Do Americans really have to write lots and lots of essays in high-school?

I don't remember having to write essays in math. They are mostly for English (obvs), History and the Social Sciences

>writing essays are not exactly our number one choice
>are not
oh nononono

The three subjects I do are Spanish, English, and politics. In total I have 7 exams for them, and 6 of them are 100% essays.

How's your Spanish m8

We did about one a month for Croatian class.

I assume that nearly every school system in the world makes extensive use of essays as an exam form, so I don't think that's the issue. The bigger problem is probably language proficiency. Perhaps also handwriting for children from non-latinic backgrounds. I got marked down for handrwiting occasionally, and the professor occasionally found non-existent grammar mistakes in my essays because she would misread my words.

bastante bien, debo escribir ensayos sobre La Casa de Bernarda Alba (y la película Volver). Es una obra por Lorca. Me aburre mucho, y odio Adela. Está como una e-mujer de hoy.

No I think language proficiency is a given, but I myself went to the US for a semester in an exchange program, and the way essays are written is quite different.
In the US system you can write different types of essay, you can give your own opinion outside of theconclusion, its shorter and less structured, there's no requirement of a "problématique", etc

What's the form like in France? Here the essays were mostly used as an exam form in Croatian class, so the subject usually had to do with one of the novels or poems that we studied in the last 2-3 weeks (often it was about the last novel we had for compulsory reading). We usually interpreted the theme, the message, or the actions of characters. Because it was for Croatian class, the main factors of the grade were not only consistency and persuasiveness, but also knowledge of the source material, grammar, vocabulary, style and handwriting. The essays had three sections (introduction-body-conclusion), they were written by pen in special notebooks that the professor kept (we only got them when we wrote essays), always on the right-side page (left-side page was for corrections), and they were supposed to be about three pages long, with half a page for the introduction and conclusion, respectively.

Here dissertations are the go-to form of examination for all subjects that are not hard science (math, biology, physics). The alternative is text commentary, but it doesn't really differ in the structure.

The most crucial part of the dissertation is the "problématique", that is the theoretical perspective that one decides to adopt to deal with the problem posed by the starting question (exams subjects are usually a simple quote or short question). The introduction is about unraveling the exam subject to arrive at a problématique.

>Example: philosophy exam, "Is freedom an illusion?"
>Problématique: "If every individual experiences an immediate feeling of freedom, does this conviction refer to an illusory belief or to true self-knowledge? The objective will therefore consist in distinguishing what comes from a real, identifiable freedom, from what comes from an unfounded desire for freedom, with a concern for lucidity and truth."

From the problématique you derive the "plan", usually in 2 or 3 parts, each then subdivided by 2 or 3 parts, each having a couple of paragraphes, that usually follow a dialectical format of thesis, antithesis, synthesis (although for some professors, only a 2 parts plan should be preferable, where the 2nd subpart of the 2nd big part should be your synthesis)

>Plan example
I) Freedom is an immediate feeling: the thesis of free will
>I.a) Every man considers himself spontaneously free
>I.b) Can we prove the existence of free will?
II) The deterministic critique of free will
>II.a) The anthropocentric illusion of free will: "Man is not an empire within an empire"
>II.b) The human illusion of freedom
>II.c) Freedom then designates necessity properly understood
III) Freedom is to be conquered: from liberation to the quest for autonomy
>III.a) To be free is to learn to free oneself from the passions
>III.b) To be free is to be responsible for one's actions
>III.c) Freedom as a condition of the ethical act

The in the conclusion you summarize your dissertation and try to answer the subject in a sentence or two, and then attempt to throw a possible opening, because even answering the question only leads to another question.

Obviously in some classes, like History, you can have other types of plan than thesis/antithesis/synthesis, the most common being the chronological plan, but even then it usually follows the same structure

>Example: history exam: "Communist China"
I) China and rejecting the world
II) China and opening to the world
III) China and becoming the center of the world

One could make dozens of different chronological plans, but the ones that are going to get a good grade will follow the same sort of dialectical format

>essays

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I see. We didn't use a similar form, as all subjects except for Croatian were done through exams. I do recall that we had similar three-segment essays in English, but they had the pro-con form, in that they were basically done in the form of cost-benefit analysis about debate subjects.
University papers follow a different form, but we're talking about primary/secondary school.