As the uncle travelling Matt of LP, I’ve had my first missive on U.S. education published over at Online Opinion.
Feel free to have a gander, and comments are welcome below.
3 Responses to “School in outer space”
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Very interesting and informative, Merc.
The differences between our 2 systems go back to the differences in our history, I would suggest. From its Revolutionary origins, the US has, it appears to me, always relied on localised solutions. The plethora of Committees of Safety that ran the country administratively at the same time as the First and Second Congresses, which, on my reading, were relatively ineffectual bodies, and I stress relatively, were more powerful and effective, as were most of the state Congresses. This tradition seems to have been maintained over the centuries.
Here in Oz, we were used to the very start to absolute government control, and, generally speaking, accepted it. This primacy of government carried over into the various colonies as they were created, and continued when the colonies became states. For all the talk of individualism, choice, etc, mostly imported from the US, Australians expect, in fact, demand that governments do things for us in al areas of health, education, welfare, transport etc. I would suggest this inclination has even been reinforced with the failure of private-public partnerships. The fact that our schools are divided into public/private, with an over-arching state responsibility for examinations and financing/subsidisation of both, arises partly from the desire of elites to establish a private school system comparable the the GPS’s of England, and partly from the sectarianism of Australian society, especially towards Catholics/Irish, up until about the 1960s. Subsidisation of religious schools, apart from a belief in egalitarianism, is a means of ensuring that kind of sectarianism doesn’t rear its ugly head again.
Those are my theories about the defferences.
I am unconvinced about the more nuanced public debate in the USA, based on the level of complaint from American friends about MurdochLtd, and the educational debates here. For example, the whole-word/phonics debate just doesn’t have the ferocity that it has in the US (excepting Miranda Devine, who is ferocious about everything anyway) — most schools use elements of both methods, just as our pre-schools cherry-pick elements of Montessori, Steiner and other programmes. My impression is that the Seppos are a lot more hung up on Following Methods than we are, and we’re hung up on Whatever Works.
One question I do want answered, though: the Yanks send their kids away to Uni, as a rule, and they have a vast number of colleges. How the heck do the colleges tell how good their prospective students are and how do students tell how good a college is? Secondly, I have the impression that the liberal arts program you do before your real degree is about the level of the NSW HSC — is that correct?
Chookie - I can’t give you an authoritative answer, but I can tell you what I’ve seen. I’d strongly suggest you cross-check the below as I could easily have missed something important in the short time I’ve been here:
Your questions presuppose that there are centralized systems for college admissions. If there are, I haven’t encountered them. Higher education is not Dawkinised here. Colleges are pretty much free to set their own policies and courses, as long as they can keep their public and private funding bodies satisfied (sound familiar?).
There is the SAT test, but I haven’t encountered any equivalent of the centralised NSW Universities Admissions Centre to process and handle admissions. Instead, students apply individually to a plethora of colleges and wait to receive acceptance letters.
Apart from the SAT score, some colleges also want to interview their applicants, see some writing samples, and so on.
Students decide which colleges to apply for through reputation, advertising, and the advice of their school counsellor. Some schools are very pro-active in forging close links with local colleges and can provide their students with detailed advice and recommendations on which college would suit them. They also help draft the college applications.
Many colleges also actively solicit student admissions, because without enrolments they die.
Then there is the whole 2 year/4 year college distinction. The ‘liberal arts’ program you referred to might be the 2 year degree…I wouldn’t be quick to say that it’s the “equivalent” of the NSW HSC, because there are 4,100 colleges here, and they all do their own thing. So at one college the 2 year degree might be fairly undistinguished, at another it could be quite advanced.
In my own subject area, Japanese, the New York public school exam is known as the ‘Regents’, and in some ways it goes beyond the NSW Japanese Continuers exam for Year 12. Here in New York they cover more grammar elements, about 5% more kanji, but a bit less vocabulary and less emphasis on cultural knowledge and conversational fluency. But an outside observer would be hard pressed to notice the differences - I suppose to external observers they are for all practical purposes equivalent.
In fact, in foreign languages generally, there seems to be a lot of commonalities between the goals and stages in New York and NSW, the two curricula with which I am most familiar. A student could easily move from one to the other and slot right in at the same age and stage level. A few New York teachers have told me that the city educational board has taken its cures from Australian foreign language teaching for the last decade or so.