Secondary
At the end of primary school (or at the beginning of secondary school), pupils are separated according to their capacities and career-intentions in several (often three) sections. Students who aspire to an academic career enter high schools (named "Gymnasium" or "Kantonsschule") to be prepared for further studies and the matura (normally obtained after 12 or 13 years of school at the age of 18/19) Students intending to pursue a trade or vocation complete only three additional years before entering Vocational Educations which are regulated by federal law and are based on a cooperation of private business offering educational job-positions and public schools offering obligatory school-lessons complementary to the on the job-education. This so-called "dual system" splitting academic and vocational training has its continuation in the higher education system. While the academic training leads to the matura and free admission to Universities, successfully completed vocational education give access to third level of practical education, the Fachhochschulen. In the science literacy assessment of PISA, 15-year-old students in Switzerland had the 16th highest average score of 57 countries.
In the lower second level there are several different teaching and school models that may exist. Some cantons define a specific model, while others allow the individual municipalities to determine which model to follow.
Read more about this topic: Education In Switzerland
Famous quotes containing the word secondary:
“Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Cloud-clown, blue painter, sun as horn,
Hill-scholar, man that never is,
The bad-bespoken lacker,
Ancestor of Narcissus, prince
Of the secondary men. There are no rocks
And stones, only this imager.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman “other” or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.”
—Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)