From: mroussel@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca (Marc Roussel)
Subject: Re: What can we have for an educational system?
Organization: Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 14:03:46 GMT

In article <26512@optima.cs.arizona.edu> lal@cs.arizona.edu (The Morning Sun)
writes:
>	If my suggestions are followed, 3 physics courses, 3 mathematics
>courses, and 3 computer science courses <approximately> will be dropped
>from the program, as the material is covered in High School. First year
>english composition should also be covered in High school.

     What's so important about computer science?  High school should be
a place where one acquires fundamental skills.  CS doesn't really fit
that mould.  In fact, it's the time wasted on things like computer
science that most negatively impacts high school education.
     I however don't disagree that a remodeling of our secondary system
would be in order.  Fortunately, we have a model right here in North
America that we can study and emulate:  the CEGEP system in Quebec.
It's similar to the Singapore collegiate system described by the poster
quoted above.  High school in Quebec goes up to the end of grade 11.
(Grade 7 is used as a sort of remedial year which almost all students
are expected to skip, so grade 11 in Quebec is grade 10 almost
everywhere else on this continent.)  From there, students enrol in a
CEGEP (College d'Enseignement General Et Superieur).  There are two
streams in CEGEP:

	  a) The professional stream.  This leads to technical diplomas
	     in applied arts, management and applied science.  Some
	     examples include welding, commercial photography, hotel
	     management and electronics repair.
          b) The university preparation stream.  This is a two year
	     program equivalent to the last high school year and the
	     first University year in most other jurisdictions of North
	     America.

Obviously, we want to focus on stream b in this discussion.
     The advantages of using an intermediate school for university
preparation are many.  First, because of the collegiate nature of CEGEP,
you can have subject specialists (usually Ph.D.'s) as teachers in every
course.  Secondly, because everyone in the class is planning a
university career, even if you pander to the lowest common denominator
student, that's not so bad a standard.  (CEGEP tends not to do this
anyway.)  Third, because a CEGEP is not a university, you can have
meaningful breadth requirements not subject to petty departmental turf
wars.  (The breadth requirements are set by the province.)  I'm sure I
could come up with more advantages of the CEGEP system but I think that
others could do that better than I.
     Note that, as I understand it, the CEGEP system is substantially
different from the American Junior College system.  As I understand it
(and please someone correct me if I misunderstood), a Junior College is
a university without upper year courses.  Since the best students get
directly into full-program universities, that means that the Junior
College system gets only those students that didn't make the first cut.
(In Quebec, everyone goes to CEGEP before university.)  Furthermore,
most Junior Colleges would be at least semi-autonomous from the state so
that standards and practices would be very non-uniform.
     There are many models we can follow.  Quebec offers one that has
been shown to work in a modern Western culture.  We should certainly
have a good look at it before we examine models based on cultural
assumptions which may not be valid here.

				Marc R. Roussel
                                mroussel@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca
Newsgroups: sci.math