Random interest in other country's education systems

[Muskys]

To me I've had this interest for a while. When I was 16/17 I wondered what my equivalents "across the pond" were doing.

I love watching school swap episodes and really enjoyed the Chinese school series back in 2015. Been really fascinated by the east Asian countries teach for example maths.

Does anyone else have this?

Yeah, I only started a few months ago. I should have started when we first moved really, but everything was a bit too hectic.

I'm fast becoming part of the furniture as I'm in my 4th year.

I lived in several countries when my DC were small and the British education system is usually perceived by outsiders as being the gold standard. I work with newcomers now and it's interesting that so many are disappointed with education here, they feel it is very lite and lacking and you progress to the next year without exams. Indians and Chinese in particular are disappointed but it does seem to be considered lacking across the board.
I'm very interested in the Scandinavian model, but do wonder how much of it is just rose tinted spectacles?

It’s so hard, my first language isn’t English, so my triple double translations get tiring pretty quickly. My written Swedish has improved loads, it was awful!

My brother and sister in law had a daughter in a Swedish sixth form. They started off very very positive about everything they encountered (and still love the country very much) but did come to feel that the school didn’t demand as much of its high achieving students as would have been the case in her (typical state) English school.

I loved some of the visible aspects though. Just the simple fact of school playgrounds being open spaces that everyone can use whether they are at that school or not for example. And of course the attitude to outdoor play - more like it was in England when I was a kid - that you went outside rain, shine or snow. We moaned then, but it was better than constant ‘wet play’ calls at the English school I worked at at few years back, when the kids would frowst indoors. And Swedish children went to school wearing sensible clothes not uniform so they didn’t have freezing cold knees or wet feet like we did back in the 70s.

Look at the PISA scores

I think they have very different priorities. In my experience the Uk system is extremely focused on the grades, whereas the Swedish system is more interested in the overall wellbeing of the child. I found it hard to adjust but DD loved it.

This is similar to what I have seen. My niece is German and the same age as ds. I have memories of dn demonstrating correct pencil grip before she even turned 3. She may not have started school until 6 but she did a lot of learning before that.

Germany also has this weird thing where the kids are split into different secondary schools depending on the teacher’s opinion rather than anything objective.

It's their equivalent of the secondary modern / grammar school system, but these days parents often manage to get their way and get their child assigned to the "grammar school" = Gymnasium, and the 3rd tier school seems to have faded away.

This is more difficult than you might think.

the two countries do not measure the same thing,

numeracy in China looks at whether people can add subtract divide and multiply. Their rate on this is close enough to 100%.

see this research paper:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342750139_In_China_What_We_Need_is_More_Than_Mathematics_A_Literature_Review_of_Numeracy/fulltext/5f04ae98299bf18816083709/In-China-What-We-Need-is-More-Than-Mathematics-A-Literature-Review-of-Numeracy.pdf?origin=publication_detail&_tp=eyJjb250ZXh0Ijp7ImZpcnN0UGFnZSI6InB1YmxpY2F0aW9uIiwicGFnZSI6InB1YmxpY2F0aW9uRG93bmxvYWQiLCJwcmV2aW91c1BhZ2UiOiJwdWJsaWNhdGlvbiJ9fQ

numeracy in the U.K. is measured on whether people can apply those skills to everyday situations eg working out wages, etc. the U.K. rate on this measure is about 52% of adults are numerate.

https://www.nationalnumeracy.org.uk/news/new-oecd-data#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Organisation%20for%20Economic%20Co%2Doperation,above%20the%20average%20among%20the%20OECD%20countries**

being able to apply addition, subtraction etc to real life problems is a much higher level of numeracy than simply being able to do addition, subtraction etc.

so the two “numeracy” rates are not comparable.

My mum went to primary school in the fifties in post war London. They had classes of 60 or 70.

How was behaviour in those days? How and why was it different from behaviour in schools now? Please ask your mum and report back.

Not educational exactly, but cultural - lots of Icelanders go on a multi year gap year before starting university. They travel, work and self study before they choose their degrees. It's also thought to help the small population, as when they travel they often end up marrying out and improving the small gene pool.

What about the PISA scores?

In comparison to Indian/Chinese education systems, the UK is very much a whole child approach rather than results focused. I suppose it's just differing views of what 'education' means.

The pisa scores for China are not for the whole country.

China chooses a few schools in the best performing areas of the country to do the pisa tests.

the U.K. enters the whole country.

if the U.K. just entered Eton we too could have pisa scores like chinas

I like the US system - much more individualistic and importance given to extra curriculars/community work. The downside is obviously the variability between school districts, but done well it has a lot to offer.

What I find interesting is that DS's school constantly have groups of teachers from the UK visiting to learn the Swedish way of doing things. And my DD is a teacher here and at her school all the teachers get sent to the UK to learn how they do it there. Everyone appears to think the grass is greener somewhere else.

I also feel it's near impossible to get into Harvard. Whilst you can study and prepare to get into Oxbridge.

It doesn't have a good academic reputation.

I compare my family life with respect to parental motivation, school and University with my Japanese partner. His parents were pushing him to be the best, learn three musical instruments including a traditional string instrument plus Kendo. Then came private school and weekend school. Parents paid for him to attend Aoyama in Shibuya Tokyo plus Shane language school. My parents could not have cared less and the motivation had to come from me.

It does seem to be very hard to get into Harvard. Apparently the acceptance rate has recently been 3.6%. The acceptance rate for Oxford is 14%. It's all about your choice of subject though. At Oxford the acceptance rate for some subjects is only a little under 50%. But the acceptance rate for maths and statistics is 2%. The acceptance rate for Chinese nationals who apply to Beijing University is under 1%.
Of course we don't know who's applying. It's possible that Americans, tending to be a self-confident and ambitious lot, apply to Harvard despite having little chance of getting in.

This is what it often comes down to, people read about education systems without working knowledge of it and think it sounds amazing. There was a documentary once on channel 4 where teachers swapped schools, one from England and one from Sweden or Denmark. The Swedish teacher was horrified at how unruly the British kids were (they weren't, they were questioning things, using critical reasoning) and the British teacher was very shocked how rigid the curriculum was, she thought (as is often said) that each child has it's own tailor made curriculum.

It's good to visit other countries, attend international teacher conferences, do teacher swaps, etc. It helps education systems and teachers to improve. It doesn't mean they just want to copy another system wholesale. A Spanish teacher (teacher in Spain) told me that the international teacher conferences she ran were popular with teachers from all over, with the exception of the UK. She didn't understand why no-one from the UK ever attended. I assumed it was because of cost, which didn't seem to have occurred to her.

I used to enjoy watching programmes (on youtube) about education in Hong Kong.