Interesting. I did a calcuation of my school days.

Total vacation time - 14 weeks per year

Total school weeks = 38 weeks per year

38 weeks x 5 days per week = 190 school days

5 hours school day - lessons = 950 hours school hours.

That did not count the after school activities which were mandatory - generally an hour of sport every day, nor the 2 hours prep (homework) in the evening.

There most definitely was no such thing as a child arriving late, and talking in class was strictly forbidden. So was anyone helping us with homework. Why? Because the teacher could then not see if we knew what we were doing.

There was only one thing that counted towards being upgraded to the next grade, and that was the final exam at the end of the year. If we got less than a 50% aggregate, we had to repeat the year. Some of the lesser subjects we could get away with, but if you got less than 50% for math or a language, you stayed behind.

In 12 years of schooling, I only knew one person who repeated a year.

We covered world history (except for the Americans and Asia) We did cover Russia. We started from Neolithic man right through Greek and Roman up to the time we were living in.

We did math - algebra, geometry, trig. We did geography (world, climate zones, etc.) We did three languages each. We did chemistry, physics, biology. And so on and so forth. There also wasn't any chance of going to university if you didn't have math, science, 3 languages, and were not writing to a publishable standard by the end of K12.

It was a reasonable education.

Now, when I went to college in America, I found them teaching things I learnt in junior school, most people unable to put together an English sentence, and nobody could speak a second language.