On quality education, and whats wrong with it in the USA.

My following response is based on my 36 years of teaching at universities in the US, mostly at post-graduate (masters and PhD level) level. Over those years I have had probably over 2,000 students, mostly at masters level, and students from over a dozen countries. I’ll respond only about American education, but intersperse with comparisons to the UK system (having gone through the sixth form education prior to college.

• Supremacy of Division 1 sports in college, with most high school years wasted in preparing for football/basketball/baseball (or whatever) rather than preparing for college. In fact I was so fed up with this that I refused to pay tuition for my kids if they went to any school that had Division 1 sports, EVEN IF IT WAS AN IVY LEAGUE SCHOOL. One kid tested me on this by being admitted to Brown U. I stood my ground and the kid went to a highly ranked public university. In my humble opinion, Division 1 sports are the greatest corrupting influence on American education. UK schools have their rowing teams, cricket, etc., but not with the religious zeal that American students and their parents display towards sports.
• Political interference to diminish academic freedom. I am lucky I did not teach social “sciences” or humanities, for then the hordes of know-it-alls from either side of political and religious spectrum would have called for my blood if I exercised my academic freedom. My academic competency as well as my sense of fairness would have been irrelevant. I am sure things are not as dire in the UK as I hallucinate, considering the regard in which I hold British sense of fairness.
• In my opinion the elementary schools (first six years of schooling) here in the US are essentially child care for school age children. I remember attending a PTA meeting when some well-known sports figure caught AIDS and still continued to boast about his bedroom conquests; the parents seemed to show no outrage at the behaviour but were more concerned about too much homework for their kids cutting into their “quality time”. Education took a backseat. I am sure everyone in the UK is gung-ho about cricket and are ardent followers of famous cricketers as I was about WG Grace, Don Bradman, Gary Sobers,… in school, but sports was always an extra-curricular activity whichever way you define it. In most American schools sports trump just about everything else, except in some schools where academic excellence is a part of their tradition.
• American undergraduate education has now reached it a stage where it resembles a smorgasbord: you take what you like and leave what you don’t for others. When I taught at a prestigious liberal arts college, a student asked me for a reference for graduate school in Philosophy. The feather in his cap was a course on “Theories of Good Living”; I suspect it had more to do with avoiding difficult issues than philosophical inquiry about what it means to have led a good life. So, the course titles are catchy advertisements for enrolments than food for thought. I am sure in the UK the situation is quite different.

At the graduate school level, American universities excel because they attract the best talent from around the world. And Of course there is a sizeable American component. But this semester I taught a PhD seminar in Informatics; in a class of a dozen there were only 3 or so American students. That should sadden all of us Americans.