What is school like around the world?

HAZEL WALTENBAUGH THE RUBICON

Like any experience, education varies worldwide. Combinations of factors contribute to the success of students worldwide, such as population, poverty rates, teaching styles and curriculums, price of education, and so on. Below are windows into the education systems of a few countries across the world, with input from students who have experienced them firsthand.

Spain

Education in Spain tends to follow a slightly different schedule than in the U.S. Many students typically go to school from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with a two-hour lunch break in the middle. Rather than GPA scales, Spain uses a 10-point scale to average student’s grades. The majority of schools in Spain are public, but there are also private schools, as well as semi-private schools which tend to be funded by either the state or the Catholic Church. Mario Nordstrom, a first-year college student who grew up in Alicante, Spain, was immersed in a semi-private high school system. His school ran from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. every day, and the students were required to take around 10 classes per year. At his school, similar to a lot of semi-private schools in Spain, priests lived on campus and often taught some of the classes. In addition, students were required to go to church a few times throughout the year. “In Spain, you pick either science, which is physics, chemistry, or biology, or you take economy. There is no in-between. Other classes we are required to take are math, English, español, and Valenciano,” Nordstrom said.

Another large difference is the college entrance exam, which determines the fields students will be able to enter after the required education. “The test is called ‘selectividad,’ where you take 7 tests. Added to that there’s your ‘bachillerato,’ which is the test you take in the last two years of college. The grades of both of those tests add up to a 14-point scale and determine what you are allowed to study. So, many people don’t get to study what they want because they don’t get the right grades,” Nordstrom said.

United Kingdom

Schooling in the United Kingdom is often similar to private education in the U.S. Students often wear uniforms, teacher-to-student relationships aren’t rigid, and they value a learning style that encourages conversation, student participation, and creativity. During middle school, senior Cooper Bollinger-Danielson spent a year in the U.K., where he was immersed in their public education system. “When I was there, [students] were preparing for their GCSEs, which is a fundamentally different system of education. It’s sort of like a major but in high school,” Bollinger-Danielson said. GCSEs stand for General Certificate of Secondary Education, which is a framework for how 15 and 16-year-old students are assessed. Alongside core curricular classes, students make decisions on the areas they want to study and be assessed on. The GCSEs are essentially checkpoint exams to make sure students have met the qualifications of their classes before furthering their education. On top of the core curricular classes that are common in the US, Bollinger-Danielson was also required to attend a religion and ethics class. With larger class sizes, he also mentioned more diversity in his classrooms than he was used to at SPA. Another clear difference he noticed was the rewards system.

“They have a weird system of merits and demerits, the demerits build up to detentions and the merits are awards. …if you do a good thing, then you get an award, and if you do bad things then you get punished,” Bollinger-Danielson said.

Taiwan

Many systems in Taiwan tend to be more conservative; students wear uniforms and there are often little to no student-teacher relationships. The curriculums rely heavily on memorization of material rather than the independent exploration and creativity that is common in the U.S., although new reforms are working toward improving those factors. The majority of schools are taught in Mandarin Chinese, and students are often required to learn English as well. Senior Andrea Gist lived in Taiwan and was immersed in Taiwanese education until fifth grade.

“We only stayed in one classroom, you don’t go into different classrooms. There are a bunch of different teachers but it isn’t like SPA where we get to move from different places … There also isn’t really a teacher relationship, there is no tutorial time or anything like that. You