Here’s some things I think we can all acknowledge:
- Neither [no] system is clearly "the best" for every student. Every system creates winners and losers, and they won't necessarily be the same people from one system to the next. The best system might be the one that creates the fewest losers, but that won't make it the best system for a kid who would have been a clear winner under a different system.
- The two systems we are discussing often get to the same place by different pathways. My spouse, for example, slid into what has become her main career in her mid 30s. She had already left one potential career for law school, and then law for a position in local government that developed out of volunteer work she had been doing that was very tangentially related to her legal practice. She was hired to work for a foundation in what had then become her area of expertise, except the position also included another area she knew nothing about. That area became her life's work. Paradoxically, one of her two undergraduate majors has been very useful in that field, notwithstanding that she did not use it at all in the first 15 years or so after college.
So, her career is typical of an “American” pattern, emphasizing that what you get out of undergraduate education is critical thinking skills and experience mastering something, not a set of job qualifications. But the rest of the Western world has people who do what she does, too, even though when she was in college there was no “slot” for her main area of expertise. In some cases, those people trained in a related field, and their careers developed naturally to include this area; in other cases, people were trained in something else and slid into the field mid-career, just like she did.
A child in India may decide what her career is going to be when she is 14, but her chemical engineering degree won’t stop her from writing a screenplay on spec when she’s 25.
- The two systems aren't completely mutually exclusive, either. The American system will require a child to take a broad range of courses in high school, and to some extent even in college, but it does not stop a 14-year-old from having focused ambitions, or from doing a lot to pursue those ambitions. If a child naturally has that kind of focus, by all means, let her pursue it.
The problem comes up when lots of parents decide their children naturally have that kind of focus mainly because the parents wish they did. But kids can get hurt, too, by parents who try to thwart the kids’ natural inclinations, or who never communicate that focusing someday is a good, even necessary thing.