Educational System Differences between the US and China

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All around the world, education has a same purpose: to educate people, to let people acquire knowledge that our ancestors had discovered, and at the same time, to encourage them to discover new knowledge by themselves. But, in different countries, under different cultural backgrounds, education will have different forms and meanings. Here I want to make some comparisons on education between the US and China. The first aspect concerns about the attitude the education system holds. American education emphasizes cultivating a student’s mind rather than requiring him to memorize mere facts. Students are encouraged to learn by doing, by expressing themselves and by discussing. While in China, students usually have to put into their minds a lot of numbers, facts, rules etc in order to successfully deal with their frequent examinations. Thus, education in China seems to put more emphases on oriented education and this consequently results in a lack of manipulative abilities. Second, the overall system frames in the two countries are different. American school education can be divided into three stages: elementary education, secondary education and higher education. Elementary or primary education begins at the age of 5 or 6, ending at the age of 11 or 12 and it covers grades 1 to 8. Secondary education covers grades 9 to 12. Then, it comes to the higher education. Students in America need not to take a college entrance examination as we Chinese students do to be admitted into a university. The general standards of admission include successful completion of high school, high school grade point average (GPA) and class rank results from several kinds of standardized tests. In China, schools can mainly be subdivided into four stages: the primary school (grades 1 to 6), the junior high school (grades 7 to 9), the senior high school (grades 10 to 12) and the university or

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