<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1"> <title></title> </head> <body> The "great schools" of Europe disappeared in the seventies. I experienced a little of the wonderful era of European schools, and they were really quite good. When I came to the U.S., I pretty much twiddled my thumbs (except for math) for about four years...until the U.S. system caught up with where the European system had put me. However, each time I returned to Europe, beginning in the eighties, I heard dire stories about the schools in Western Europe. So far as I could tell, the graduates of schools in eastern europe and the former SU, were still doing quite well. Joanna Thomas Seay wrote: <blockquote type="cite" cite="mid20060119190011.56955.qmail@web52705.mail.yahoo.com"> <pre wrap="">--- Andy F <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:andy274@gmail.com"><andy274@gmail.com></a> wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">A subjective comparison of Germany and the United States <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/us-d.html"><http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/us-d.html></a> </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> Although there were a few small details that he got wrong, I found the above an interesting read. I must say that I was shocked by the below statement about the educationaly system in Germany. As a high school student in a poor area of the United States (West Virginia), I had heard of the strength of the German gymnasium and the French lycee. I remember wishing that I could have attended such wonderful institutions: <<The German public (including me) generally assumed that the German school system is far superior to the US one -- until the devastating results of the PISA 2000 study came out. It showed that the knowledge and skills of German students were consistently below the performance of US students (which typically hovered around the international average). Since then, more German parents have begun to send their children to private schools, which had performed better than public schools in the study. >> -Thomas "...everytime we move it ahead, it's thrown back. But the base camp has been made, and the next wave will come and find your wreckage, and they'll be encouraged to go beyond that." -Timothy O'Leary "I want to do something with my life; I want to be a cyborg." -Kevin Warwick __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://mail.yahoo.com">http://mail.yahoo.com</a> ___________________________________ <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk">http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk</a> </pre> </blockquote> </body> </html>