It's all relative and a difficult subject.
There are many levels of education here. As far as I can tell, the greater majority does not get a good education (free compuaters notwithstanding). However, I came down to Argentina originally to take advantage of the good IT training that many were receiving here. Of course, that comes from college, not high school.
Many of my oldest sister-in-law's friends (they graduated last year) are not going on to college (my sister-in-law started in UADE on Monday).
The level of education I've seen in high school was not very good and they give so many chances for the kids to make up failed classes that I knew a couple of kids who had as many as 11 subjects (not necessarily classes) that they had to re-take to graduate. There is rampant cheating with little care from the administrators (in the three different schools I've been involved with).
The teachers send the kids to copy copyrighted books with no care to the illegality or morality of that. The teachers for the most part are terrible, with no patience and no control over the students in many cases. One has to employ tutors to get the kids enough information to pass a test. A report on a subject in history, biology, etc, consists of copying material from books and internet and ensuring that the footnotes are correct - there is no originality (i.e., NOT read the book/material and tell me in your own words what you learned, supported with quotes properly attributed where appropriate - it's copy the material and make sure you change the footnotes properly when you change copied sources in your text).
Things like the Falklands/Malvinas and the "Invalid Foreign Debt" are pushed in the schools. They teach the Argentine system of contracts in the business part of school and concepts that support that instead of concentrating on business concepts that a lot of the rest of the world get and showing how the contracts try to support that (impossible job, that, anyway).
Kids run around fairly wild here too - it's much more important to think about when and where the next party is than the test that's coming up. Parties START around 2:00 am, from the time they are 14-15 years old. Graduation parties happen in the middle of the week and the young ones go too (not as many as regular parties on the weekend) and this is so accepted that the schools pass out warnings to the parents before the graduation party season starts that kids found sleeping or being unruly after a party the following day will be sent home.
I don't know, I've heard that schools in the US are pretty bad nowadays. My personal experience in the 60s and 70s was quite a bit different than my experience with my kids in the 90s and early 2000s, but nowhere in those 40 years did I see such a lack of teaching and care about the subjects that I do here.
Having said that, we seem to have a large portion of young folk in the US who are completely clueless about many important things as well. Of course, I watched with horror many of the absolutely stupid things educators are doing in the States while my kids were in school and every year we reap lower and lower results.
It comes down to something simple, really, both here, the US and other parts of the world:
You can teach people to read a WHOLE LOT EASIER than you can teach them to think. People can learn information a WHOLE LOT EASIER than they can learn to work hard and honestly and apply their learning to real-life situations.
