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 Sun Dec 09, 2007 12:34 pm world class |
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Maybe he meant "American class". As far as I know American universities are on top of the list of the best universities in the world - I read this fact in a local newspaper. Actually it was a shock to me to find out that the best university in my country (situated in Mockow) is below 300 on the scale. (and the one I graduated from is not on the list !)
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lost_soul
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| Sun Dec 09, 2007 12:59 pm world class |
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Hi lost_soul,
Oo -er , your remark could easily be construed as a red rag to a bull for me. I'm sure it wasn't, was it?
Alan
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| Sun Dec 09, 2007 15:09 pm world class |
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Hi, Alan
Ops, seems like I brought trouble upon myself.
Sorry, my remark was not meant to offend you in any way. I just quoted a passage from my local newspaper.
To tell the truth, the results published in that newspaper exasperate me, but alas, there's little I can do about it..
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lost_soul
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| Sun Dec 09, 2007 16:28 pm world class |
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In Japan, I am beginning to see that if they want to be 'world class', they actually want to be 'world class' their way. This can be either, they want people to follow their way or, they want to be 'world class' that has been somewhat adapted to their way. In a word, I would say they don't want to change their way.
Come to think of it, what is 'world class', anyway?
Maybe I was answering your question with the term 'globalization' in mind. Because the Japanese has a different way of adapting to globalization. This can be seen at their stubbornness of not wanting to learn English.
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NinaZara
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| Sun Dec 09, 2007 22:47 pm world class |
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Alan
In the US, "world class" = top-notch, high-quality, very good, etc.
This is a world-class team. = This team is very, very good.
He has world-class speed. = He is very fast/He is an Olympic sprinter etc.
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prezbucky
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| Mon Dec 10, 2007 3:35 am world class |
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| lost_soul wrote: | | Maybe he meant "American class". As far as I know American universities are on top of the list of the best universities in the world - I read this fact in a local newspaper. Actually it was a shock to me to find out that the best university in my country (situated in Mockow) is below 300 on the scale. (and the one I graduated from is not on the list !) |
This is not quite accurate. US universities are supposed to be absolutely top notch (depending on which one you go to), but they nonetheless kowtow to Oxford and Cambridge when it comes to humanities.
However, for elementary school through high school, on average, the US is one of the worst places in the industrialized world to send your kids to school. Our kids score close to dead last in math and science achievement in the PISA study every year, but they rate themselves very highly when asked if they THINK they're good at math.
American schools are locally controlled, though, so things really vary. Someone who went to the schools in my suburb would be considered highly educated in any country, while the kids living three blocks away from me have schools that are so bad that many of them graduate from high school with an 8-year-old's reading level.
And what makes a good education anyway? We Americans think the East Asians are little robots who learn math and science so well that they're going to take over the world and steal all our industry. We think of Russian schools as turning out legions of superhuman technical geniuses that our kids will crumble before. Meanwhile, I meet Chinese people here who say they LOVE the education their children are getting in average American schools, because instead of memorizing mountains of facts and figures to be regurgitated later, they're being taught to reason better than in China and create things. At the same time, some Russian lady insisted to me that the US system is superior to the Russian system. She said, "The Russian educational system does a good job of educating a small elite to a very high level, but in the United States anyone who wants to can get more education than he can in Russia."
"World class" just means something can compete with anything like it in the world. Sometimes it means nothing, as when an advertisement refers to world-class hairdos, world-class cola or something like that. |
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Jamie (K)
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| Mon Dec 10, 2007 12:50 pm world class |
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Hi,
It's interesting to read how different countries regard schooling in other countries. Although I am personally now far removed from secondary education in terms of occupation and also family since both my children are now pushing 40, I get the general drift from practising teachers that this present government in the UK is too preoccupied with getting teachers to fill up forms and getting their students to run through too many tests so that the main business of 'teaching' for all of them is constantly being sidelined. This produces monumental irony in the minds of bystanders when we recall that the mantra in 1997 from the then prime minister (Blair) was that at the top of his list of priorities was; Education,education, education.
Alan
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Alan
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| Mon Dec 10, 2007 13:29 pm world class |
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| Alan wrote: | | I get the general drift from practising teachers that this present government in the UK is too preoccupied with getting teachers to fill up forms and getting their students to run through too many tests so that the main business of 'teaching' for all of them is constantly being sidelined. |
Right now in the US we are getting constant complaints from teachers that the current testing regimen takes them away from "real teaching" and forces them to "teach to the test". This is a great conceit, because the standardized tests were only introduced because their "real teaching" wasn't teaching anyone much.
I was dumbfounded to discover that two of my relatives and their friends, in their teens and 20s, knew absolutely nothing of Canadian geography. They didn't even know the name of the Canadian province that's 25 minutes from their house. Some of them thought that South Dakota was in the south, that North Carolina was in the north, and the rest of their knowledge of their native country was also a mess. This was all because when they were in school there was no standardized assessment that forced teachers to give kids at least rudimentary knowledge of basic things. I know that in the case of one of my relatives, the problem was that in the year they were supposed to cover US and Canadian geography and history, she had a teacher who autonomously decided that Ancient Egypt was more interesting and taught that, without a thought to the knowledge the kids would need three years later and where they'd get it. |
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Jamie (K)
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| Tue Dec 11, 2007 15:52 pm world class |
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"World class" symbolizes the best. In other words, the British minister meant that the students will get the best education, thus becoming the most qualitative employees/ers, entrepreneurs, politicians, etc.
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SkiIucK
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| Tue Dec 11, 2007 19:55 pm world class |
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| SkiIucK wrote: | | "World class" symbolizes the best. In other words, the British minister meant that the students will get the best education, thus becoming the most qualitative employees/ers, entrepreneurs, politicians, etc. |
True. BUT politicians always come up with a lot of verbiage when making promises. Using the term "world class" in relation to raising the bar for education sounds nice, but finding a proper yardstick to measure its implementation will prove difficult.
PISA study scores are currently the hot potato used by politicians to assess the efficiency of an education system. Whether this kind of performance rating can identify world class education is a different story. And I'm sure that if the educational standard of one or two countries will still not live up to PISA norms in future, they will find some way or other to cast a rosy light on their "world class" standards.
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