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| This absolutely determines a child's life and future, and once this path has been set it becomes extremely difficult for the child to switch paths. Your whole life can be completely decided at the age of 13. Attending University later in life isn't a possibility without going back to the equivalent of high school (matura) and starting all over again. This is probably the biggest difference between US and Swiss educational systems, IMO. | |
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Yes - the lack of university education is what really struck me about Switzerland. Comapred to the UK or Ireland there are relatively few people going to university, many seem to end up in apprenticeships really early on and their life is then fixed.
I know quite a few very intelligent Swiss people who had never been to university but instead had ended up in various undemanding (ie less than they were capable of) careers purely because that's the way their path had been determined at school. I asked them why they didn't go to Uni but they said that their career path was just fixed as a result of their schooling quite early on (?) I have to admit, I never really understood that process but I know for sure that these people were easily bright enough to have done really well at university.
Many of them ended up spending years studying part-time in their late 20s/early 30s, giving up every weekend for 3-4 years in order to get the sort of educational qualifications that they would surely have had by age 21 in many other educational systems. To me, that can't be the right way to go about things.
I'm sure that the 'basics' are covered pretty well by the Swiss system, certainly as well as the UK one (the same caveats apply regarding the luck of getting a good/bad local school). However, higher education is a real weakness it would seem. You only have to look at the huge demand for educated, skilled foreigners for high-level jobs in CH. Plus I remember reading in another thread here how more than average numbers of foreign students are brought in for postgrad places in Swiss universities as there isn't enough local graduate talent to fill them.
The Swiss system seems to me to be very much geared at churning out people to fill the various vacancies in society, not to enable the maximum potential of the individual and to give them a chance to realise their aspirations.
Maybe the solution for expats is to educate the kids in the state system until secondary level and then look at what other possibilities exist privately?
Gav