Success is everyone’s ultimate goal. In today’s day and age, every country wants in the fight of being the best of the best. This mindset of becoming the superlative holds a lot of value to a country’s leaders as they believe it will lead them and their people to be the front-runners of the world. Education has long been an area in which countries feel indicates how successful they are and will be. As a result, educators continue to use a variety of methods to ensure that their country’s children are receiving a superior education. France, while not as widely known as Japan or the United States, continues to fight to offer the best educational system in the world. In hopes to achieve this objective, French educators have allowed their …show more content…
Like many nations, France is feeling the pressure to offer the best educational system in the world as their rankings have started to slide. For the past few years, much debate has stirred over whether creating a more balanced school calendar would improve student performance. As a result, officials have considered shortening summer vacation (Kamette 1) and have taken steps within the past year to eliminate their four-day school week (Chu). Since the late 19th Century, French schools have gotten Wednesdays off in order to attend religious classes offered by the Roman Catholic Church (Chu). However, as the culture in France has become more secularized, Wednesdays have now been devoted to co-curricular activities, family time, and relaxation. While having a four-day school week may appear inadequate to people in countries with five and six-day school weeks, France’s four days of school each week are long and grueling. In fact, the number of hours French students are in class each year is quite comparable to other industrialized nations. Officials hope that by having school on Wednesdays, the number of hours students are in school each day will be better balanced and allow students to feel less overwhelmed. The implementation of the five-day school week has recently …show more content…
I believe that while France’s education system may not be as highly regarded as say Japan’s or South Korea’s, it is generally on the right track of helping prepare children for a successful adult life. One of the aspects of the French education system that I respect most is the fact that every child has free access to a pre-school education. This is important as it puts children ahead once they enter primary school and it helps them adapt to what schooling is like before it becomes more “serious”. Additionally, aside from the educational aspect, it is great for parents as it ensures that their children have a place to go while they are at work. Another aspect that I liked about the French education system was how students are given a specific path of study to focus on while still in secondary school. I think this can help students determine at a younger age whether they really like what they are doing and can see if it is something they see themselves doing before they go on to college. However, what I do not like about this idea is how parents are the ones who choose what their child should study. While this approach may work in some families, I believe students would be more successful and more motivated to work hard if they themselves choose the paths they want to study. Additionally, I thought the process of selecting
In 2012 the French President Francois Hollande proposed a ban on homework within French schools. In support of this a year 12 student and student representative council member from Gardendale Secondary College prepared a speech. Aimed at educators within her school, the student makes some steering comments and convincing facts to turn the heads of principles, teachers, parents and fellow students against the giving and completing of homework.
Family vacations, pool memberships, and corn de-tasseling; these have been the experiences of traditional Midwestern summers. For centuries young American children have attended school during the winter months, during farming off seasons when their families could afford to be without them. Families have grown accustomed to a traditional school calendar that provides time for bonding throughout the year. Students have grown accustomed to an eight week break during the summer months where they are allowed to refresh their minds before returning for a new school year. Unfortunately, these traditional experiences and practices are now in jeopardy. In today’s race to improve student achievement, traditional school calendars have become a point of contention. Today more and more school districts and parents alike have begun to debate the pros and cons of an alternative school calendar.
When it comes to our children education, we always should pay extra attention to the decisions that we make, especially if the decisions that we’re going to make are weighty and could have an impact on our children educational performance. In Jaclyn Melicharek’s article “Four-Day School Weeks: The Rule to Skip School,” she makes several climes against the four-day school policy, which is a convenient policy that seem to pervade our schools nowadays. She believes four-day school policy is ineffective and rather harmful to our children, teachers and staff because it reduces our children educational performance, deter the academic value that our children are obtaining and shatter the lives of the teachers and the staff. I agree with Melicharek
The United States has a long and proud history of providing public education to its citizen’s children. The fundamental idea behind the creation of this educational system was that it be available to all, regardless of geographical location or family status. In the era that this initiative was generated many of America’s families lived and worked on farms, and children were a vital part of this lifestyle. The founders of the United States’ public schools had to create a plan that included all children, even those who were expected to perform agricultural work in the harvest season. Thus, the nine-month school calendar was brought into use, allowing farming children a three month break from school in the summer to aid their families in the crop yield. In time, youth participation in farming became outdated and obsolete, and this arrangement slipped from necessity to simply being a tradition held on to through the years. In our modern era, a year-round school calendar would benefit the teachers, students, and finances of America’s public schools.
