You understand the global history since the neolithical times rougly, and your own contintents history since the 1500s pretty exactly.
You understand how algebra, analysis, stochastic work, and can do simple mathematical proofs.
You know the laws of physics, how and why things work, you have learnt general and special relativity, and even know parts of quantum mechanics, including being able to work with the probability functions of electrons.
You know basic chemistry, understand what each element is, know a large part of organic and inorganic chemistry, have experimented with it, and can explain why some molecular bindings work, and why some don’t.
You speak fluently 3 to 4 languages, and can read standard literature in them, as well as being able to write essays about cultural topics in them.
You have had PE, know how to play a majority of sports, and have a physical condition where you are able to play them.
You know the historical styles of art produced, and when and where they were produced, and have experience working in a majority of styles yourself.
You know how our political system and our economy works, and know how to do accounting and taxes for yourself. You know how to start a company, and the trade offs of different types of incorporation.
You are able to work in teams, can delegate work, know how to learn things from existing sources and do your own research, how to write scientific papers, can debate with others in a civil way.
________________________
Excerpted and translated from the curriculum for high school students in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, 2012.
(And I can attest that what I learnt in school fits this description)
I paid attention in a US high school, I'll take a crack at this list.
History, yes. Algebra and basic proofs yes. Basic physics were covered, but no calculations were ever done with relativity, and no quantum mechanics.
Chemistry covered the elements, molecular structure, and several dozen compounds. The Krebs cycle was roughly covered in biology class, but most organic chemistry went unexplored.
Language classes were enough to half-learn one beyond English, and not to fluency.
PE yes. Art history no.
The mechanism of government was very well studied, but politics were largely ignored. The economy was not a subject of study except for a bit about the Great Depression. Accounting was barely mentioned, and definitely not taxes or incorporation.
Teamwork? It was practiced, at least. Research and debate? Yes, pretty well.
That doesn’t sound nearly as bad as the media and other HN and Reddit users always claim it to be. In fact, sounds like an average high school in most of the developed world.
That leads to the question: Why is the US education system always portrayed like that?
It varies wildly. For a student who's motivated, encouraged by parents and peers, and lives in at least a reasonably middle-class or higher school district, you can come out of most high schools having achieved most or all of the things you listed. If you're poor, live in an impoverished district, are surrounded by family and peers who do not value education, and attend dilapidated schools with few resources, it's much harder. Those are are the schools thats are sensationalized, but they're mostly an artifact of inner city urban areas, and are more a reflection of the overall culture of poverty than a cause of it.
This roughly matches what is expected of a high level student in The Netherlands. Note that The Netherlands (and I think Germany as well) segregates students with a learning aptitude test.
This means for example that my sister who is more artistically talented than I am was sorted into the high school track that is shorter, teaches only the very basics of these topics. Her highschool track ends at 16 and students are expected to go into a college that teaches some kind of physical skill, she did graphical design, and after that got accepted into an academy of arts.
In contrast I went to the highest highschool track, did everything parent post mentioned, did that until 18 (6 years) and was then expected to pick a higher learning college (which we call university) to which you are generally automatically accepted if you have a higher learning high school diploma.
I often wonder how the US deals with this. My sister would be severely unhappy at my highschool being constantly confronted with topics that would be hard and uninteresting to her. I would likely be bored and vastly unqualified for proper university if I went to hers. How would you put us in the same classroom? ( though I would have loved to go to the same school as her, she rocks :) )
While I wouldn't say I learned all of this, we did cover quite a similar set of topics during my schooling. It's not everywhere that schooling is bad in the US. Not every school just lumps all of the kids no matter their aptitude into the same classes. A lot of schools have many levels of placement that are to help understand the baselines a student can be held to. For most math and science classes I took the top classes and felt it was a great pace (most of the time) and learned quite a bit. For history and English/grammar classes where I'm not as strong, I took a middle level class and still learned much of the same material but at a slower pace.
For cases like your sister, there was options for classes to be taken. She can take many different art classes over the course of a couple years to help build a portfolio for submitting to colleges. I on the other hand had 2 maths, 2 sciences, and an English class my final semester. It was great since it so closely aligned with my college studies and helped me get ahead (AP). I never felt difficulty in college having taken these APs either.
