American and Czech school systems, Part 1

In this term paper, i would like to follow the education of both American and Czech people, because education is as important to me, as to many other people and I believe there is a lot of things that could be improved, or at least considered, if they are in the right place. It should not be only something, that we need to go through to live a better life, that’s only one part of that, but there are others. For example, I would like to learn how to live a life, I think we should be led to perceive from wider perspective. And in general, I would be glad if we were taught more about everyday life and not only theoretically. In The Purpose of Education, Noam Chomsky practically summarized my thoughts and he has given me a lot of things to think about. “Education is really aimed at helping students get to the point where they can learn on their own….” The school system is very outdated, for example we are learning by very similar means as my father and his generation were, which seems incredibly inefficient as nowadays getting information is a matter of only few seconds via your phone, but back in the nineties the main source of information were books.” A big part of contemporary teachers was teaching in the eighties and are still sticking to the same principals. They are leading the students to obedience instead of leading them to become freely thinking people.” Needless to say, information we are forced to learn should be only a little part of the education itself. “You can’t expect somebody to become a biologist by giving them access to the Harvard University biology library and say: just look through it. It will give them nothing.” So it is almost ridiculous that we have to memorize as much, if not more information like twenty-five years ago. The curriculum should be taught more deeply and less wide and the schools should be able to teach how to critically look at the problem and appropriately solve it. And we could find more things like that. Regarding to that, I believe the education could be more efficient and more pleasant for the students and the teachers too. And the way I see it, it wouldn’t even be so difficult. What pleases me is the I have decided to compare Czech school system to the school system in Massachusetts, because that is actually the most successful system in the United States of America and is one of the best in the world, so I think we have a lot to learn from it. But even with regards to the statistics, there are many things American schools could learn from the Czech one. For all of those reasons, I have decided to write this term paper.

The children in the U.S. usually start going to school at the same age as we do, in nursery school or kindergarten, and go up a grade each year to the 12. grade at the age of 18. The 12 grades are usually divided into 6-3-3 plan, which is 6 years of elementary (primary) school, 3 years of junior high (middle) school and the last 3 years children spend in senior high school. There are few variations of the education plan, for example 8-4 plan, in which students spend 8 years in elementary school and 4 years in high school. Similar to the Czech school system, students have for the first 6 years one main teacher for major subjects and for the rest of the grades they have different teacher for each subject. Students must repeat a grade due to low marks or great absence in school, which is no different from Czech system as well. In the twelfth-grade students get high school diploma, if they meet requirements set by school or/and state they live in. Although students can legally quit school at the age of 16, job prospects for people without high school diploma are very discouraging and so most of the students stay in school until the age of 18.

End of Part 1.