United States: Education isolationism fallout fears

A recent report shows that US students knowledge of other nations is “weak and increasingly dangerous” and urges more international educational and foreign-language requirements in lower grades and in higher education. The study, States Prepare for the Global Age, says US students “lack sufficient knowledge about other world regions, languages, and cultures and are in danger of being educationally and economically handicapped in an increasingly interconnected global economy”. This is despite a record high in the number of US students studying abroad, up almost 10 percent over the past year, according to a report from the Institute of International Education (IIE). Just short of 200,000 Amercians study abroad, up about 20 percent over the past five years. The rise reflects US universities growing awareness that “increasing the global competence among the next generation is a national priority and an academic responsibility,” says Allan E. Goodman, the institute’s president. Yet schools and universities are doing little to meet the resulting demand for Asian language speakers, particularly Chinese, according to the IIE report, which precedes a national conference in Washington to tackle the gap between the growing importance of the world in general and Asia in particular, and students limited knowledge of the issue. Organisers are to propose that 5 percent of all US students learn Chinese which is currently studied by fewer than 40,000. The conference will involve policy makers, business leaders and educators. Russia School leaving exam compromise Russian universities will keep their own system of entrance exams when the country introduces its long-delayed unified state exam, a nationwide scheme similar to ‘A’ levels. Years of lobbying by rectors of top universities to halt a common school-leaving / university entrance exam seems to have paid off after the education ministry announced a much modified new parliamentary Bill last October. Measures allowing universities to have flexible entrance requirements replaced earlier plans to scrap college tests in favour of the new exam which Viktor Sadovichny of Moscow State University calls “tick-box testing”. A Bill to introduce the exam across Russia by 2008 was agreed after a series of meetings between Andrei Fursenko, the education minister and groups that included members of the Russian Union of Rectors, education officials and pedagogical experts. The Bill — which is likely to become law within two years — will allow universities to accept students based on an assessment of their unified state exam results, scores in regional and national subject ‘olympiads’ (public competitions that test the knowledge of Russia’s top students) and their own entrance exams. “We cannot call this a complete victory because they are not leaving university entrance exams entirely alone,” says Evgenia Zaitseva, a spokesperson for Prof. Sadovichny, “but this is what the rector has been fighting for.” Alexander Kachanov, a spokesman for the education ministry says the unified state exam will be rolled out nationwide by 2008. Universities will have to accept the results of the new exam but could demand supplementary tests if a student fell short of an institution’s benchmark. Italy Follina’s rainbow…