[zhemao]

Oh look, yet another article about a country that's doing education better than us here in the US. And the funny thing is that they all seem to do things in different ways.

You know what I think the problem is? Americans on the whole just don't care about public education. Either in terms of quality or equity.

[jmknoll]

While we've got the cynicism out, I'll do you one better. I think its that Americans on the whole just don't care about public anything.

Public education, public healthcare, public transportation, public libraries, public lands.

Decades of the Republican party screaming that government is the enemy while gutting every public institution that it can get its hands on has led to a real, tangible decline in the quality of public services.

Then from here you get into a vicious cycle of "Wow, our train system is horrible. But I'm already paying for my car; I don't want to have to pay for that chump who can't afford a car to get to work." Or "What a shame about the state of our local school. But I'm already paying for little Billy to go to Catholic school. Why should I pay for the neighbor's education as well?"

Not sure about how we get ourselves out of this mess. But I feel like just generally giving a shit about our neighbors and communities would be a good start. Seems like we're heading in the wrong direction for the time being though.

[zhemao]

Very true. I don't think the Republicans are solely to blame though. I live in the SF Bay Area, definitely a very blue part of the country. Despite pretty steep taxes, our public transportation and public schools aren't much to look at. Better than other parts of the country, probably, but it ain't Canada. Even when there's a political will, there doesn't seem to be much know-how in how to actually provision public infrastructure and services in an efficient way.

[ghufran_syed]

Most public education is run by cities in the US, and controlled locally. If the "Republicans" are the problem, shouldn't we see better education results in Democrat controlled areas, of which there are clearly many in the US? Seeing as there is no such difference to my knowledge, I would suggest that your assertion is unsupported by the facts.

[alacombe]

Coming from Europe, I can tell you that secondary Canadian education is laughable at best.

[Kpourdeilami]

I attended a high school in Toronto from grades 10 to 12. The purely academical content of the science and math courses (math, physics, chemistry, and biology), can seem "laughable" but that is not all that there is to our education system. Every student is required to take elective courses from 3 different categories and students get exposed to lots of different ideas early on.

The public school I went to offered 100+ elective courses on different topics from law, and philosophy to computer science, industrial design, and even hairstyling. We had access to great teachers who took on project-based approaches to teaching that made the lessons more enjoyable. For example, when my Physics teacher wanted to teach us about vectors, he put us into groups and gave each group a sheet of vectors and a tape meter. We had to travel in the direction of each vector on the sheet until we got to a point in the school where he had hidden a sheet of paper and when we took that back to him, he would mark our assignment as completed. After that assignment, everyone in my class had a much better understanding of vector arithmetics.

Students who will attend a post-secondary in other countries will end-up redoing most of the advanced math and science they did in high school in the first-year of university anyway. For the rest of the students, those extra science and math courses will just be a waste of valuable time that they could have spent learning more useful skills.

[zhemao]

And if you came to the US and saw our public schools here, you'd probably die of laughter.

[avip]

I had the exact same impression, yet somehow they nail it in OECD comparative tests.

[johan_larson]

Having gone through the Canadian education system, I would guess that Canada's high score comes from doing a good job on the lower percentiles, 1-50 or so. The system is slow and repetitive in the lower grades; its focus is getting everyone up to basic standards rather than challenging the best students. But if you're at all clever and diligent, it's boring.

Tracking happens late, at entry to high school (grade 9), where they split you up into academic, regular, and vocational tracks. From there on things move at a more respectable pace, at least in the academic track. But at that point the top-track students are already years behind their peers in other systems that moved faster and tracked sooner. I would guess the top students coming out of high school are about two years behind students in academic tracks in other countries, like the UK or Germany.

[narak]

Please expound...