The American v/s The Indian and Chinese

I recently saw a Documentary on the devastating effects of the American education system on the future of American economy. The documentary named '2 million minutes' shows how much time does an average high school student from USA, India and China spent their time. It says american education has lot of options for the students which makes them concentrate on wide range of areas such as sports, academics, clubs, jobs and other interests at a shallow level. While on the other hand the Chinese and Indian system lays more emphases on academics and makes their students more focused on a serious career building curriculum.

The thing that I derived from both scenarios is that the ideal education system that will help develop the student at its full potential in every area of life is yet to be invented.

As we saw the American system diverts its students' efforts it very wide area of interests which is a better for your overall development but it also gives lots of students to escape the hard and tough classes such as Math and Science which eventually results in less and less students graduating from majors such as Engineering and Medicine which are of immense importance in the 21st century economies. The american system is also found to be creating students that are less focused about their life goals. Also, the american students are not familiar with the concept of real hard work as their average homework on weekdays is 1 hour with no homework on weekends which is really less compared to Indian and Chinese systems.

While American system has its on flaws. Chinese or Indian system are no near to be called 'perfect'. These education systems have proved to be more efficient in creating students that are more focused on their life goals. Indian system has a clear rule : if you want to get successful and respected you have to get graduate from a good college and to get into a good college you have to focus on academic alone and not on any other activity. Though this system has been successful in creating students that are much more hardworking. An average high school student spends nearly 17 hours day for academic. From the past one decade, India and China have given out more engineers and doctors than any other country, the reason is clearly the emphasis of Mathematics and Science in their curriculum. But still, the Indian system does not allow its student to pursue any other interest than academics. So India would not create more Rock Stars or Good Athletes or professionals like such. The Chinese system is much like the same as the Indian but it allows its student to have some extra activities. But, other wise it still has the long study hours as in India.

All these brings us to where we had started from, the ideal education does not exist. It is yet to be invented. We hope it does soon...