Stupid in America (how we cheat our kids)
October 5th, 2007 by MarkStupid in America is a 20/20 investigation into the failures of K-12 schooling in the US. John Stossel interviews a variety of teachers, students, parents and administrators in the US and in Belgium. It’s particularly interesting for me because I’ve experienced it from so many sides. I’ve been at all kinds of schools, from public to Catholic, to one that had merit-based admissions. As a teacher, I’ve taught calculus and freshman physics in the US and more recently EFL here in Taiwan. It certainly doesn’t pay as well as my previous programming work, but it is interesting, and I enjoy it enough that I’ve thought about working as a public school teacher in the US after retiring.
I’ve seen some of the policy debates as well. In my high school district, a group of parents actually sued the school system and made them abandon a program called Direction 2000, that many considered an ill-advised attempt at political indoctrination rather than true education. It also turned out that the father of one of my good friends in middle school was the senator who proposed our voucher system. Anyway, it’s an interesting video… despite the Europeans claiming we’re stupid.
One final thought I’d like to share is that I see the school system in Taiwan as one of the biggest reasons to stay here long enough to have my own kids. Despite the complaints I hear from parents about the public schools here, the achievements I see in my nine and ten year-old students are so far ahead of what my peers in the US were doing at that age that it’s almost shocking. Especially in math, art and languages, the difference is stark.
Update: Michael Turton has written a response to this post.
Related Post: The New York Teacher of the Year is Against School
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October 5th, 2007 at 3:03 am
I am not sure that comparing the level of knowledge is the best indication. Out of 179 countries US is ranked 8th in GDP per capita. Surprisingly the countries that are higher than US are not known for their technology. Whereas Japan and Korea are below. Belgium is below as well.
The population and total GDP of US and EU is similar. But the world is ruled by America not by Europeans. If you are smart, why ain’t you powerful?
Regarding that guy in the video who could read only at a level of 4th grade, I think school shouldn’t be blamed. He’d better instead of doing drugs and playing basketball grab some books and read it.
October 5th, 2007 at 6:34 pm
No, they aren’t far ahead of American kids, Mark. The two systems distribute skills differently. I’ve had kids in both systems and I prefer the US.
Of course the locals learn more in elementary school at a young age. Not only does the system demand that they learn more advance stuff, there is also a cram school system that operates 7 days a week. Of course, if US students went to school 14 hours a day, they’d know a lot of largely meaningless and too-advanced stuff too.
It should also be noted that the purpose of piling all that stuff on young kids is not education but Weeding Out. Education in Taiwan is a Weeding Out process, not an enhancement process. You can see this effect at the other end — even the best college here is probably only as good as a mediocre state school in the states, and college as a whole is wildly inferior to the US system in every single aspect. Once they reach college, the weeding out has been accomplished, so “quality” of education drops off. The reality was it was never quality, just weeding out.
The US approach is far more sensible.
Michael
October 5th, 2007 at 7:31 pm
I completely agree with you about the situation in college, Michael. I always had the idea that elementary and middle school in Asia or Europe and then college in the US was the ideal.
I really appreciate your input about local schools, too. I’m sure some of what they teach is meaningless, but surely having basic math skills such as the ability to do multiplication and division by the end of elementary school is worth something. You may not realize just how little an American high school diploma means. I have a couple of friends teaching in public schools who have told me that it’s almost impossible to fail anyone.
My college in the US, which was a good one (three Nobel Prizes in hard sciences while I was there), gave me a strong impression that Chinese, Indian and European schools did do a good job up through the secondary levels. After getting to the 3000 level classes, nearly half my students were foreigners, and in the graduate programs Americans were a minority.
This isn’t limited to academia either- more than half of silicon valley biotech and computer start-ups are have foreign founders.
October 5th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
Thanks, man. These debates about education are fascinating…I’ve written a longer piece on my blog about this post
October 6th, 2007 at 8:29 am
I don’t share your opinion about the Taiwanese education system. The results that it achieves are very narrow in scope. Proficiency in maths is only one small part of what makes a good education system. If you considered proficiency in sports and physical education then Taiwan’s system is a complete and total failure.
October 6th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
David, I think the schools here achieve more well-rounded results. Math may be one of the most important shortcomings in the US system, but it’s not the only one. My schooling at least, was nearly completely devoid of any music or art whatsoever. Ditto for foreign languages. Here, students are enriched in those areas.
You’re right about physical education, though. The number of people here who don’t know how to swim or ride a bike is a bit high.
