Originally Posted by aquinas
I am going to tread lightly here so as not to offend or over generalize, but I know that the math standards at my undergraduate economics program allowed graduate level material to be taught in 3rd and 4th years. Several of the professors had previously taught at Harvard and Princeton, and they used their PhD material because we had been required to study calculus and linear algebra. Given that my class had incoming students from a wide array of high school backgrounds, I'd hazard a guess that this was fairly representative for the province.

Countries differ very widely in their patterns of specialisation and in what the "courses" are. The US is pretty generalist, England pretty specialist, Scotland and from the sound of it Canada somewhere in between.

In the English system a typical pattern for foreign language learning is to learn one language from age 11 to 16, perhaps with a couple of years of a second thrown in, but to continue after 16 only if it's a particular interest. However, wanting more foreign language teaching than that is one of the commonest reasons for choosing a private school. DS has had French since 4, Latin since 8, both compulsory, and could have had a couple of other languages as clubs if he'd chosen to. That's pretty typical of the sector. That said, the French teaching seems very slow - he could order a sandwich (or a beer ;-> ) but not a whole lot more so far. That also seems pretty typical :-(

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