Here's an interesting piece by an American educator noting that her foreign students out-perform her American students by a wide margin. This is a phenomenon I've blogged about many times in the context of hiring U.S.-educated employees versus foreign-educated employees.
She ascribes the difference to “work ethic” differences, but the actual examples cited seem to speak more to the lack of motivation and seriousness of the American students. To me, those imply cultural factors that are tough to pin down in any simple way. The sum of them, though, is this: it's ok for an American to be an uneducated git upon completion of high school or college. There are no unhappy consequences, other than certain careers being out of reach. This is not true in many other countries; there, first of all, you'd never graduate without actually having achieved certain measurable sets of knowledge or skill. Second of all, should you fail to reach these, you'd be greatly looked down upon.
How can we fix this? I'm afraid I'm not optimistic about it...
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