Complaining about our education system has become quite popular on social media and other more casual news outlets, and perhaps rightfully so. When compared to other developed countries such as Germany, the U.K. and a number of Scandinavian countries, it would seem that the education system in the U.S. is downright materialistic, too broad and far too close-minded.

We have come to a point in time where it is now possible to look back over the past decade and see what the results of our education have shown. At the same time, numbers would not reveal much as they would most likely be too objective to interpret in an unbiased manner. Yet why is it that when placed on an international scale, the U.S. is barely among the top 10 countries who are rated to have a higher standard of education?

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), along with data from Pearson’s annual “Learning Curve” report, was able to create an index based on literacy, graduation rates, cognitive skills and other factors in order to better understand the effect education has on a country’s economy. In this index, the United States received an overall ranking of 14, preceding countries such as Hong Kong-China, Poland, Ireland, Singapore, South Korea and other smaller, less developed countries.

Nevertheless, there are some qualities that an American education offers that other countries often pay little to no attention to. Although the way we teach math may be flawed, and the cost of a higher education is bizarre compared to the rest of the world, the U.S. offers a more personal relationship between teacher and student.

This means that although other countries do a better job with teaching cognitive skills and have higher graduation rates, education here allows for a personal connection to a teacher or professor which often results in motivation for better studying, or simply instructors having a better understanding of the needs of their students.

I talked to Lawrence Hatter, assistant professor of history at WSU, who studied in the U.K. for elementary school through undergraduate. One thing he noted, when comparing education here to education in the U.K, was that in the U.K., “people were less accessible,” and that in the U.S., education is “more informal, rather, than I experienced.”

An aspect of American education that is both good and bad is the broad education we receive in high school, and in some cases even in university.

Hatter commented that one of the things he liked about the British education system was that it “focused exclusively on the specific subject.” This means that from an early age, one had the opportunity to focus on the subject that they would be pursuing a career in and not have to spend time learning subjects they would not use in the future.

At the same time, having a broad education system is beneficial in creating more well-rounded and knowledgeable individuals. Hatter went on to add that it “does, also, narrow down your knowledge of broader subjects.”

Standardized testing, and testing in general, are perhaps the most ridiculous part of our education system. Although some might argue that the reason we get so much public funding is thanks to standardized testing, this does not disprove the fact that teachers have to test hundreds of students, nearly on a daily basis.

The testing system in general is quite different from the rest of the world in both the frequency of tests taken, and the amount of tests an average high school student needs to take in a year, and Hatter find this system “quite infantile.”

Despite the numbers and statistics that show how truly unimpressive our education system is, it should not discourage us from changing that system. Our College of Education here at WSU has collaborative relationships with more than 150 districts statewide, and we are the generation that can change the way we educate the generations to come, and make sure that education is about more than just a test result.