A reader writes:
It doesn’t seem like you read that article with a critical eye. The author cherry-picked facts to support what appears to be a predefined solution. He keeps talking about required minimums, but then mentions they actually attend 25% more days. The minimums don’t mean anything; how many days/hours are they actually going is the only thing that counts. If American schools are only meeting the required minimum but other countries are exceeding the minimum then you’re not making a fair comparison.
Another:
As someone who grew up in the “system”, I can tell you with first-hand experience that, in Taiwan, I was spending roughly 14 hours a day “in class”, with about 10 hours in school and 4 hours in cram school. On weekends, I was having up to 6 hours of cram school lessons. This is the reality of education in Asian countries.
Another points to a similar experience in another Asian country:
The thing is, India as a whole may require 800-900 hours per year, but that, I imagine, only applies to Indian government schools (equivalent to US public schools) that are on the whole, pretty bad. Most middle-class kids go to private schools in India, where the instructional demands are much higher. The kids I know in India go to school from 9 am to 3 pm, but before and after school they have extra private tutoring, especially in 10th and 12th grades when their performance on the exams determines their future. Additionally, in 12th grade they take nationwide or statewide exams for entrance into medical school or engineering school, and for each of these entrance exams they take more specialized tutoring. So the 800-900 hours does not begin to represent the total amount of academic work done by these kids.
Not that I’m recommending this approach. I think it’s brutal.
The Dish 