education Archives - understand-culture

Zero Tolerance

Americans typically prefer rules that are very specific, but not meant to be followed to the letter. Nevertheless, recently in response to a lot of complaints about inconsistencies in disciplining misbehaving students, many American school systems have started adopting strict zero tolerance policies.

These policies typically state that any student committing a wrongdoing will receive the same pre-determined punishment, no matter what the specifics of his/her offense are.

Schools have had quite a bit of trouble implementing these policies, and statistics have shown that the rigid rules have actually led to elevated dropout rates and an increasing number of suspensions. This is largely because American students are used to having a little “wiggle room,” and weren’t accustomed to the strict enforcement policy.

Wiggle room – permission to slightly bend a couple of rules, as long as most of the rules are followed.

“Well, that was complete shit.”

Berliners respond to the question “Are we Germans direct?”:

And one of the comments from a German: “When I was in high school, I can remember, another student gave a poorly-prepared presentation. Directly thereafter the teacher simply looked at him and said in English: “Well, that was complete shit.”

Little Bell

Mid-1990s. University of Bonn. Professor Dr. Schmidt enters the classroom with books and papers under his arm, and his little bell. The topic: Game Theory in the Context of International Politics.

A graduate student moves to the front of the room to give his presentation. Hardly a minute into it a shrill ding-a-ling pierces the air. The students don’t dare move a muscle. “Ladies and gentleman. Time and again I simply must impress upon you the need to define the terms you use. You cannot simply throw complex terms around the room without having first clearly defined them!“

A few students risk rolling their eyes. The presenter sweats, squirms and stammers his way through his material. Professor Dr. Schmidt sits down in his chair, his left arm on his desk, in his hand his little friend the bell– ready to get shrill at a moment’s notice.

Duale Ausbildung

Apprenticeship System (Duale Ausbildung). The dual education system is a model of structured, objective feedback: apprentices receive regular, formal evaluations based on skill mastery and performance; feedback is standardized, unemotional, and focused on professional development; personal feelings are set aside; the focus is on competencies and meeting professional standards.

Business Case Method

Most American business schools base their teaching on case studies, a method which goes back over one hundred years. Business cases are descriptions of actual business situations.

Information is presented about a company: products, markets, competition, financial structure, sales, management, employees, as well as other factors influencing success. The length of business cases ranges from five to fifty pages. Case studies are based on experience.

Universities – Career Development

Career Development offices at American universities advise on personal branding tactics in order to improve the career prospects of undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students. Yale University, for example, helps students understand how best to use LinkedIn in order to network with contacts and employers.

When uploading a photo, students are advised: “To be mindful of the image you want to project. Be sure that it is appropriate for the audience who will be viewing it.”

The office also recommends that students join Ivy League groups and alumni networks to take advantage of connections with other elite universities. Further, Yale students are advised “to connect with those with whom you share common interests.“

American Teaching

Perhaps because of the high cost of tuition at American universities, Americans typically view students as customers and schools as businesses. As such, teachers will attempt to cater to the needs of their students – if a certain process doesn’t interest the customers (students), the teacher will change it in order to keep the customers attentive.

During their classes, if American teachers notice that students aren’t paying attention, they will often include several amusing anecdotes that they tell throughout the class to keep their students’ focus.

For example, during a physics class, it would not be uncommon for an American professor to stop the lecture to talk to students about how Herman Weyl (one of the early proponents of group theory) had an affair with Erwin Schrodinger’s (the physicist who’s best known not only for his quantum mechanics equation but also for his potentially dead cat) wife, or how Murray Gell-Mann (who won the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics) was so narcissistic that he once warned his cab driver not to cash his check, because he believed that his signature was worth more than his cab fare had been.

American teachers will also include anecdotal stories from their own lives if these stories have any relevance to the subject matter. For example, if the teacher is describing a discovery made at CERN, he/she might talk about a colleague who worked there.

Show ‘n Tell

As children Americans learn at an early age to be on – or to be put onto – center stage. As early as Kindergarten, in Show and Tell, they are asked to bring something personal into school: a toy, a stuffed animal, one of their favorite books. They stand before their peers and present.

They practice not only speaking in front of a group – the first experience with public speaking – they learn how to speak about themselves and their feelings. And when they do, they seek from the other children attention, positive feedback, ultimately approval. They are in presentation mode.

It is the same with letter-writing. American children are taught not only to feel free to begin sentences with I. They are encouraged to write in the active, not passive, form. They should write from their individual, personal perspective. Letters are per definition a personal and consciously subjective form of communication.

Personal Branding

Personal branding is not new. People have always taken into consideration how they are perceived by those they are trying to persuade. It is natural that the marketing techniques used to sell products are being applied to selling a person, or a person’s skills, experience, value.

Books, seminars and companies advise individuals on how to best manage their reputation in the Internet. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and other forums and communities exert influence on how people are perceived. Perceptions are personal and subjective. Branding means presenting the messenger in the most positive light.

See what books Amazon offers on personal branding.

Business Schools

American business schools offer degrees in business administration. The focus is primarily on analyzing quantifiable factors. The predominant subjects are finance, accounting, statistics. The methods are data-driven, structured and rigorous. The goal is to be as scientific as possible.

As of 2012 there were 662 business schools in the United States. Out of 436 schools reporting, over 168,000 students were enrolled in Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) programs in 2012 alone. From 2008-2009, 347,985 Bachelor’s degrees, 168,375 Master’s Degrees and 2,123 Ph.D.s were conferred in Business and Management. Many Americans believe in the the discipline of business administration.