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by Aurornis 2 hours ago
> They dont learn proper reading and math, they dony learn creativity. Its just a big waste of time sending them there to be honest. Heck, they watch 1 hour of stupid TV shows there everyday.. why???

I am not in Amsterdam, but this seems very unexpectedly wrong. For as much as people complain about the US education system, I’ve been amazed watching how early my kids and friends’ kids at various schools around here have picked up reading and math. They’re learning these things earlier than I did as a child and earlier than I thought they would in the school system.

That’s not to say that every school is perfect, but it’s all been so much better than I would have expected from the extreme negative sentiment that I read online. The only explanation I can come up with is that school quality varies by a wide range from school to school or region to region, maybe more than the tests and statistics can show.
2 comments
Aeolun 32 minutes ago
I think this is a thing in the Netherlands, where schools are almost painfully standardized. It only matters to a degree which primary school you go to, you’ll have more or less the same education.
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lmf4lol 32 minutes ago
we had a pretty good education system. But it got much more worth in the last decade(s).

And this is not only my personal anecdote, There are numerous studies on this. One for instance, that really shook me, reported that around 1/3 of graduates from the “practical level” of secondary school cant tell you what a newspaper article was about after reading it. And this was not the case “back in the days”.

Germany has the same problem btw. They perform less and less well at all kinds of standardized tests. Just like the Dutch.

So there is sth seriously wrong!

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Aeolun 26 minutes ago
> reported that around 1/3 of graduates from the “practical level” of secondary school cant tell you what a newspaper article was about after reading it

I feel like this has more to do with motivation than lack of understanding. They could, but that would require them to actually read it, and that is effort that is better spent elsewhere.

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