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September 14, 2009

When I was growing up, my parents were adamant about providing me an “American Education”.  Luckily, I had the means and opportunity to attend an American international school both in the Philippines and Hong Kong, and got a pretty good K-12 education.

However, I’m not sure how attractive an “American Education” really is these days given how the US stacks up against some other countries in areas like Science and Math.  Looks like there may be a lot of other good models out there:

Recently, my brother’s family moved to Singapore (#1 on the list above).  His daughter Rachel is in 4th grade, and while I know that she was studying hard at her old school, Singapore is a whole new level of intensity. An email I got from my brother was particularly interesting:

“Rachel is in the 4th grade, but I would consider her tests to be pretty damn hard. She is supposed to do complex math problems without using algebra.  Just using the “model” method.”
First, I don’t think I did any math problems resembling algebra when I was in elementary school.  Second, I never heard of the model method.  But the more I read about it, the more I was intrigued. I’d always thought that superior performance in math and science in other countries was mainly due to heavy drilling and repetition, not a fundamentally different teaching pedagogy.  The Washington Post had a short article about the Model Method and lessons from the Singaporean education system in general a few months back.  One could probably learn even more by taking a serious look at countries that perform similarly to the US but have much lower per capital GDP (like Lithuania).
This got me thinking.  If we know that the US education system lags other countries in Science and Math why should we be constrained to that system?  Wouldn’t it be interesting to have an after school program modeled after the best practices of education systems around the world?  Or, couldn’t there be an online math and science academy based on the same premise that is a viable and cost effective alternative to private schools?
I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts, as well as other teaching methods that have been effective in other countries but not widely available in the US.  I think making these available is an interesting opportunity, because national boundaries for educational curriculum should become increasingly artificial.
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