Re: The performance of the American Educational system

        It isn't hard to find someone who would argue that the American education system could use some improvement.  And there is some objective truth to this. The United States currently ranks 25th (source http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0923110.html) in the world for Math education by country. Apart from that, there are a large amount of students in remedial education that hardly get any attention. Two works, which I analyze today, illustrate these facts. "Two Million Minutes" is a documentary that compares the lives of two students from the US, India, and China, and uses the comparison as representative of the entire systems. "I Just Wanna be Average" is an essay that is an excerpt from Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary, which illustrates his experience with the remedial education system.
        Two Million Minutes is essentially arguing that other developed nations (i.e. India and China) are trying harder to educate their students, and the students themselves are overall more motivated to work hard. American students are subtly portrayed as slightly lazy, while the Indian and Chinese students are often shown working hard to achieve their goals. While students here are playing football or watching television, the Chinese and Indian people are practicing the violin, or spending their time programming. In my opinion, this is a fairly accurate comparison of the educational cultures of both societies, ignoring the subtle bias. Of course this doesn't mean that China or India are better than the US, but there is definitely room for improvement over here.
        This fact might be most obvious when evaluating the performance of the remedial education system. By some twist of fate, the bright child Mike Rose was placed on the vocational-ed track, which was "a dumping ground for the disaffected." No impetus was placed on these kids to succeed, and none of their teachers ever expected anything of them. As such they lived up to the expectations. Again, the educational culture here may be blamed for this. The teachers can't be bothered to really try to educate their students because everyone else has already given up hope on them. Why even bother? The answers to this question are mostly subjective, but one could easily argue that a lack of serious education is an enormous waste of potential, even for those people who have already been given up on. You know a class is in trouble if the teacher has trouble even reading aloud from a history textbook. In my opinion, give people the option to learn, to succeed, and to live a happy life and they will jump at the opportunity when the need becomes apparent. But these things take time, of course.