This is a discussion of the influence of culture on academic achievement. Different cultures see education as having different goals. Some see school as the beginning of the child's lifelong quest to get the best job possible and do well in society. Some see it as the formal start of a process of socialization that began with birth. Some see it as a necessary evil that fights against the child's individuality and specific cultural heritage. These different views influence how the society as a whole goes about educating its children and how particular children within a society react to school. This presentation looks at why students in some countries consistently outperform those in other places and why certain backgrounds may make success very difficult for children from various 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 decidin...