was the title of one very interesting piece by Serbian writer Srdja Trifkovic on his education in former Yugoslavia.
Although Yugoslavia was a Communist country, it left entire elements of the ancien regime untouched until the 1970s. One of those things was education. Only the best of the best made it to the Gymnasiums - un-egalitarian institutions of learning in which the broadest range of education from the classics to the languages to the hard sciences to hard history of the antiquity was taught by the oldest and the most experienced high school teachers in the country, ages north of 60.
Not even the most rigorous of Communist ideology could force affirmative action, grade inflation, or sending failed students to higher grades anyway. If one ethnic group was “overrepresented”, so be it. Those who simply could not handle the Gymnasium high school system found few options other than the shorter trade schools, of which the Communists built many. Oh, and Tito barely managed to force in his Marxist teachings into the Gymnasium schools as little more than an afterthought subject. The teachers were masters.
The point here was simple. The social democratic world had started a race to the bottom with an exultation of mediocrity and belief that “Equality in education is excellence in education”. Yugoslavia, as late as 1960, still produced extremely brilliant, thoughtful people, and could have been considered ahead of the curve, until it to fell to social democratic reforms, meant to “equalize” mediocrity in the entire country.
Though there may be some quantitative difference, that’s a wrong point nonetheless. There’s no such thing as a school producing brilliant people. Brilliant people pass through school like water through a pipe. Yugoslavia still had the same basic Prussian system as everywhere else, which is fundamentally designed to crush the individual on one hand and appeal to the early common school movement on the other. It would be myth creation to assert that schools qualitatively changed via the more recent egalitarian efforts.
Find a place that had a 17th century school system and there might be something worth looking into.
It is the old excuse for keeping teenagers out of the work force. This like any Western education system is horrible. Bob Dylan wrote “Blowing in the Wind” at the PRE-COLLEGE age of 17. What could he have written if he had not been sentenced to a school building (Public or Private is rarely of consequence as the mass majority of schools use the aforementioned Prussian system.) for years 13 to 17? Some of the best hackers in the world are young teens. Certainly teens still work on farms and in family businesses and that is good.
My theory for jamming everyone into college is to keep teens from competing with adults for as long as possible. The fact that the college grads are drowning in debt is only a plus for the state.