I look at this from a spiritual perspective. Everyone has natural gifts, and I believe these are given for a purpose. So the ideal field of study is one that develops the person’s abilities. For some people, this simply means going to a vo-tech high school and learning a trade. For others, it is a narrow, focused discipline requiring rigorous training, such as medical school. For others, it is a wide-ranging education in something like history, that trains the student to see patterns in historical events that can help him identify and solve modern problems.
There is no one size fits all approach to education.
Indeed. To add to what @dfbdfb said, going from most liberal artsy to most restrictive/focused, it’d go like this:
American liberal arts majors (typically only 1/4 to 1/3 of 4 years in a major) -> American professional majors and many Canadian liberal arts majors (roughly 1/2 of 4 years in a major) -> Canadian professional and science majors and Scottish unis (roughly 3 of 4 years in a major) -> English-style unis (pretty much all of 3 or 4 years in a major, though you have electives and may be able to take some related courses) -> “Continental”-style unis (spend 3 or 4 years taking a rigid sequence of courses).
British, French, or German students may be getting a more rigorous liberal arts education in high school than most Americans do. So by the time they hit college, they are better prepared to specialize. I bet a typical Oxbridge STEM student knows his or her kings and queens, or 19th century British novels, at least as well as a typical Ivy League liberal arts major knows his or her Presidents and Herman Melville. As for deeper knowledge and skills associated with liberal education, I don’t know, maybe there is some advantage to prolonging general education past age 18.
I don’t know any of the european high school systems. Would a US student with 6 or 7 APs really be that far behind?
I am using the 6-7 APs as a standard because the students going to the top (30?) universities and LACs (30?) all seem to have that many, often more.
. @ucbalumnus You can be a college drop-out while being the wealthiest person on the planet; that doesn’t mean it’s good advice. While it’s possible to gather skills through disparate college courses, a designed curriculum that focuses on such things is (IMO) more likely to achieve success.
LAC’s have taken a beating for their “lack of focus”. When that shifts to be more appreciated, now you can get that at all of the other schools as well?
That depends on the American HS. There’s a lot of variation in quality in the US. I’ve always said that I got a terrific liberal arts education in HS.
Evidently, they cover a lot of ground in different subjects in French prepas, so a French Grande Ecole student would have a pretty wide knowledge base, but no way would your typical Oxbridge STEM major know much about literature or history (unless they were interested in that in their spare time). Don't know where you got that idea from. In their HS, they'd be covering subjects at our HS level (but could already choose). Then in the 2 years of "college" before uni, they study 3-4 subjects at our college freshmen intro class level; typically ones related to a future major so are narrowing even further.
No. 3-5 AP’s with mostly/all 5’s in them in relevant subjects can get an American in to pretty much in to any UK uni besides Oxbridge (which have their own harder tests and an interview) and LSE (too much demand for slots).
However, A-Level Maths and Further Maths definitely cover more ground than just AP Calc and AP Stats (it’s annoying that, just because it isn’t in AP, most American kids don’t learn stuff more useful to more people than calc like numerical methods).
In terms of “designed curriculum”, would you be referring to a LAC like Amherst or Evergreen State (open curriculum schools), one like Harvey Mudd or UNC Asheville (with extensive core or general education requirements), or one like St. John’s College (with a core curriculum that is the entire curriculum)?
Most of the range of curricular design and offerings that exists in LACs is available in non-LACs (perhaps not the St. John’s College model, but that is an outlier even among LACs).
^ I admit I was speculating about that (based on a possibly mistaken impression that Europeans tend to favor early specialization in universities in part out of confidence in the quality of their secondary school general ed.) We see occasional reports in the press about Americans v. the foreign competition in elementary through secondary school STEM education. I haven’t seen so much about how we compare in general education.