I was talking in general, actually, so I welcome both perspectives. It seems I'm not wrong about my understanding of New Zealand, which is always pleasant to discover. It is a part of my personal cosmology that unfucking your elections in 1992 has led to governance that more closely matches the makeup of the country than does our United States.

I will say this: there was a girl in my Humanities class in high school who was one of the three of us graduating on the half-year. Me and this other girl piled up classes to graduate a semester early, the girl in my Humanities class was graduating a semester late. I didn't know why at the time but when I ended up dating her for a while, fifteen hundred miles away and six years later, she told me that Christchurch Grade 13 did not meet the graduation requirements for 49th-in-the-nation New Mexico Public Schools standards thus she was basically required to repeat everything. That would have been 1991, in the opinion of some of the worst schools in the world, and I think says more about different approaches to education than it does about educational rigor. After all, we also made these sons and daughters of Nobel-winning scientists take a four-hour course on the history of Conquistador New Mexico, including the future president of Croatia.