It's always a great surprise when you discover that your own socialist european nanny-state country has been doing something in a lot more free-choice and free-

It's always a great surprise when you discover that your own socialist european nanny-state country has been doing something in a lot more free-choice and free-market way than the US. :-D Grouping high-school students after ability is a great idea, but why would someone else choose which track to put a student in? How the hell did you guys end up in that system? Why not let the kids and their families choose freely? When I went to high-school in Sweden in the early 90s, we still had an ok system. Elementary school (grades 1-9) was the same for everyone, and you went to the school closest to where you lived. But for high-school, everyone had to make a choice. There's open enrollment, so you got to pick a school, and you had to pick a programme. There were a few "theoretical" programmes - arts, humanities, economy, science, and technology - that most schools offered, and a whole slew of vocational programmes that varied greatly between schools. And the different programmes would give you different eligibility for university later, if you took science or tech, you'd be eligible for anything, but if you took the humanities programme for example, you wouldn't qualify for engineering college or med school, and if you took a vocational programme, you wouldn't qualify for any university education. But complementing this was a system of "adult high schools", where you at any time could take classes to bring yourself up to a higher level programme, and they were typically evening classes. So if you chose the high-school programme to become a construction worker, and changed your mind, you could always later take evening classes, get a science programme high school degree, and do something else, got to university, get another career, whatever. And this system worked pretty well. The kids who were just fed up with school after elementary got to choose something vocational and be happy not having to learn more German or algebra or biology, and you could always try the science programme if you wanted to, and if it didn't work out, if it was too hard for you, you could choose another programme. But then, of course, we went the same way as the US, and our politicians bought into the idea that EVERYONE MUST GO TO COLLEGE, and therefore all the vocational programmes got more theoretical, and the lower-level theoretical programmes got a bit more science and math. And the results after a decade of that is that it's a complete failure. Because the kids that are tired of school, the just flunk it, instead of completing a vocational programme. And the ones in the lower-level theoretical programmes flunk as well, because they can't handle the extra math and science. And the universities are furious, because they see that the quality of the high-school graduates that apply are falling year over year, because the system has just produced a lot more graduates that are "eligible", without actually giving them the required education.