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That is a fairly profound statement when you consider the general state of the American educational system. I never fail to be amazed at how poorly US college a
by miked 17y ago
That is a fairly profound statement when you consider the general state of the American educational system. I never fail to be amazed at how poorly US college and university systems are run. They are full of bureaucracy and little good teaching is done.
I'm an American who's traveled in Europe a fair bit. I've had several conversations with Greek, Swedish, and Hungarian teachers. All were universally critical of teaching in their countries, the main thrust being that it was almost all driven completely by rote. Teaching in greece was so bad that a large number of families hire outside tutors just to teach things like English and classical greek and latin.
There's a Chinese institution that publishes a comparison of all the world's major universities, based on number of paper citations to its faculty. It's been a while, but US
universities held all but 2 positions in the top twenty (Cambridge and Oxford were the only non-US universities). Research is not the same as learning, but its probably as good a proxy as we've got.
Two other proxies would be number of Nobel prizes and number of patents issued. At least in absolute numbers, the US does quite well. Not sure about the more relevant per capita numbers, though I'm certain Israel would crush in the patent category.
While I largely agree with your statement in broad terms, it's too sweeping and doesn't control for things like ethnicity. We will never have great teaching anywhere until we get rid of the teachers' unions.
- bokonist 17y agoThere's a Chinese institution that publishes a comparison of all the world's major universities, based on number of paper citations to its faculty. It's been a while, but US universities held all but 2 positions in the top twenty (Cambridge and Oxford were the only non-US universities). Research is not the same as learning, but its probably as good a proxy as we've got. Journal publishing and citations are heavily based on social networks and the intricacies of the modern grant system. I really wouldn't trust citations to be a good indicator of research or advancement. A better thing to look at would be the flow of real world improvements that come out of a universities research. Unfortunately, there is no systematic measurement of that flow.
- miked 17y agoI quite agree, but as you point out we don't have a lot of choices here. That's the best proxy I can think of.
- johnnybgoode 17y agoWhen the only measure available is hopelessly flawed, the correct approach isn't to use it; it's to say, "I don't know."
- jseliger 17y ago"Research is not the same as learning, but its probably as good a proxy as we've got." I'm a grad student in English Lit at the University of Arizona, and I'm not so sure: many of my freshmen talk about what it's like being in 500-person classes, their interactions with GATs who don't speak English, and so on, which appear to be common at big R1 schools. It seems to me that the major thing the U.S. has going for it is competition between universities to a large extent; after (and sometimes during) high school, one has a wide array of choices, ranging from vocational schools to community colleges to liberal arts schools to R2 / R1 universities. But I'm not sure the latter are great for undergrads, though they're amazing for grad students. The better question is whether the US will eventually implement real competition in the primary and secondary arenas, so as to avoid problems like this: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_brill?currentPage=all http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_... .
- BrandonM 17y agoWow, I just read that article you linked and it is pretty mind-boggling how efficient the NYC public school system is. I'm sure it's not exclusive to NYC, either.