The other day our daughter came home from school with a new assignment: memorize the names of the counties in Austria and their two letter abbreviations on car license plates. There are 99! The assignment is typical of Austria - and very different from our previous experience in the USA where skills rather than encyclopedic knowledge were taught. Why feed students with often useless knowledge which they need to be able to reproduce on demand? In times of Google and Wikipedia? The schooling philosophy behind Austrian teaching is probably 250 years old. It favors dictated over self directed learning, dependent thinking over independent judgment, and authoritarian over democratic structures. God bless Austria!
Culture, Lifestyle, Politics: An Immigrant from Austria Explores L.A. and the America Beyond It