I am from Russia and I had lived in the UK for 5 years in early teens and I had a chance to study in English schools from year 5 to year 9. I generally have a positive experience of the learning process and I remember having a great time engaging with some teachers. I enjoyed the hands-off approach which allowed everyone to discover what each one enjoyed instead of being force-fed information about subjects you are absolutely uninterested about (more on that later). There were several things that struck me as very odd for an education system so praised world-wide, particularly in hindsight after having returned and graduated in Russia.
-Many teachers in State secondary schools were very unqualified. We had a subject called "science" ( in Russia it is split up into chemistry, physics and biology), which was mostly taught by biology teachers who were clueless about physics. This isn't just one teacher - I had several and the trend was clear.
-There doesn't seem to be anything like a unified curriculum. I remember changing schools and coming to a geography class, just to realize that they are studying something totally different. Same goes for history. In one school we studied history from the iron age and in the other school I was told that they didn't study anything before the battle of Hastings. The things that were taught on smilingly the same subjects in two different schools were totally different to the point that it didn't make sense. I wouldn't even mention the fact that foreign history wasn't taught in the slightest.
-Except perhaps for maths, english and french, there was no system to what was being taught. It literally seemed like teachers were making up their own curriculum as they went along. I remember we started year 9 geography with studying the jungle, then we switched to volcanos, then we switched the Mediterranean climate, then to Japan, then to urban planning, then to something else I don't remember. In biology (in a private school after I was forced to flee the state school by local chavs), we studied everything from the effects of drugs on a human body to BMI: it was all over the place. Don't get me wrong, the individual topics were interesting and taught well, but it was all over the place such that nothing ever got studied seriously. To give you an example of what I mean, in Russia in 6th class biology (≈ year 8) everyone thoroughly studies botany, in 7th class, zoology, in 8th class anatomy, the 9th class studies cytology, genetics, biochemistry and prepares for the Russian analogy of GCSE. What we studied in England was interesting...but it wasn't biology. It was bits and pieces of things related to biology but it wasn't biology as a whole. The same could be said about almost any other subject.
-Despite the general lack of system, the British system, particularly in state schools, was surprisingly authoritarian. It was forbidden to argue with the teacher! Teachers very often used their authority to suppress opposing views and everyone was constantly bombarded with homophilic liberal muticulturalist propaganda. I never felt so politically free then when I returned to Russia.
-The hands off approach which worked great for me, a couple of Chinese guys and a dozen or so middle-class Englishmen, but not everyone else. The rest of my year was pretty clueless about the world around them and absolutely unmotivated to study it.
After I had returned to Russia, I found my new classmates to be way ahead of my former English peers in general understanding of the surrounding world. In Russia, we discussed economics, politics and history in class. There were real debates and opinions were welcome. The Russian system is terrible in many other ways, sure, but at least it is systematic. There is a clear, systematised curriculum which everyone must at least sit through, and probably learn at least something along the way. I still don't understand what the British system is trying to achieve. Am I missing something?
TLDR: The British system seems to me as unsystematised mess of different topics mixed together without a clear end goal. There is no central curriculum which everyone is required to study so most unmotivated teens (the majority of school kids) seem to end up pretty uneducated
My apologies in advance if this is the wrong sub
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