Differences in the Organization of Education in Britain and America

III. Discuss the content of the text in the form of a dialogue.

II. Write down new words into your vocabulary.

IV. Translate the following words and word-combinations into Ukrainian and memorize them:

to attend school, hardworking student, excellent education, neighbourhood, to become educated, public school, impoverished, to teach, community, evaluate, sibling, school curriculum, textbook, to keep up with, to insist.

TEXT 14

I. Read the text. What is it about? What information of the text is the most interesting (in your opinion)?

Differences in the organization of education in Britain and America led to different terms. One crucial word, school, is used in overlap­ping but different ways. A place of education for young children is a school in both varieties. But a public school in Britain is in fact a ‘private’ school; it is a fee-paying school not controlled by the lo­cal education authority. The free local authority school in America is a public school. The American grade school has a BE near-equiva­lent of elementary school. But whereas an American can say: ‘Stan­ford is a pretty good school,’ the word school in BE is never used to refer to a university or other college of higher education. An Amer­ican high school student graduates; a British secondary school pupil (never student) leaves school. To graduate is possible only from a university, polytechnic or college of education in British usage; grad­uating entails taking a degree. British universities have 3 terms; American universities have 2 semesters (or in some recent cases, 4 quarters). A British university student takes 3 years, in the typical case, to get his degree; these are known as the first, second and final years. The American university student typically takes 4 years, known as freshman, sophomore, junior and senior years. While he is study­ing, the American majors in a particular subject, but also takes electives; the British student usually takes main and subsidiary subjects. The British term honours degree signifies that the student specializ­es in one main subject, perhaps with one subsidiary. The American student earns credits for successfully completing a number of self-contained courses of study, the credits eventually reaching the total needed for him to receive a degree. There is no counterpart to the credit system in British high education at present.

The British student who has already taken a first degree (usually a B.A. or B.Sc. except Scottish universities) is a post-graduate; theAmerican equivalent is a graduate. In American universities those who teach are known as the faculty; in Britain they are the staff, possibly dignified as the academic staff.

BE has no equivalent to AE co-ed for a girl student, nor is there any BE equivalent of the American sorority or fraternity, i.e. nation­wide university clubs or associations with restricted membership.

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