I ran into a girl from Bangladesh who is here in Cincinnati for one year at one of America’s Top 100 high schools (Walnut Hills). I asked her how the courses compared to what she was accustomed to in Bangladesh. “School here is much easier than in Bangladesh.”
Note that Bangladesh has a per-capita income of approximately $500 per year. The government spends between $25 and $50 per year per student in primary and secondary schools, many of which are madrassas that spend a good portion of the curriculum on the Arabic language and Islamic topics.
I’m not from Bangladesh, but having been raised in India, I feel I can comment on the distinction between the school systems in South Asia and the US.
Yes, there is a lot more work to be done. With the amount of homework and exams they throw at you, there is precious little time to do things like date, get pregnant or drink. Societal pressures to do well are high.
There is a lot of emphasis on theoretical concepts and a fair amount of math. What is missing, however is the application of the math to real world problems. When I was in the 11th and 12th grades, I could solve calculus problems like a champ, but had little if any understanding of how it all applied to the real world.
Most tests are tests of memory. In other words, how well you have memorized a particular concept. You are not tested on analytical skills, or how you take the available information and make decisions on it. Anything not connected to chemistry, biology, physics, math and computer science is de-emphasized. Of late, the quality of English education has taken a severe nosedive.
There are about fifty to a hundred students in a class. The teacher doesn’t get to know you much, unless you are in the top bracket. If you don’t understand the material. there is always private tuition available for an extra fee, after hours.
There are major public exams in the 10th and 12th grades. Unless your score is extremely high, you will have difficulty landing a subsidized college admission in Engineering or Medicine. Uniqueness of expression, thinking, etc are given short shrift. What matters is how well you are able to answer the question to the satisfaction of an anonymous examiner who corrects your paper. Again, more rote learning and hardly any other skill development. In fact, the way we used to prepare for the “board exams” was to obtain question papers from the previous six years (which were legally available), figure out which questions appeared and with what frequency, and tailor all our learning around that.
There is one last point to keep in mind… in South Asian school systems, it is very Darwinian. If you are not in the top X percentile, no one cares. You will be held back in the grade. There is no such thing as remedial education or special needs. If you have the slightest cognitive impairment, you better wish you had a very rich father.
I know I’m painting a bleak picture… but far too many people assume that the school system in these countries (my country, India included) is somehow great. It emphatically isn’t. They just make a different set of tradeoffs.
“primary and secondary schools, many of which are madrassas that spend a good portion of the curriculum on the Arabic language and Islamic topics.”
To be more precise The Madrassa students constitute of about 7% of the total formal education system (Statistics from BANBEIS (http://www.banbeis.gov.bd/trend_analysis1.htm). However a million students of about 6,000 Qawmi Madrassas with 130,000 teachers are not included in the formal education system. In total approx 11% of total students study in Madrassas.
The non formal Madrassas in Bangladesh have long been fulfilling a social obligation. Bangladesh is a developing country and it is still fighting to better its literacy rate which hovers around 50-60% among its enormous 140 million populations. The rural areas, where the people are mostly farmers and poor, still lack infrastructures and opportunities to better their income. The government education in primary level is free but there are simply not enough schools to pertain education in rural areas. Many orphans and extreme poor students traditionally find their places in Madrassas.
An overwhelming majority of Madrassa students come from poor families who cannot afford to send their children to modern schools because, first, in most cases modern schools do not exist at an accessible distance, and second, parents prefer to send their children in a Madrassa to get a general and religious education with lodging facility to relieve some of their financial burdens.
With the exception of a few Madrassas directly funded by the government, Madrassa education in Bangladesh is mainly in the private sector. As most Madrassas are usually supported by donations and grants, the schooling is free. Not only do the students not pay any tuition, they are provided with free textbooks, board and lodging, and a modest stipend, which is more than enough to attract poor students, especially orphans. Only some private Madrassas in urban areas have fees instead as they provide higher standard of education.
So the majority of Madrassas actually present an opportunity, not a threat to the community. For young village kids, it may be their only path to literacy. Else they could have as well find themselves as the victims of forced labour, sex trafficking, or other abuse.
However the religious fundamentalist quarters have misused some of these non-formal Madrassas in inciting hateful ideologies with the help of Middle Eastern funds. However the Madrassas in the formal education system are rarely that radical as they are overseen by the education board.
I went to Walnut Hills. It is an excellent school in the sense that if you are motivated, you can take a bunch of challenging courses taught by great teachers; but like most public schools, there is also pressure to graduate a bunch of students who are unmotivated (even though Walnut has an entrance exam).
Plus the budget situation in Cincinnati makes it so that we can afford to spend twice, prehaps even THRICE what they spend per pupil in Bangladesh. How lucky we are to prioritize education so highly in our local governments.
Someone who came from Bangladesh to Cincinnati may have been from a particularly privileged background, with a family income perhaps similar to that of Cincinnati.
@James Or she won a contest to study in America. Or was awarded a scholarship. Or was sponsored. Or, or, or… The key phrase: “here in Cincinnati for one year at one of America’s Top 100 high schools” which implies not here to finish school, not moving here and specifically attending a top high school.
That sort of critical thinking is what Jagadeesh refers to–non-existent. American schools aren’t much better at teaching critical thinking or getting much further past memorization–a task even low intelligence animals can be trained to do. Highly motivated students find a way to further themselves, but per Shimon, the schools are under tremendous pressure to produce results: specifically test scores and graduation rates.
In Colorado, the school district I was in stopped including students with special needs in their test results several years ago. Now they have a nice linear, upwards-trending, graph of excellence. Three years ago students who dropped out were reclassified, much like the federal government did with the unemployed: if they didn’t go to another school within a few years it was claimed they chose to not finish and they disappeared from the statistics.
Many studies have shown that motivated teachers (including parents!) are of greater service than more money thrown at the problem, but it’s hard to see how someone could stay motivated for very long if there isn’t any money. Perhaps more money to teachers and less to administrators (my brother’s high school had 3 vice-principals, and 6 guidance counselours for 1100 students)?