flipping through the news on tv a short while ago...  saw romeny make this claim.  

i feel sad for the world.   obama and romney certainly cant be the best people you guys could put forward to lead your country...surely.    maybe i can cross my fingers and hope for a  coup of some sort which places competent peoples in the positions of your government. 

Actually... I think the US did invent widespread schools and the school system as we know it today.

Don't quote me on it though, because honestly I don't care enough to check.

Of course, schools in an invidividual sense have been around since greek philosphers and before.

However that a country should try and educate the majority of it's people... I think that such a thing may have been implemented by the US first.

I think he was probably talking about a national public school system.

lol who knows

Bingo. Most of the major European-ish countries were conducting experiments in education through the 19th century, but America was the one that embraced mass education quicker because there was no classist stigma about education (not to say that America has never been classist, but significantly less so than Europe), so we got around to it quicker than other countries. Hell, when Japan decided they needed mass education for their country in 1870 as part of the Meiji reforms, they adopted off of us because we were the only one doing it on a really large scale

Nice, I wasn't sure for sure, though I did know that widespread public schooling as an idea went as far back as Thomas Jefferson, likely due to the founding fathers Masonic roots.

But i wasn't sure if europe or the Muslim world did it first.

Muslims i believe creating the first modern schools with the invention of Madrassas.

Thought i had read that was the case though.  Really, I wonder what kind of effect that had on American GDP etc... vs other countries.  That'd be an interesting historical economics equation to run.

The United States has never been known for it's excellent education, US education peaked in the 80's and 90's and has been in decline ever since. A ton of European countries have scored better at education throughout the world (if you need sources a simple Google search will do). Especially Scandinavia, Germany and the Netherlands far outscore Britain, France, US and other larger countries.

The average person in Belgium/Netherlands speaks 2 or 3 languages, just to give you an idea of the advantages they have over us.

Nah I think Nintendo did.

And then Sony copied it, well it wasn't the same, they still had classes, schools and teachers but they added recess.

Interesting read on Wikipedia about education. I skimmed through what is from start just a short history of it. the US did not invent education. Some parts of it did implement some sort of modern education (for males) pretty early (17th century), but not before others did in Europe (see Scotland).
The Islamic world has a good claim on being among the first that had schools for all. (10th century?)
@Mr Khan: Japan was modernizing it's existing education system, not implementing one when they (according to Wikipedia) took inspiration in what the western Europeans were doing, which I suppose could easily have been the US actually.