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Comment by laluser | Hacker News Reader

Once, I took Calculus 2 in the summer at a local community college to save some money before attending University. In my class were what I assume to be two brothers. The oldest was probably 12 and the youngest was 8. I thought that was so cool at the time. Community colleges are extremely underrated and I wish I would have known more about available opportunities during High School. It's such a much better environment for focusing on just academics.

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I took computer programming classes at my local community college as a freshman in high school. I learned COBOL! It was a great experience. I encourage any parents to persuade their children to take a class or two at the local community college, especially parents of kids like me who were bored-as-fuck in high school and just stared out the window all day.

So did I! Once I realized I could take “school” classes at the local community college I did as much as possible.

Really opened my eyes.

This is something I was quite jealous of Americans. In Germany you can just go to claasses in university without paying but if you skip school too much you fail your grade no matter how good you are and not attending school at a young age is actually illegal. And then failing school disqualifies you from university.

German school was immensely frustrating to me. I'd lose grade for giving answers too early because the math level was so incredibly low.

At the same time I recognize now that in the grand scheme of things the average German high school is better than the average American one and that we had a lot things biology and chemistry that they don't seem to do until college

Yeah it's the same pattern. It's trendy, on either side of the aisle, to complain about how college is too expensive or how America spends too much on education. And then you see how it's different elsewhere, such as much less flexibility even if the schools are 'better'. The extra cost is the flexibility and accommodations that you don't typically see elsewhere. And also, tons of scholarships and other aid in the US.

> At the same time I recognize now that in the grand scheme of things the average German high school is better than the average American one

What evidence do you have of this?

If you're thinking of the PISA tests, Americans do well on PISA compared to their ethnic relatives. <https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco...> Asian Americans do better than Asians; whites do better than Europeans; Latinos do better than Latin Americans; and blacks do better than Africans.

Hispanics and especially blacks' scores drag the US average down. Both white and Asian Americans score higher than Canada (and white+Asian is essentially Canada's racial makeup), and higher than New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Norway, and the UK; Estonia is below US Asians but above white Americans. Norway is by far the wealthiest Nordic state but its average is only two points higher than the US national average, despite not having a demographic that is 13% of the population and scores 85 points below the white American average.

This is because you are measuring the entire cohort/generation of students.

Germany splits students into highschool (called Gymnasium, the academic track) and the vocational tracks at age 10.

Smart-kid highschool in Germany definitely moves faster than US highschools. Some even teach Greek and Latin for a well-rounded humanist education.

Uh oh, stating facts contradicting the Equity Politburo only gets you a one way ticket to the Cancel gulag.

Why does only one country get its data subdivided by ethnicity? I imagine that most countries have some groups that score better than others. Most ethnic minorities in Asia are "Asian", but in the 21st century there are plenty of non-white people in European countries.

> Why does only one country get its data subdivided by ethnicity? I imagine that most countries have some groups that score better than others. Most ethnic minorities in Asia are "Asian", but in the 21st century there are plenty of non-white people in European countries.

The US is an outlier among developed nations in terms of both numbers and composition for its minority population.

Example: The UK is 86% white. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_Kingd...> Of the remainder, 7% are "Asian" (which in the UK almost always means Indian subcontinent, not east Asian as in the US) and 3% are black. By contrast, 13% of the US is black, and another 14-15% are Hispanic (of which about half are white). In other words, the percentage of the British population that is not white is about equal to the percentage of Americans that is black.

Plus, as I said, the huge gap in US PISA scores is between whites/Asians and blacks, not white and Asians. There are severe social dysfunctions among the Muslim portion of the British Asian population, but the non-Muslim portion performs very well on social and economic indicators.

Example: The largest Canadian non-white ethnicity is south Asian, at 7%, followed by Chinese at 5% and black at 4%. (Which is why I said that the ethnic composition of Canada is essentially white and Asian.)

It looks like you've been misinformed about American high school- biology and chemistry are standard required classes for graduation.

It's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison between countries. Americans' concepts of equality and fairness are highly averse to the sort of separation-by-test-results that is core to the German secondary education system, so every school tries to cater to every type of student, with varied results.

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