You should write a blog to record your worldview and affirmative views, as compared to your reactions here, on various subjects and recommend it here so I can find out about it to read it.

Trying to be CONCISE here:

1. In math and sciences they were typically about a year behind.
– This is hard to compare because the programs were always quite different, so it could well be that in *some* parts of the program they were behind whereas in *some other* parts maybe even ahead – but as a *general* impression, there was about a year of difference. For example, in elementary school, times tables were a cornerstone of my second grade, I knew them cold by the end of the year, but they finished them only in the third grade. Over the years, my many little impressions like this one have merged into a *general* impression of my friends being behind by about a year.

2. They did not study anything *systematically*.
– We studied history chronologically, while they seemed to switch from one unit to another with no apparent order.
Our geography program emphasized facts and operated with neatly organized units (the host country, then all of Europe, then other continents one by one, all over several years), but theirs seemed totally divorced from any logic: they would do “unit studies” on specific countries but without any wider context. In fact this is emblematic of how they did things – no context and no system, just improvised projects. They did not even study the grammar systematically (I could analyse any sentence both morphologically and syntactically when I was in middle school – and I knew the difference between the two levels of analysis).

This ultimately translated into a decreased skill at what I called “systemic thinking” – they were great at problem-solving on a micro-level, but not good at mentally encompassing the big picture. They have developed *skills*, but as if in a vacuum.

3. In arts, hey relied too much on “feeling”, “self-expression” etc.
– We were *taught* how to draw, for example: perspective, proportions etc. Our art classes were not – or not *only* – about “expressing ourselves”, there were very specific elements of the craft that we were supposed to recognize and apply. From what I gathered, whenever they had art or music before high school, any formal analysis was taken out of it, they turned it into a sort of “mystical”, “expressive” experience.

4. They were not even that much better at ENGLISH.
– They frequently committed the same grammar and spelling mistakes as my classmates who studied English as a second (or third) language. I spoke English, but I had to be *bribed* to read in it when I was a child, yet they did not seem to have much of a linguistic advantage, not even wider vocabularies. Eventually I grew to speak unremarkable, maybe even objectively bad English – because it was not my dominant language – but with all that, they never seemed to actually have a much better command of it than I did. This is quite telling IMO. I know the languages in which I was educated better than I know English. One is *supposed* to know the languages of one’s education and socialization on a level higher than this.

Which brings us to:
5. Worse literary education.
– They read not only less (comparing anthologies and required readings per year, especially in high school), but also qualitatively more dubious works. Sure, there was an occasional Shakespeare (but then again, so there was for us), but a lot of what they read seemed to be the sort of works I would classify as free time readings rather than school readings.

All of this resulted in a sort of generalized aesthetic deficiency. Not only in literature, but also in other arts.

6. Grade inflation, and I suspect an “everyone gets a trophy” mentality.
– Everyone seemed to have very good grades and very positive reports. I was typically among the best students, yet I never had an equivalent of all As. It just did not exist in any system in which I studied. All of the feedback I was getting was quite balanced, not limited to praise only. Maybe I was an objectively worse student than my friends, but maybe their criteria were less intellectually honest to begin with.

Those international schools are not for people from modest or even average socioeconomic backgrounds. They are attended by children of diplomats, military, international businessmen (often companies pay for the kids’ education as a part of the deal) and some of the local elite that wants an English-language education for their children. And yet, they are quite literally payed insane amounts of $$$$ for an inferior education as compared to the school system of the host country. This is, of course, a generalization that is probably not applicable to every European country and to every international school, but those have largely been my impressions.

How you know?

http://www.amren.com/news/2012/05/why-liberals-are-terrified-by-anders-breivik/

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/apr/17/anders-behring-breivik-claims-victims-not-innocent

Talk to Lawrence about that. He’s talking about the soul. There are other ways to gin up a mass killing.