ABSTRACT
One of the most important cultural structures in any society is ethnocentrism. It is developed, mostly during the early socialization process, from the time children become linguistic until they take steps to venture out on their own in life. An instance of extreme ethnocentric discrimination can be accompanied by an instance of racial discrimination. Everybody who lives in the United States has come from someplace else, from the colonial experience to the present. While the idea that the United States is 'exceptional' continues to dominate public and private discourse, at least in the United States, this chapter explains that such talk includes notions that education in the United States is still 'the best in the world'. It looks at the three major categories of education, roughly shared among the United States and Asia: elementary, secondary and university. The chapter describes three major parameters among them for comparative/contrastive purposes: year of establishment, quality of curriculum and universality of offering.
