Yet another study popped up in my feed saying the same things about what successful educational countries are doing that America isn’t.  This study, as many of the others have been doing, looked at what foreign exchange students are saying when comparing their systems to ours.  If America ever wants to compete, these are things that have got to happen:

  1. School is harder. There’s less homework but the material is more rigorous. People take education more seriously, from selecting the content to selecting the teachers.
  2. Sports are just a hobby. In the U.S., sports are a huge distraction from the business of school, but that’s not the case in other countries.
  3. Kids believe there’s something in it for them. The students in other countries deeply believe that what they are doing in school affects how interesting their lives were going to be. Even if they don’t like a class, they see their education as a stepping stone to their future.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if all the parents in the U.S. pressed their kids to succeed as much academically as they do with sports?  What if every community member knew not who had the better football teams, but the better mathletes or young scientists or writers or artists?  The sad truth is that especially in poor and rural America, not only are we a long ways away, but we’re still falling.  Here’s the original story:  This researcher asked kids what’s wrong with U.S. schools. Here are their ideas.