Education in the United States: level and features

The development of education in the United States began in the first half of the seventeenth century. The life of the colonists who arrived in the country at that time was full of privations and rather unsettled, but the first educational institutions began to open - they were both small schools and rather large educational centers. For example, all known Harvard University was founded in 1636.

Secondary education in America is predominantly state-owned, it is funded by state, federal and local budgets. But the system of higher education in the United States is designed in such a way that most universities operate on a private basis, so they seek to attract students from all over the world.

Structure

Depending on the state, the age for the start of training and its duration varies. For children, education in the United States usually begins with five to eight years, and ends at the age of eighteen to nineteen. First, American children go to primary school and study there until the fifth or sixth grade (depending on the school district). Then they enter secondary school, which ends in the eighth grade. The senior, or higher, school is the ninth-twelfth grades.

Girls and boys who have received a school education in the United States can go to colleges. Having been educated there for two years, they receive a degree that is equivalent to secondary special education in Russia. And you can disaccustom yourself in college or at the university for four years and get a bachelor's degree. Those who wish can then continue their studies further and in two to three years receive a master's or doctorate degree.

Primary School

Here children are trained at the age of five to eleven or twelve. As in Russia, all subjects are taught by one teacher, with the exception of music, fine arts and physical education. Among the academic subjects in the curriculum included arithmetic (sometimes - the initial algebra), writing, reading. Public and natural sciences in elementary school are studied little and often take the form of local history. Features of education in the United States are such that training largely consists of excursions, art projects and entertainment. This form of learning originated in the course of progressive education that emerged in the early twentieth century, which taught that children should receive knowledge through everyday activities and analysis of their consequences.

high school

Schoolchildren are trained here from eleven to twelve to fourteen years of age. Each teacher teaches his subject. The training program includes English, mathematics, social and natural sciences, physical education. Also, children can independently choose one or two classes of training for themselves: as a rule, these are subjects from the field of art, foreign languages and technologies.

In high school students begin to divide into streams: ordinary and advanced. Well-performing children gather in "honorary" classes, in which all material is passed faster and higher requirements are imposed on training. However, now such schooling in the USA is criticized: many experts believe that the division of well-performing and retarded students does not give an incentive for the latter to catch up.

High school

This is the last stage of secondary education, including training in the ninth to twelfth grade. In high school students are given more freedom in choosing subjects for study. To receive a diploma, there are minimum requirements established by the school board.

Higher Education in the USA

The country has about 4,500 higher educational institutions. More than fifty percent of students choose to study under a six-year program (bachelor's + master's program). Education in the United States annually receives over half a million foreign students, more than half of them are representatives of Asian countries. The cost of training is growing every year, and this applies to public and private universities. For the year of study you have to spread from five to forty thousand dollars (depending on the institution). However, low-income students, many universities pay generous scholarships. In colloquial speech, Americans usually call all higher education institutions colleges, even if in fact it is not a college, but a university.

Types of HEIs

Higher education in the US can be divided into three types. Institutions differ mainly in the atmosphere and the number of students. The college from the university is distinguished by the lack / availability of research programs and postgraduate studies.

In colleges, mainly, students are trained, and scientific work is beyond the scope of educational programs. As a rule, those colleges that presuppose a four-year education are private and small (up to two thousand students are admitted). Although recently, large state colleges have been formed for talented young people. According to the American laws, in such educational institutions a resident of the locality where they are located can enter, but in practice it is rather difficult. Since in different schools the teaching standards are different, colleges do not very much trust the marks of entrants and provide for them their examinations.

All the universities in the country are also divided into state-funded universities, funded by the government, and private schools. At the same time, in terms of prestige, the former are somewhat inferior to the second. The main goal of state universities is to train students of their region, and for young people from other states a competition is established, and they are charged with higher tuition fees. In such universities, the quality of education often suffers because of too large groups, bureaucracy and insufficient attention of teachers to students. But despite this, many school leavers and even foreign applicants wishing to study in the US are heading to the best state universities, including Michigan and Virginia, as well as the University of California at Berkeley.

The most famous American universities belong to private higher educational institutions, namely Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale, California Institute of Technology (Kalteh). Most private universities are of medium size, but there are very small ones (for example, Kalteh), and very large ones (for example, the University of Southern California).

Level of education in the USA

Higher education in the United States is considered one of the best in the world. In general, the level of literacy of Americans reaches 99 percent. According to statistics in 2011, 86 percent of young people aged between twenty-five years had a secondary special education (school + two-year college education), and 30 percent had a bachelor's degree (school + four-year college or university).

Unlike the success of higher education institutions, secondary education in the United States is experiencing a number of difficulties. As the Minister of Education of the United States says, the school system in the country is now in stagnation and can not compete with many other states. About 25 percent of American students can not complete their studies on time, because they can not cope with the final exams.

Finally

Despite a number of problems, the education system in the US has established itself as one of the best in the world. Tens of thousands of people come to the United States of America every year from different countries with only one goal - to study in American colleges and universities. In the US there are more institutions of higher education than in any other state. And universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, Princeton have long become synonymous with the highest level of education in the world. People who graduated from them, have every chance in the future to build a successful career.