cultures, whether or not they are attending school in their own society.
Formal education can serve a number of purposes. It can help create a pool of informed citizens with a developed ability to think and reason. It can be used to establish students who share a common body of knowledge and who share socialization into the way things are done in a particular society. It can also be used to prepare individuals for good jobs and a place in society. Whichever of these purposes a particular culture finds most valuable will determine how that culture sets up its schools and measures individual progress.
Many Asian societies, for instance, see schools as critical in deciding their children's future. Thomas P. Rohlen (1983) observes that in Japanese schools, this is the most critical factor. Almost as soon as students begin school, they start taking a series of tests that are designed to sort them into categories. Those categories very quickly begin to decide each student's future.
In the United States, by contrast, sorting happens much later because, in part, Americans do not look at education alone as the most important factor in deciding careers. How a student does in elementary school will undoubtedly make some difference in where he or she goes to college and, ultimately, in what kinds of jobs choices he or she can make. However, most Americans see the elementary school experience as being more important in developing an "educated" person, who can then make educated career choices.
Societies that think education is most important in providing a common body of knowledge, for instance, focus more on giving students certain specific skills. Harold W. Stevenson (1988) looked at students in three different parts of Peru. In the society where children were expected to help their parents bartering and selling, they tended to have better math skills than did students in farming communities where math proficiency was ...