American students compare poorly academically against students in many foreign countries. The American school system should be reformed by using some of the approaches that other successful educating countries use, in order to create students who will be competitive in the future.
A generation ago, cellular phones and computers were envisioned in episodes of Star Trek. Today, they are everywhere, and today's students have to learn technological skills, more so than the last generation. Previous generations were required to learn the basics: reading, writing, math, science, and history. Students now are more technologically advanced, many having cellular phones and laptop computers. .
Today's students need to learn not only the core of education, but computer skills and learning skills that will enable them to think creatively and with analytical reasoning capabilities in order to be competitive in a future with advanced technologies. We need to educate students with the future in mind, not only for the employment positions available today. Recent reports demonstrate that American students fall far behind their foreign counterparts. One article titled "The "U.S. Can Learn from Other Countries' Education Systems"," states that in 2009, an education firm named Pearson released a report in which the United States ranked 17th in education in the developed world. The report says the U.S. placed twenty-fifth out of thirty-four countries in math and science ("Best Education "1). The Program for International Assessment (PISA), report in 2009 graded the knowledge of teenagers in seventy countries.
Students fifteen years of age were ranked fourteenth in reading, seventeenth in science, and twenty-fifth in math (Koebler 1). In the same test, students from Shanghai, China, received higher scores than any other school system in the world (Hechinger 1). The top educational systems were found in Finland and South Korea.