Just setting the record straight, it's not the complete Wild West over here. Just some schools are stronger than others. My school is pretty standard as far as schools in south east Massachusetts go.
Cool thanks! Just to clear it up, I didn't think it was a complete wild west out there. Clearly the U.S. has many of the best universities in the world, and similarly many of the best arts academies so somehow it's able to produce well prepared students. I was just a bit confused on how exactly.
To a large degree, the competent US high schools do that sorting within the school.
In my 4-year public high school there were at least 10 different math courses. The lowest students would still be taking some remedial arithmetic and such, normal students would take algebra, and I was taking discrete (first year).
This applies for pretty much all study areas, with AP/advanced options available for the best students and remedial courses for the worst. There's also a large degree of flexibility in choosing your schedule, so students who aren't planning to go to university could choose mostly shop classes and have half days for their final year or two of high school.
The end result was that I wasn't in a single class with the remedial bullies from elementary school (where unfortunately there is substantially less segregation, with the only solution being to move up a grade).
Almost no one graduating in the US would have even one of these skills, except possibly "knowing how to play a majority of sports." Most people graduating college wouldn't even have more than one or two of them, if any at all.
I don't know how you can make such a ridiculous assertion.
The vast majority of students at my public high school definitely graduated with most of those skills. I didn't go to a particularly special high school, just a normal public school in Vermont.
See my reply to tlunter[1], particularly link #4. Vermont is around the second best state in the U.S. education-wise and has a school system which is globally competitive. The U.S. is a giant country and there is a big difference between the best performing and the least performing states - e.g. between Massachusetts/Vermont and Mississippi/Alabama.
I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that most high school graduates in the U.S. are not fluent in 3 or 4 languages or able to solve problems in organic chemistry and quantum mechanics. This is, after all, a country where merely teaching the theory of evolution vs "intelligent design" in public school is still considered controversial among the general public, and people have trouble locating the countries they've recently spent a decade at war with on a map.
While I agree that Vermont is generally pretty good, I don't actually think it's that far outside the median. For example, in the US News ranking you linked to, Vermont is ranked 18th. [0]
That being said, I do agree there are large inequalities in education between states. I certainly don't think most US high school graduates are fluent in 3 or 4 languages. Heck, I'm not.
But that's a far cry from claiming that "Almost no one graduating in the US would have even one of these skills." Some large states actually have decent enough education that I'd expect their students to at least pass half the skill list.
The languages are the only point where I disagree with GP. Most US students don't start studying a foreign language until junior high at the earliest. When I was in high school (early 1980s) very few started foreign languages before high school. There were definitely kids at my high school who were pretty fluent in one non-native language, a few might be conversationally passable in two, but very few if any would have fluency in three or four languages in high school.
I think some resentful high school students that had a hard time often reflect American schooling poorly. I didn't have a supremely negative time (with the teaching at least) and I went to a standard 8:00-2:30 school in Massachusetts that had hour long blocks. I think we need to start taking more negative responses on the Internet as the extreme and not necessarily the norm.
Massachusetts seems to be consistently ranked as having one of the top public school systems in the US.[1][2][3] That might explain part of the discrepancy between your experience and my own.
(Edit: In fact, it seems MA would be pretty competitive globally against other country's schools - 9th in math, 4th in reading, 2nd in math. On the other hand, the worst U.S. states are on par with Bulgaria and Kazakhstan, among others.[4])
I'm not sure how to concisely respond to this as explaining everything right or wrong with U.S. public schools would be tall order. At the same time, it's likewise hard to believe your list would be the expected knowledge at graduation of a median high school student rather than a top-tier one.
For one thing, most items on the list wouldn't even be covered by U.S. standards (i.e. Common Core). Speak 3 to 4 languages fluently? The requirement to graduate in my state was 2 years of a foreign language (my school offered Spanish, German, French, and Latin, but options vary from place to place). Even assuming two years of a 55-minute a day class, 180 days a year, was enough to become fluent, that would leave you with two.
