>>US education is peculiar among nations in the proliferation of poor tertiary institutions. For most "colleges", i.e. institutions without a graduate school connected, you would not be far off to say all of the 4 years are spent teaching what should have been learned in high school.<<
You are addressing a topic that I have thought about a great deal, Malcolm. My educational experience was high school and an undergraduate degree in the UK and a graduate degree in the US.
I confess that in my early years in the US I carried the same kind of prejudice that you carry now regarding the quality of US education. Having attended a "good" English high school, I had studied 11 or 12 subjects in some depth and three in great depth. I think it is true to say that at age 18 I knew more history, geography, english literature, biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics than first or second year undergraduates in each of those subjects, even at "good" US universities, hence my initial prejudice.
However, after living in the US for a while, I was able to put my experience into context, in the following ways:
1. First, the UK and most other European countries provide a university education to a much smaller percentage of their populations. Ignoring differences in educational quality, this is bad in and of itself as it fosters elitism and the continuance of social stratification that prevent many Europeans from participating in the workforce up to their true potential.
2. The quality of UK education was judged without reference to its social utility. In fact, the more generally useless and inapplicable the material was, the higher that learning was regarded in academic circles. (I am describing my experience in the early 1980s - I wonder how much this has changed). Clive Sinclair used to tell a great story about one of the Cambridge University College libraries that refused to release lending materials to him because he intended to use them for "commercial" purposes. That anti-business bias was a deeply ingrained part of upper class English culture and negated much of the quality of English education - at least as it translated into aggregate economic performance.
3. Social and cultural values are ultimately far more important as drivers of a country's economic performance than is the aggregate quality of a country's educational system. The US has a system that educates a relative minority to be world-class primary researchers, inventors and innovators and endows them with a business culture that encourages and enables their efforts to create wealth. The US system also educates the majority to a point where they can read, write and operate a calculator sufficiently to function in the business systems created by the minority. As it does this, the US system does not constrain anyone within a cultural matrix that confines them to their allotted roles. Everyone has a shot at the brass ring, and that is why rumors of the demise of US economic supremacy are greatly exaggerated. |
