Mildly random side-note: One way of schooling which I really dislike, and was employed by a school local to me, is banding children based on their academic performance and restricting those bands to particular subjects depending on how academically able the groups were. For someone like me, who was quite a 'late bloomer' in terms of education, that would have really shot me in the foot and they only seem to do it to force good statistics like high pass rates etc... I don't know how many countries do this but, I really dislike it.
Generally in Australian high schools, early high school classes are formed based on general academic ability. According to my housemate, who's a teacher, it's because when you get kids who aren't in the right classes (for example, someone's who's way ahead of the rest of the class) they get bored and tend to either not do anything or be disruptive. Kids are also generally able to move between classes if they get better grades (for example, I was moved from 8.2 english to 9.1 english based on my grades in year 8). But yeah, it's also to do with the class dynamics and things like that; apparently teenagers learn better when they're among peers instead of a mix of students! Again I know this anecdotally from my housemate, but she's taken a dip ed so I assume there's some kind of basis to it.
Then in upper school (years 10-12) you get to pick more of your classes, and your ATAR classes (exam classes; they were called TEE when i was in school). I don't remember people being restricted from taking particular classes, except there were prerequisites, like taking TEE Biology before taking TEE Human Biology, stuff like that. Though I
can imagine teachers probably discouraging students who regularly did very poorly in math from wanting to take advanced calculus and trigonometry and stuff.
In terms of what country is 'run the best': I think you'd really have to define what that means to have a better discussion about it, and I'm not sure how to do that. For example, what I know of Sweden from MD is that he receives free education, dental, and healthcare, and also receives money to study. On the other hand, it's a bit concerning how prominent the
local neo-nazi party (svp) is at the moment!
Australia has a fairly good free healthcare system, but we're also sending military to the middle-east despite there not being tons of support for it, our media is becoming increasingly more biased, and the only real neutral media outlet we have is government funded and has received serious budget cuts as a result. The level of education is good in Australia, but we have a serious problem with the disenfranchised indigenous peoples of Australia, who are rapidly losing their cultures, languages, and independence. the current Australian government is also being really awful about various human rights issues surrounding refugees from, like, all of Asia and the middle east.
I guess probably the best indication of how well Australia is run right now is that at the G20 summit, our prime minister was proudly proclaiming how global warming is a bunch of garbage and how he'd repealed australia's carbon tax; meanwhile,
America and China just made a big deal with regards to global warming and carbon taxation.
