j.vanbaardwijk
@chello.nl To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent by: cc:
owner-BRIN-L@c Subject: Re: *DO* we share a
civilization?
ornell.edu
07/28/01 07:18
AM
Please respond
to BRIN-L
How do you handle it in the US? Let parents pay the bill themselves? Then
what do you do with children whose parents can't afford it? Tell those
kids: "tough luck for you, but it isn't our fault that you weren't born
into a rich family, so you'll just have to do without even basic
education"?
Jeroen
Jeroen, I have no idea where you get your ideas about the US, but they're
often rather amusing :-) The United States had the world's _first_ free
and comprehensive public school system, advocated by Thomas Jefferson
himself, and first funded through land sales in the Ordinance of, I
believe, 1785. The original plans for such actually predate the American
Constitution itself. The United States spends more on education per
student than any other nation in the world by a considerable margin. The
largest single item in the budget of, I believe, every state government is
education expenditures - in my native Maryland, that figure has
historically been over 50%, and even now is over 40%, I believe. A
_higher_ proportion of Americans go on to post-secondary (i.e. after high
school) education than in any other nation in the world. Of my (1997)
graduating class from high school, more than _50%_ went on to higher
education, again, the highest proportion in the world. The public school
systems of every other country in the world - including those of Western
Europe - considerably postdate those of the United States, and free and
universal school access did not approach American levels in Western Europe
until well into the 19th century. The state school system of higher
education in the United States is similarly enormous - the University of
Michigan, I believe, has more than 50,000 undergraduates. All have heavily
susidized tuititions. More than a third of my high school was made up of
students who lived below the poverty line - according to my guidance
counselor, who had been there for more than twenty years, in her entire
career no student had ever told her that they could not afford to go to
college because of the extent to which tuitition was calculated based on
parental income. Even here at Harvard more than half the student body is
on financial aid of some sort, with some proportion getting a full
scholarship. Which means, incidentally, that my parents, by paying _more
than_ $30,000 a year, were subsidizing the education of many of my peers.
While the American educational system is not perfect, it is a remarkable
achievement, successfully educating a population larger and more diverse
than anyone from Europe could even imagine, in my opinion. The proportion
of students who go to "private" schools in the United States is relatively
small, and the largest portion of those go, I believe, to Catholic schools
that are often quite inexpensive and also, to be honest, probably do a
better job than the public schools against which they compete (on average,
although not at the extremes - the best American public high schools are so
vastly superior to even the best American private schools that they're not
even playing in the same universe - Andover's science programs were
pathetic compared to those of my school, for example, and the International
Baccalaureate program with the highest IB test scores in the world is
Richard Montgomery, a public high school in Rockville, Maryland). Indeed,
a free and high quality public education is, I think, the single most
important thing (beyond basic security) that any government can provide to
its citizens, and this is something that virtually all Americans agree with
- and something, to be blunt, that was originally our idea as well.
Although the American government is not universally successful in doing so,
it's worth remembering that it faces a far more difficult task - how many
languages does the average school in the Netherlands have to deal with
among its student body? In my high school more than _20_ languages were
the native tongue of students there, many of whom had very limited English
skills. I'm not sure what gives you the idea that we don't have public
education here, but let me assure you that such is not the case.
Gautam Mukunda
