Just walked into the 'teachers room' at lunch break and asked if I could use a microscope to inspect an UV-erasable EEPROM :
Sure, go ahead.
Wanted to write a program instead of doing the final physics experiment :
Uhhh, well, why not
For some reason, the HN and Reddit bubbles seem to collect a lot of people who loathed high school education. Even in adulthood and traveling around the country I’ve never encountered as many negative stories about high school as I read on HN.
Take what you read here with a grain of salt. There appears to be some significant selection bias going on in the stories.
I built a potato gun and tested different fuels. It wasn't very scientifically rigorous (hard to measure how much fuel went into the firing chamber, distance measurements were sloppy, and we didn't take the weight of individual potato projectiles into account). But it was incredibly fun, and the report I produced earned me an A.
That was probably the best "scientific" experience I had in all my years of schooling including college. Having to think about all the different variables really helped me grok the scientific process. We thought up ways that we could start to control things like fuel load and projectile weight and just generally had a blast.
The Netherlands school system is falling victim to the exact same controversies the USA and other systems around the world are facing... [0]
[0] https://nltimes.nl/2021/06/03/netherlands-slammed-prioritizi...
So what point am I making: I've read that schools are teaching creationism, others spend 80% of their time on sports, something with greeting the flag every morning with a speech?
A lot of time is spent on teaching how to make arguments (How to plead your case) instead of trying to work together in finding truth.
And most of all: do not criticise, but a "do as told" mentality.
Again: Sorry for that almost mean-spirited first comment of mine.
The difference between the America as portrayed in sensationalized news headlines and the America I live in is vast.
No, creationism isn't standard curriculum in high schools and no, students aren't spending 80% of their time on sports. When you see these things in news stories, their newsworthiness stems from the fact that it's abnormal, not because it's the norm.
America has half the population of all of Europe and a similar amount of landmass. It's a big enough country that if you go looking, you're going to find pockets of weird culture. The mistake is to assume that when journalists highlight the worst of these, that it's actually representative of the norm.
Judging the US by these stories would be similar to me judging your European education by some of the wild anecdotes my Romanian coworker relayed about his high school experience there.
I suspect his experience has nothing to do with yours, naturally. However, when people read horror stories about bad US schools, they assume it applies to every single high school in the entire country for some reason.