Similarly for science, you're required to take some basic science classes - intro chemistry and biology were the only required ones at my school. You wouldn't touch organic chemistry unless you took an AP (advanced placement, for college credit) class, and the teacher decided to cover it. I did take AP Chemistry and received college credit - we still didn't touch anything from organic the entire time, and I couldn't have even told you what a functional group was when I finished. Physics is just an elective and calculus-based wasn't even offered at my high school, so the majority of students aren't taking it.
Understanding special relativity? Quantum mechanics? General relativity? The highest math requirement is algebra 2, which might include a brief intro to how to add and multiply matrices. So exactly what level of "understanding" are we talking about this hypothetical median high school graduate having, in any country? General relativity is advanced enough that most physics majors won't even cover it beyond a superficial introductory level. You'd need a decent understanding of differential equations, linear algebra, and tensor analysis to tackle that kind of stuff, and the highest students could ever typically go (without the administration bending over backwards for a few particularly bright ones) is AP Calculus.
So I really have trouble believing the list of expected knowledge described in the GGP is anything other than a wish list for the best students. U.S. public schools may not be great but even I wouldn't criticize them for not meeting those standards for typical students.
That aside there are some real problems. Where I graduated HS, about 15 years ago, things were divided into the Honors program and Vocational program. The honors program was where you basically got what we might think of as a normal high school experience, teachers actually expected at least a minimal amount of work from you, and the better students had the option of AP classes. The vocational program was for everyone else. I knew people in it who didn't turn in any work their entire four years of high school. The classes were made to maintain a reasonable graduation rate despite having to deal with a large number of students who simply didn't care or for whom everyone had very low expectations. Those students might take two years of Spanish, but they weren't expected to be able to speak or understand it in even the most rudimentary way. Forget about actually learning algebra or knowing how to "solve for x." Even at the community college I attended, there were students who needed some science classes to do nursing who couldn't grasp the concept of atoms being made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and therefore couldn't get credit.
This is just how it is for a large portion of the populace - the really bad cases are far worse. My girlfriend is currently a student teacher at one of the two lowest performing schools in our state. She has immigrant students (in junior high) who not only don't speak English, but can barely read or write Spanish either. It seems like about 15-20% of her students would simply fail if she didn't take steps to try and get them to the minimum passing grade. But would it be better to hold them in the 7th grade indefinitely? Or to pass them along to a higher grade despite having only rudimentary understanding of the material outlined in the standards?
I know one thing she has changed her mind on recently, with actually being a teacher, is that it's possible for every student to get an A. It would take massive interventions beyond what a few teachers are capable of to turn around students from poor, rural, impoverished communities, who sometimes have histories of assault and abuse, and who have been perpetually falling behind the ideal outcome a little more every year. For the really poor outcomes, or just the suboptimal ones, it's a lot more complicated than just "what do you do in high school all day long?" The cases of having students primed for learning but not given enough resources are far fewer than the ones where schools are taking disadvantaged people who have already fallen behind and trying to make the best they can of bad situations.
I'm no fan of the U.S. public school system, but even I can't blame it for not being able to get students up to those kinds of standards before graduating.
You understand the global history since the neolithical times rougly, and your own contintents history since the 1500s pretty exactly.
You understand how algebra, analysis, stochastic work, and can do simple mathematical proofs.
You know the laws of physics, how and why things work, you have learnt general and special relativity, and even know parts of quantum mechanics, including being able to work with the probability functions of electrons.
You know basic chemistry, understand what each element is, know a large part of organic and inorganic chemistry, have experimented with it, and can explain why some molecular bindings work, and why some don’t.
You speak fluently 3 to 4 languages, and can read standard literature in them, as well as being able to write essays about cultural topics in them.
You have had PE, know how to play a majority of sports, and have a physical condition where you are able to play them.
You know the historical styles of art produced, and when and where they were produced, and have experience working in a majority of styles yourself.
You know how our political system and our economy works, and know how to do accounting and taxes for yourself. You know how to start a company, and the trade offs of different types of incorporation.
You are able to work in teams, can delegate work, know how to learn things from existing sources and do your own research, how to write scientific papers, can debate with others in a civil way.
________________________
Excerpted and translated from the curriculum for high school students in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, 2012.
(And I can attest that what I learnt in school fits this description)