October 6th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
I’m not going to voice my opinion yet, but at least in Canada, kids don’t get the shit kicked out of them at school. Happens all the time here in Asia.
“Cindy mommy very bad, she hits Cindy.”
Heard from a 5 year old this week in school.
October 6th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
I agree with David, they don’t have enough sports or school teams like softball, soccer etc.
I think a balance is needed. I don’t think that sending a kid to school from 7 AM to 11 PM is the answer.
The ABC Dateline show was interesting, but there are good things that come out of unions. They protect their members in certain ways. Competition between schools is good, but job security is important as well. The benefits are also appealing and important for teachers.
Would I teach in Canada? Probably, but not in elementary school, high school or secondary school. Undergraduate and graduate levels in university. But that’s a few years in the future. My wife is teaching in a private university in Taipei County and she likes it. She is teaching similar things that she used to teach in cram schools, only she gets more benefits and paid vacations. At the same time, she is completing a doctorate at Shida.
October 6th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
I have a child in Taiwan, and the last thing I would want to do is put her into the school system here. Yes, the students have an impressive grasp of facts and score higher on achievement tests. But what of their analytical/critical thinking skills? The teaching of history is a good example. Which is more important, being able to regurgicate names and dates for multi-choice exams, or having a clear understanding of, and being able to explain, the forces at work behind historical events?
October 6th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
How many public high school students in American can do that?
October 6th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
Math’s a huge part of a good education. Along with first language skills, it’s the foundation of an education.
That doesn’t mean that the other subjects don’t matter but the three R’s are non-negotiable.
October 6th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
Mark,
That video makes some good points, but it seems a bit one-sided. Do other European systems “attach the money to the kids”, or did they pick Belgium to support their belief if vouchers? Where did you find it?
October 6th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
More than those in Taiwan, Cindy. I don’t know about you, but my high school history teachers didn’t care if we got the dates wrong. They made us write essays on the reasons why things happened.
October 6th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
Cindy, you’re right. This 20/20 investigation had a clear aim- to get people to support vouchers. I found it on the popular page on del.icio.us.
To answer your question, Sweeden has a very popular voucher system, and Ireland also has system in which students can choose their school, public or private, and tax money pays the teachers of those schools. England does not have a voucher system, and attempts to create one were crushed fairly recently. As for anywhere else in Europe, I have no idea. Maybe other commenters can tell us.
October 7th, 2007 at 2:53 am
i was in the orthodontist’s office with my two children and picked up the 2007 yearbook of my hometown. i saw in it some of my old teachers (i’m 42) were retiring. there was the math teacher who was so bored that he often when off track to talk baseball. there was the social studies teacher who tried to scare the crap out of me… all i could think of was ‘thanks union for giving my hometown 30 plus years of mediocrity’. then there was the art teacher i had in elementary school who now was at the high school. he was absolutely fantastic. i had him when i was 10 and i still remember his class vividly at 42. all i could think was ‘what a legacy he is leaving behind’. i was lucky to have him. what public schools teacher soon learn is that it doesn’t matter if you do more or less than expected- everyone is treated the same- except in the eyes and smiles of the students. that is what differentiates the good from the mediocre from the bad. that for some teachers is their greatest motivator: their ‘merit pay’.
October 8th, 2007 at 7:30 am
[...] Doubting to shuo and Michael Turton have different viewpoints about Taiwan's education system. [...]
October 8th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
I have no qualms with sending my daughter to Taiwanese schools. In my opinion, the kids learn the basics better here in Taiwan (especially in math or the sciences).
University seems to be a different bag. Right now, I am completing a master’s degree in Taiwan, and am finding I am getting less out of it than I did completing an undergraduate degree back home. Western education seems to be a lot better at the university level.
October 9th, 2007 at 5:42 am
I think Taiwan’s educational system teaches people to be parrots. They repeat whatever they learned, but they don’t know how to analyze anything very well. I also thought they were pretty lacking in the creativity department. I went to grad school with several Taiwanese. All were good at reciting the facts of whatever we read, but ask them to interpret or give an opinion and they tended to perform not as well as the mediocre students. They also told me they were never trained to analyze, only memorize and recite. My wife is Taiwanese and has the same opinion too.
Unfortunately I think US schools are daycare for older kids. Once you get outside of honors and level 1 classes, the classes seem to be more like holding rooms with teachers going through the motions and the kids killing time or disrupting the class.
