Just learn enough to work in McDonald's, because that is where you are going to end up anyway. For U.S. students, high school and college are still the main path to success. Americans stay in school longer because they have nowhere else to go. In contrast, foreign countries have built solid apprenticeship programs and vocational schools. We dismiss technical schools as second-rate.
Countries can also ease up on college when they do a better job teaching high school.
Thomas Rohlen, a comparative education expert at Stanford University, estimates that half of the Japanese students who finish grade twelve have learned as much as the average U.S. college graduate. Other experts agree that the Japanese learn more in elementary and high school, but say that Americans catch up by the time they finish college. No one is ever going to change us into Asian mothers who take notes for their children in class. But the disengagement of American parents is troubling. Americans agree that the overall system is in disarray, but they see the problem as strangely removed from their own lives.