The best part though is how they treat you like you're actually a responsible person. You are always allowed to, say, go off-campus for lunch. Starting in high school, if you're skipping too much class or getting bad grades, they don't call your parents, they come talk to YOU. Your parents never have to sign off on any papers (ex. your report card) stating that they've seen them. If you're in university and something is going wrong or you're doing badly, the teacher doesn't come bug you about it (as has happened to me in the US many times), they simply wait for you to come to them and if you never come, too bad, you fail and you didn't ask for help so it's your own fault. I hear that in the US if you take too long to get your degree they sort of cancel out some of your credits - here that doesn't happen, you can take 20 years to get a degree in French if you want.
In university you can turn in your work basically as late as you want as long as the course is going on and they don't mark off points (or don't mark off much - depends on the class and teacher). In general in all their years of school there's extremely little homework compared to American schools. Usually it's stated outright that you can skip a certain percentage or amount of lectures before failing the course (again, percentage depends on the class/teacher), for example in my classes in Iceland I could skip something like 30%, in my Japanese classes here I can skip 3 out of 15 lectures, but sometimes it's more, sometimes less.
Then there's the degrees themselves. Other countries are different, but here you don't really have a set route that you follow. You generally don't just choose to get an "International Communications" degree for example. Instead you amass a bunch of courses and go talk to the councellors and together you figure out what kind of degree you can get. I can mix Japanese with nutrition if I want to and as long as I have enough points in the same general categories, I can get a degree with it all together.
As for "being the best", sadly it's propaganda that they hear in other countries too. All the Swedes think America is (or "must be") better than Sweden, unless they've been there themselves! People think that America is technologically advanced everywhere, ex. super high-speed wireless, public transportation everywhere, electronic medicine prescriptions, (not the reality which is "full of small towns that are straight out of the 50's"). They think it's extremely multicultural everywhere (not "my town has only white people and the occasional mexican"), they think that "you pay less taxes so it must be easier to get rich" (not realizing that in America, school and healthcare isn't basically free like it is here, and that you aren't guarenteed a pension).
Even just the general medical care is worse - things that legally, only nurses are allowed to do here, in America the hospitals have you do it yourself at home. Or things that here, are side effects "that only come if you had a bad surgeon", there are the most normal side effects of a surgery. There's even just stuff like, I have a very rare eye disorder and in the US I had to go to a specialist (no one else had ever heard of what I had) but here even just the random people who work at the glasses shop know about it.
When I was first living abroad I didn't at all expect that it would be so different, as all the differences were so tiny, "we're both first-world countries!", but over the years they've really added up into the bigger picture. All the years that I heard "They're so strange in Japan! They're so strange in France! They're backwards!" I now know is actually "America is the strange one out of all the first-world countries in the world".
2/2
In university you can turn in your work basically as late as you want as long as the course is going on and they don't mark off points (or don't mark off much - depends on the class and teacher). In general in all their years of school there's extremely little homework compared to American schools. Usually it's stated outright that you can skip a certain percentage or amount of lectures before failing the course (again, percentage depends on the class/teacher), for example in my classes in Iceland I could skip something like 30%, in my Japanese classes here I can skip 3 out of 15 lectures, but sometimes it's more, sometimes less.
Then there's the degrees themselves. Other countries are different, but here you don't really have a set route that you follow. You generally don't just choose to get an "International Communications" degree for example. Instead you amass a bunch of courses and go talk to the councellors and together you figure out what kind of degree you can get. I can mix Japanese with nutrition if I want to and as long as I have enough points in the same general categories, I can get a degree with it all together.
As for "being the best", sadly it's propaganda that they hear in other countries too. All the Swedes think America is (or "must be") better than Sweden, unless they've been there themselves! People think that America is technologically advanced everywhere, ex. super high-speed wireless, public transportation everywhere, electronic medicine prescriptions, (not the reality which is "full of small towns that are straight out of the 50's"). They think it's extremely multicultural everywhere (not "my town has only white people and the occasional mexican"), they think that "you pay less taxes so it must be easier to get rich" (not realizing that in America, school and healthcare isn't basically free like it is here, and that you aren't guarenteed a pension).
Even just the general medical care is worse - things that legally, only nurses are allowed to do here, in America the hospitals have you do it yourself at home. Or things that here, are side effects "that only come if you had a bad surgeon", there are the most normal side effects of a surgery. There's even just stuff like, I have a very rare eye disorder and in the US I had to go to a specialist (no one else had ever heard of what I had) but here even just the random people who work at the glasses shop know about it.
When I was first living abroad I didn't at all expect that it would be so different, as all the differences were so tiny, "we're both first-world countries!", but over the years they've really added up into the bigger picture. All the years that I heard "They're so strange in Japan! They're so strange in France! They're backwards!" I now know is actually "America is the strange one out of all the first-world countries in the world".