A quick question - when you say "where every kid could branch off to follow their interests" does this imply that kids in the US education system don't choose a set of subjects to focus on at about 14?
At least at my school (a small rural secondary school), there just weren't enough classes to to "specialize" or focus on any one particular field. You just took the core classes every year: a science (sometimes), a math, an English.
Normally I would say "that's okay, you've got plenty of time to do that in secondary school (middle/high school)". But then you go on to say this:
> Most of my peers still have NO idea what they would like to study, even though some of them are paying $10,000-$20,000 to go to college.
If you just graduated from primary school, why are your peers going to college? That's quite odd. I suspect, in declining order of likelihood, that either "primary school", or "college", or "peers" is an error...
Yes, it does. [1]
> Secondary school is college.
No, secondary school is either equivalent to "high school" or equivalent to "middle and high school". [2] College is "post-secondary school". [3]
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_school#United_States
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_school#United_States
[3] e.g., http://www.cpec.ca.gov/SecondPages/CommissionHistory.asp
In 5th year (~16 years old) you usually do 5 subjects - not sure if any of these are compulsory (English used to be, but I don't think it is now) - these are examined in your "Highers" (Higher Grades). I did Maths, Chemistry, Physics, English and Engineering Drawing (this was before CS was available, it is now).
Highers are used for University entrance and, in Scotland, depending on your birthday you can get your Highers and be off to University when you are 17. Sixth year at secondary school in Scotland is either used top up your exams if you didn't get enough to do the course you want, doing more advanced courses and/or going to parties...
The downside of this approach is that you specialise very early - basically you choose at 14. Which is great if you know what you want to do and not so good if you don't. This is aggravated by UK Universities traditionally having very focused courses e.g. I did a CS course and all we had was 4 years of Computer Science and Maths classes with some Statistics for light relief. Again this is great if you pick the right course and dreadful if you make a mistake.
[NB I have a 14 year old son and we've just been through the trauma of picking Standard Grade courses]
FYI Here is a exam paper for an Advanced Higher in Computing, which I think is pretty good:
http://www.sqa.org.uk/pastpapers/papers/papers/2012/AH_Compu...
IE, my 8-12th grades had strict guidelines : must finish algebra, must have a course in each of the 4 primary sciences, must have world and us history and government, must have literature classes covering 4 time blocks from early writing -> Renaissance writing -> new world writing -> modern writing.
Must have gym, must have a foreign language (after 6 years of Spanish, and 2 years out of college, I can't remember a word of it since I never used it). I think I got one class per year I could "pick", and the closest to software / IT was web design which was just how to make a wordpress site, and never touched html / css / js.