What They Teach Abroad

While many American students now show up ill-prepared or the rigors of college, their European counterparts fare better. Many U.S. universities often allow British and French students to enter as sophomores. Few Soviet students enter U.S. colleges as undergraduates, but the best Russian teen-agers are probably also better drilled in the basics. A look at school systems in the three countries:

FRANCE. French secondary education tends to be much more grueling than the U.S. version. Primary school ends at age eleven or twelve, when students enter a college d'en-seignement secondaire--roughly equivalent to a junior high school. During the first year, they shoulder a set 27-hour-per-week load: five hours of French, three each of math, a foreign language, history, geography, civic education and economics, two hours of aesthetics and two of technical education. Later, they begin a second foreign language; the first one is typically studied for seven years.

At lycees, which students attend for their final three years of high school, classes run eight to ten hours a day.

Homework commands three hours a night. For those who do not leave the academic track for a technical one, the system culminates in a stiff national baccalaureat, composed of four-hour tests in each subject and an oral final. On average, only 67% of students who take the exam--mandatory for acceptance to college--manage to pass.

BRITAIN. Paradoxically, the best and worst of educations have coexisted in Britain. Although some scholarships to private schools were historically available for lower-class students, there was no free secondary schooling at all prior to World War II. In 1944, Britain decreed a dual track of public education: "secondary modern" and technical schools for the less talented, and grammar schools--with stiff entrance exams--which educate the top 20%.

Almost half of all students leave school at age 16, after studying as many as a dozen subjects, including a foreign language. Meanwhile, grammar school students continue a rigorous university-oriented curriculum, including English, French, math and science. The elite private schools, even more demanding, routinely push students through 13 subjects.

Britain's national exam system is even tougher than France's. At 16 students may take O Levels, or ordinary exams. Some 70% now "sit" at least one O Level, but only 33% manage to pass one. Those who perform well may undertake the even tougher A Level advanced exams two years later. A Levels are comparable in difficulty to sophomore work at an American university. Only 12% to 16% of students progress that far; only 10% are finally admitted to university.

In pursuit of equality, Labor governments since 1960 have gradually phased out grammar schools--whose pupils tend to be middle-class--in order to blend their abler teachers and students into the melting pot of the so-called comprehensive schools, which combine features of the grammar and technical schools. That policy has disturbed many education-conscious parents. Those in areas where grammar schools have disappeared complain of declining standards and high levels of truancy and unruliness in the comprehensives. A Department of Education report found that abler children are indeed being kept back because of the "boredom, disenchantment and indiscipline" of mixed-ability comprehensive classes. There is also a decline in students taking foreign languages and other hard subjects.

THE SOVIET UNION. Although educational quality varies between Russia's elite big-city schools and rural ones, all students must take the same subjects in the ten-year general education course. Math and science are emphasized after the first four years. A typical tenth-year program includes courses in Russian language and literature, history and social studies, math, biology, physics, astronomy, chemistry, a foreign language (often "strategic languages" like Chinese or Arabic) physical education and military training.

After this, Soviet students divide into vocational schools and more selective specialty schools. The vocational schools send their graduates (about 2 million a year) into guaranteed jobs. Students at specialty schools (about 4.4 million in 1973) are trained in one of 450 fields such as teaching, medicine and communications--as well as art, music and theater. After two to four years of study, they take state final examinations which are used to determine the students who may go on to higher education.

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