by tinco 11y ago
This roughly matches what is expected of a high level student in The Netherlands. Note that The Netherlands (and I think Germany as well) segregates students with a learning aptitude test.
This means for example that my sister who is more artistically talented than I am was sorted into the high school track that is shorter, teaches only the very basics of these topics. Her highschool track ends at 16 and students are expected to go into a college that teaches some kind of physical skill, she did graphical design, and after that got accepted into an academy of arts.
In contrast I went to the highest highschool track, did everything parent post mentioned, did that until 18 (6 years) and was then expected to pick a higher learning college (which we call university) to which you are generally automatically accepted if you have a higher learning high school diploma.
I often wonder how the US deals with this. My sister would be severely unhappy at my highschool being constantly confronted with topics that would be hard and uninteresting to her. I would likely be bored and vastly unqualified for proper university if I went to hers. How would you put us in the same classroom? ( though I would have loved to go to the same school as her, she rocks :) )
- tlunter 11y agoWhile I wouldn't say I learned all of this, we did cover quite a similar set of topics during my schooling. It's not everywhere that schooling is bad in the US. Not every school just lumps all of the kids no matter their aptitude into the same classes. A lot of schools have many levels of placement that are to help understand the baselines a student can be held to. For most math and science classes I took the top classes and felt it was a great pace (most of the time) and learned quite a bit. For history and English/grammar classes where I'm not as strong, I took a middle level class and still learned much of the same material but at a slower pace. For cases like your sister, there was options for classes to be taken. She can take many different art classes over the course of a couple years to help build a portfolio for submitting to colleges. I on the other hand had 2 maths, 2 sciences, and an English class my final semester. It was great since it so closely aligned with my college studies and helped me get ahead (AP). I never felt difficulty in college having taken these APs either. Just setting the record straight, it's not the complete Wild West over here. Just some schools are stronger than others. My school is pretty standard as far as schools in south east Massachusetts go.
- tinco 11y agoCool thanks! Just to clear it up, I didn't think it was a complete wild west out there. Clearly the U.S. has many of the best universities in the world, and similarly many of the best arts academies so somehow it's able to produce well prepared students. I was just a bit confused on how exactly.
- morgante 11y agoTo a large degree, the competent US high schools do that sorting within the school. In my 4-year public high school there were at least 10 different math courses. The lowest students would still be taking some remedial arithmetic and such, normal students would take algebra, and I was taking discrete (first year). This applies for pretty much all study areas, with AP/advanced options available for the best students and remedial courses for the worst. There's also a large degree of flexibility in choosing your schedule, so students who aren't planning to go to university could choose mostly shop classes and have half days for their final year or two of high school. The end result was that I wasn't in a single class with the remedial bullies from elementary school (where unfortunately there is substantially less segregation, with the only solution being to move up a grade).