We live in a society where we are surrounded by people telling us that school/education and being educated is the only way to succeed. However, the school system is not up to the standards we want it to uphold. There are three issues we discuss the most which are the government, the student, and the teacher. In John Taylor Gatto 's essay “Against School”, we see the inside perspective of the educational system from the view of a teacher. In “I Just Wanna Be Average”, an essay written by Mike Rose, we hear a student 's experience of being in a vocational class in the lower level class in the educational system when he was supposed to be in the higher class. Both Gatto and Rose give their opinions on how the educational system is falling apart. Today the government is only trying to get students to pass, making it hard for teachers to teach what they want. Students are affected everyday by the school system. They sit there - bored - and do not think that the teachers care, making the
Anne. A. “Balanced School Calendars: Pros and Cons.” June 2010. Vancouver Board of the education of the students. Web.
Back in the olden days, schools were originally put on a schedule in which students would spend the majority of the year in school, and 2-3 months off for summer break. The purpose of this was so that children could be home for the summer to help their parents run family farms. Today, due to progressive industrialization of farming, modernized farming equipment, and decrease in family farms, the need for children to be home during the summer to help run family farms is minute if not obsolete; because of this many schools across the United States have transitioned to year-round schooling (“Summer”). Contrary to belief, year round schooling does not usually mean more school days. Currently most year-round schools adhere to the 180 day school year. Instead of the traditional lengthy summer vacation, year-round schools distribute the 180 days throughout the entire year while allowing for shorter breaks. Common scheduling for year-round schools includes cycles of 2-3 months in school followed by 2-3 week breaks (“Research Spotlight...
Today however, the role of the modern public school is beginning to change. The United States is no longer an agrarian society. As a result, people feel that the traditional school calendar is too old-fashioned a...
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born on February 28, 1533, in a time when only the wealthy received the privilege of a good education. Around 1539, Montaigne's father sent him to the College of Guyenne in Bordeaux, where, by the time he had reached his thirteenth year, had completed the curriculum under the direction of George Buchanan. Montaigne spoke well of his educators and praised their teaching techniques, but chastised the stern discipline of most of the schools during his time. He said that if one were to visit a college where lessons were in progress, nothing could be heard, save “the cries of children being beaten and of masters drunk with anger.”1 In his work, The Essays, Montaigne emphasizes some very important subjects, such as the need to teach children with gentleness, make learning an enjoyable experience, and train a child's personality. Though Montaigne's thoughts on education may be contrasting to the world today, he understood the process of learning very well. His ideas may be applied to instructional theory to this day.
In The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way, Amanda Ripley investigates the education systems of three of the world’s highest performing countries offering insight into the components necessary to raise education in the United States from its current mediocre place on the world stage. By involving three teenage American exchange students, Ripley gained access to firsthand experience of the familiar US system as compared to the highly competitive systems in Finland, South Korea and Poland. The author proposes that, although the systems vary greatly, commonalities in cultural valuation of education, rigor and teacher quality have made students from these three countries the “smartest kids in the world.”
Shortly, we became more industrialized and had more advanced technology which made the summer vacation that was so crucial to the survival of the family now purposeless. With these long summer breaks, it can affect a child’s learning in so many ways. According to the benefits of year-round education article,”As of the 2006-2007 school year, nearly 2,800 U.S. schools were classified as year round.” One essential problem with long summer breaks is lack of retention of learned material and can lead to the student not being able to make progress with their learning in the next school year. In year-round schools, kids don’t waste time on review as opposed to traditional schools who take about three weeks reviewing the information they learned in the
However, the authority they manage for behave of the children is a really good method that many parents could apply in their families. Also, they good alimentation for they kids is a very good aspect of them; by doing this they teach they children from a very young age to eat healthy and adopting a well balanced alimentation making it a habit. To conclude, French parenting is not superior from others. Each country or culture has their own way to educate or discipline their children. What other families in the world can do is adopt some lessons from other cultures and applying in their own terms and forming a well-balanced education for their
Cooper, Donna, Adam Hersh, and Ann O'Leary. "US Data and Analysis." Center on International Education Benchmarking. The Center for American Progress, 2012. Web. 19 Feb. 2014.
To reach the universal education goal for all children, special efforts should be clearly made by policymakers like addressing the social, economic...
Day or School Year: A Systematic Review of Research." Sage 80.3 (2010): 401- 36. Web. 16 Feb. 2014.