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In Germany they have a three track school system which is great: - The first track is the high school degree that includes 13 years of school and afterwards al

by brummm 5y ago

In Germany they have a three track school system which is great: - The first track is the high school degree that includes 13 years of school and afterwards allows people to attend university. Generally the students with the best grades attend this track. Everybody learns English as a first foreign language starting grade 3 nowadays in all tracks, but starting grade 7 students in this track have to pick either French or Latin as their second (and then in 9th grade have the choice to pick the other one as a third language). Further, math and science education are much faster and better compared to the other tracks. - The middle track starts learning French as a second foreign language in grade 9 and the whole track only includes 10 years. It is geared towards people that will do an apprenticeship afterwards, for example in business or some other non-university subjects. - The third track is the lowest track for the worst performing students and does not include any second foreign languages. It's only 9 years of school and these are the people that often go into trades jobs like car mechanics, contractors, etc. Personally I think this is a great systems. Students that can learn more and faster get to learn with students similar to them and are not slowed down by students that can't keep up. Students in the other tracks afterwards can continue on to eventually get the higher degrees through various different ways if they want and are able to.

wink 5y ago
I think you're painting it in an overly positive picture, because in theory it should work that way but in practice too many students are sent to the highest tier because of parental/societal pressure, even if not technically on the same level (so they're holding back the other), and on the other end the lowest tier is so riddled with kids that have bigger problems than lack of good grades so if you end up there it's also a problem. Also I'm actually not sure I wouldn't have preferred to have a wider range of people in the school, especially because I also saw problems with wide gaps in progression in normal class. Not an expert but I'd hazard a guess that for every main subject out of 30 people you could have easily moved 10 up one class and 10 down one class and then the result wouldn't have been worse than repeating the same things 10 times, per subject, and not to the same people.. (Spoiler alert: I hated school, I wasn't a really good student, my main motivation for staying and not slacking off completely was that I needed to graduate in order to be able to study CS, but I would have loved to focus on some subjects and ignore others)

by brummm 5y ago

wink 5y ago

I think you're painting it in an overly positive picture, because in theory it should work that way but in practice too many students are sent to the highest tier because of parental/societal pressure, even if not technically on the same level (so they're holding back the other), and on the other end the lowest tier is so riddled with kids that have bigger problems than lack of good grades so if you end up there it's also a problem. Also I'm actually not sure I wouldn't have preferred to have a wider range of people in the school, especially because I also saw problems with wide gaps in progression in normal class. Not an expert but I'd hazard a guess that for every main subject out of 30 people you could have easily moved 10 up one class and 10 down one class and then the result wouldn't have been worse than repeating the same things 10 times, per subject, and not to the same people.. (Spoiler alert: I hated school, I wasn't a really good student, my main motivation for staying and not slacking off completely was that I needed to graduate in order to be able to study CS, but I would have loved to focus on some subjects and ignore others)