Americans Students Are Underworked
It is not a statement we can sustain because we do know that is only half true. Statistics not always supports evidently an argument. This is the case for The Economist. They subscribe to the idea that American students are underworked and compare hours class with those from Germany, Paris and Asia.
They suggest students are not paired with those in other countries because they do not attend full round year of school. But forgo to mention American students are underchallenged, it is not because they aren’t spending enough time in school!
They also suggest that these three months off in Summer act like a "mental eraser, with the average child reportedly forgetting about a month’s-worth of instruction in many subjects and almost three times that in mathematics.” Even whether these same students attend summer school or go for remedial classes, they will forget what they learn in the last 30 days!
It is heard a lot that Asian school are the super model, speaking of school success. Lets read what a Korean under the name of ME commented at Joanne Jacobs blog, about this article:
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They suggest students are not paired with those in other countries because they do not attend full round year of school. But forgo to mention American students are underchallenged, it is not because they aren’t spending enough time in school!
They also suggest that these three months off in Summer act like a "mental eraser, with the average child reportedly forgetting about a month’s-worth of instruction in many subjects and almost three times that in mathematics.” Even whether these same students attend summer school or go for remedial classes, they will forget what they learn in the last 30 days!
It is heard a lot that Asian school are the super model, speaking of school success. Lets read what a Korean under the name of ME commented at Joanne Jacobs blog, about this article:
- The article conveniently neglects to mention that suicide is one of the highest causes of death for children in South Korea. It’s not unheard of for teens to kill themselves if they don’t measure up academically. I think the same is true for Japan. SK even has a curious saying re: studying for exams: 'Sleep four hours and pass, sleep five hours and fail.' Perhaps American children do need to work harder, but I’m not sure we should be looking to a country that runs its children *that* ragged is very smart.
My parents (who seemed like unreasonable hardasses to me as a kid — they had the audacity to make me to go SUMMER SCHOOL! *gasp*) left South Korea because they did not like the education system, and they thought the amount of stress that Korean society places on its children with respect to school was too much. And my parents do indeed care about academics; even now, they keep telling me to go on to grad school. :P But at some point, the other extreme becomes just as bad. American slackdom should not be encouraged, but neither should the South Korean GET-HIGH-GRADES-DANGIT-OR-ELSE-YOU’RE-A-MISERABLE FAILURE-dom.
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One thing that has always amazed me about the U.S. education system is the amount of extracurricular activities that are considered normal. I think the kids here to a lot more stuff but maybe not enough learning. The summer vacation "mind erase" does have some legs as an argument in my opinion.