October 14th, 2007 at 11:32 pm
I taught in Taiwan for seven years before returning to the US last year. While in Taiwan I taught at a public high school, and I also taught elementary students in a private buxiban, as well as adults. Since I have been back in the States I have taught Philosophy at a community college and have been a substitute language arts and social studies teacher for middle and high school. Let me tell you the difference between students in the two countries is stark. For the most part the education system here has failed many students. In my college philosophy class I had many student that couldn’t even write grammatically correct sentences, they were lazy, they wanted me to give them the answers, and complained that the material was too difficult. The material far more simple than the material I studied at the very same school 15 years before.
What I have seen at the public schools so far is enough to convince me never to send my kids there. In general the students are not challenged any more. The kids spend half the class doing work and the rest of the time they want to play games. On any given day I have more students show up without a book or pencil than I did in 7 years combined in Taiwan. It’s a problem of attitude in US culture. Students come to school wearing flip-flops, dressing like bums, with no respect for authority, no desire to learn. They all think they will achieve the same standard of living as their parents with little or no work. They are more concerned about their ipods, DSs, and PSPs, that anything else. When my students in Taiwan finished their work they would do homework from another class or read a novel. So for none of my students here do that. They run around the class like idiots. I even teach in the suburban schools, the inner-city school my mother teaches at is worse by far. It has changed a lot here in the last ten years. It’s very scary. Many of the teachers I have talked to here feel that they are helpless. The system in Taiwan might produce little worker bees, but here we are producing fat little couch potatoes. And everybody talks about critical and analytical skills students learn here, which is what I used to think, but from what I’ve seen this year I have changes my mind. The students here have less of an understanding of their history and their political system than do their Taiwanese counterparts, and far less knowledge about the world outside of their own country. If you don’t have the basic building blocks from which to form an opinion, then your opinion will be poor and uninformed. There are some bright spots here though, the catholic school my friend’s sixth grade daughter goes to has the sixth graders doing work that you would have to wait until high for in the public schools here. They study algebra, Greek mythology and have to do at home research.
October 16th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Nathan, maybe yer just a bad teacher.
October 16th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
John, I worked with Nathan for half a year and I can assure you he’s a very good teacher.
March 11th, 2008 at 8:13 am
I don’t know much about schools in other countries, but I do know about the students who are coming out of the schools here in the US. I also know about the homeschooled students here in the US (the ones who had parents who actually taught their children, not just let them ‘teach’ themselves).
From what I’ve seen, the academic standars have greatly decreased over the years. It is not all the teacher’s fault, nor is it all the school’s fault. Some obviously has to do with the person doing the teaching, some obvioiusly has to do with the way the public school system is set up, but a vast majority of it has to do with what parents are doing to help the situation.
Are parents keeping close tabs on what their children are learning? Are they paying attention to where their children are hanging out and who they’re hanging with? Are parents involved with any aspect of their children’s lives?
Some are…and those few probably have a better chance at coming out of the public shcool system with any semblance of education. If the parents whould step up to the plate and do their parenting, then some of the problems that the schools are facing with the unruly children would cease to exist.
I was homeschooled, my parents didn’t do the greatest job in the academic area, but they did an excelent job in the area of respect and discipline. They taught me to be a hard worker, and to respect those in authority regardless of how idiotic they may seem at times. They taught me to be honest, and have integrity.
It was partially my parents fault with the academics in my home being messed up like it was simply because they had their hands full with other things and chose not to check my homework daily…it caused me to choose to lie to them rather than to do it, because I had no motivation in and of myself to do it.
I wasn’t totally screwed in the area of academics, obviously…but I could have done much better than I did. As you can see, I am a much better speller than the majority of students these days, and more so even than some of my peers of the same age as myself.
Most children are going to have the same laziness issues as I had. If they don’t have their parents motivating them to achieve goals and set them even, then they will simply not do it.
Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child, but discipline and correction will drive it far from him. Parents have a huge part to play in the development of their children, including the academic development, but many seem to let the schools take on the entirety of their education instead of doing their part to teach their children.
I understand that some parents are in a situation that makes it difficult to do so, but many more are not, and could take it upon themselves to be involved in their children’s lives.
So, what I’m getting at, is that it is not just our school system or the teachers in it that are the problem, it is also the parents and the children who should take responsibility and work towards a better future for themselves, their children, and their grandchildren.
Private shools probably show much better statistics partially because they require the students and the parents to all be involved together in and with the school.
Forgive me if it comes off harsh, but it’s a harsh reality check that may spark parents to take back the role of parent in their home, and quite possibly raise the education level once again in these United States of America.