<p>I haven’t read the entire thread, so I apologize if I am stepping into discussions that have happened in between the early posts and the later ones. There are a few things going on here that need to be untangled.</p>
<p>One set of discussions is about amount of work and expectations. American students indeed work fewer hours (length of school year; length of school day). The school calendar actually comes from the agrarian calendar and was established so kids on the farm could help their parents. I went to public school here and for a couple of years of elementary school in England and the English school (private) was far more advanced than my American one. Indeed, English high school graduates are assumed to be educated in lots of areas and have already, in effect, chosen their majors before entering university.</p>
<p>College admissions here is different. HYP, as a result of the anti-Semitism of alumni and administrations, shifted admissions criteria away from purely academic criteria (grades and a precursor to the SATs) to incorporate criteria that would enable them to separate non-Jews (largely WASPs) from Jews. After quotas to limit the percentage of Jews to 15% became embarrassing, they instituted geographic distribution requirements (most of the Jews were in a small number of big cities) and an emphasis on character, exemplified by participation in sports and worthy extra-curricular activities, and even interviews designed to distinguish Christian men of character from Jews. The upshot of this is that American colleges choose based upon a number of criteria that are loosely correlated with academic strength (and we have built up a strong ideology in the US for why this is a good thing). But, it does mean that students in HS will, a la Michael Spence’s work on job market signalling, over-invest (relative to what they would have done otherwise) in meeting those largely or partially non-academic criteria. Thus, relative to other countries, time students spend on non-academic work is time taken from academic work.</p>
<p>Another discussion is about the highly competitive arena we have for the top schools. I’d say we have a vicious meritocracy for the top ten or twenty percent, kids competing to go the the elite colleges and the second tier. In this tier, kids work and do ECs and barely have time to sleep – these kids and their parents are represented on CC. This tier includes the high-end public and private high schools. (These are the schools of my experience, though I will now report impressions based upon reading of non-academic and academic articles – I may be wrong but this is what I sense.) However, we have what I take to be embarrassingly bad educational systems for the inner cities and some traditionally poor and often black areas in places like Alabama and Mississippi. And, we have pretty low standards and mediocre education relative to other countries for many of the kids in the middle. It is not clear that the average kid not in an elite or magnet high school has to work that hard or gets a particularly rigorous education. I think the kids in these schools learn to write largely by osmosis.</p>
<p>A final discussion had to do with what is actually being taught in the potentially too few hours of school. I’ve had one kid in a highly-regarded public high school but partially homeschooled and another in a highly-regarded private high school. My observation is that a very substantial fraction of time in public school is spent on maintaining order, socialization, and activities related to grades. In the very strong public high school, teachers felt compelled to lay down elaborate and complex rules on what would happen if a student were late, needed to go to the bathroom, etc. That stuff seems to get dispensed with more quickly in the private school. In an organized homeschool (e.g., tutors come in or kid goes to community college class or just is a disciplined worker), a higher percentage of the time can be spent on academic learning and less on learning how to play well with others and more importantly how to follow reasonable but often arbitrary rules and how to cope with arbitrary autocrats. It’s both good and bad to learn to follow rules, but you don’t need 12 years of this to teach you what you need to learn.</p>
Because certainly in my area nothing could be more accurate. And as to the “osmosis,” part: sorry, but the chemistry ain’t workin’. They are in fact not writing, not learning to write, not being made to write (in such mediocre high schools that they laughingly might call “top” or even just “really good,”), and one doesn’t learn to write well overnight, instantly, or by osmosis - unless one is a phenomenal reader (they aren’t), is such a genius that direct learning is a habit, OR someone else is, ahem, doing the writing. (Some of my students’ families include those with parents who write <em>for</em> the, say, middle-schooler.)</p>
I enjoy your writing, in fact.</p>