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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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11411500


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.

[0] http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/articles/h...


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.




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