When I was in graduate school, one of the part-time jobs I held was as a placement director and student supervisor for an organization which brought foreign exchange students to the United States. My job was to find families willing to host students for a school year, and then, to provide support for the students while they were attending school. Even after finishing school and while working full time, I continued to work with the exchange students because of the insights it provided for my own work as an educator.
Over more than a decade, I had the privilege of working with students from a variety of countries, primarily Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway and Australia. Their primary motivation for joining the program was to improve and solidify their ability to speak English, to take driver's education, which was much more expensive in their home countries, and to see parts of the United States away from the tourist areas.
What these students knew about American civics and government was way above the level of Americans at the same grade level. As a history and government teacher myself, I was fascinated by how much these students, who ranged in age from 16 to 18 and who were in their third, fourth or fifth year of secondary school in their home country, knew about American History and government. The first year I did this, I had two students from Switzerland and one from Spain. All three reported that during the first few weeks of school, they'd had to pull back when it came to answering questions and participating in the discussions because most of their classmates didn't have the scope of knowledge of the objectives that they did.
These students, in studying history at multiple levels, had done far more outside reading and research than their American classmates were required to do, they'd had to use their critical thinking skills to analyze historical events and political movements, and then explain why they held their particular opinion or perspective, something American students aren't required to do until they get to college. And on top of it all, they had to know specific events, personalities, and dates, and they had to demonstrate an understanding of how all of that fit together to bring the culture, their country, and the world, to the place where it was at the moment.
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