Italian Schools Vs American Schools Essay

In America, most students go though the public school system for eighteen years of their life. I am no exception. At this point, I have spent the majority of my life waking up at six in the morning and coming home at two in the afternoon. All this time in school has lead me to wonder about how school works in places other then America, so I researched how school functions in Italy. To help me I talked with Professor Stefano Morello, a current professor at Queens College who has been through both the Italian and American school system. In America, public schools end at twelfth grade when most students are eighteen years old. After that it is almost necessary to continue with higher learning to get most jobs. In Italy this is not the case. Italian high schools take five years to complete, compared to America’s four, so they end when students are nineteen. Also, many jobs can be obtained with just a high school degree, but recently the importance of a university degree is becoming more the norm. Unlike the American school system where parents have a choice to send their children to a public school or pay tuition to go to a private school, Italian schools are all public

Looking more in depth, we can discover even more prominent differences between the school systems. First, schools in Italy are in session for longer then America as “Italy has 210 class days, compared to 180 in America” (Mignone 245). Instead, school days in Italy are shorter. Class in Italy never starts before 8 and it rarely ends after 1 (Morello), but Italian students sometimes have to go to school on Saturday. Students in Italy also stay in the same classroom all day and the teacher comes to them (Morello). In comparison, students in America have to switch classrooms at the end of the class period, sometimes having to run across the school to get to class on