from Amazon
Monday, May 04, 2009
The best education system in the world for non-adults
Non-sports post.
According to the PISA exam, Finland laps the world. Other top countries in the running are Hong Kong, Canada, and South Korea. USA is below-average.
According to inside views of education in Finland, the mindset is what is different, compared to America:
What they see is a relaxed, back-to-basics approach. The school, which is a model campus, has no sports teams, marching bands or prom.
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and with no gifted classes she sometimes doodles in her journal while waiting for others to catch up. She often helps lagging classmates. “It’s fun to have time to relax a little in the middle of class,” Fanny says. Finnish educators believe they get better overall results by concentrating on weaker students rather than by pushing gifted students ahead of everyone else. The idea is that bright students can help average ones without harming their own progress.
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Teachers must hold master’s degrees, and the profession is highly competitive: More than 40 people may apply for a single job. Their salaries are similar to those of U.S. teachers, but they generally have more freedom. Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. “In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs,” says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international student test in 2000.
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In November, a U.S. delegation visited, hoping to learn how Scandinavian educators used technology. Officials from the Education Department, the National Education Association and the American Association of School Librarians saw Finnish teachers with chalkboards instead of whiteboards, and lessons shown on overhead projectors instead of PowerPoint. Keith Krueger was less impressed by the technology than by the good teaching he saw. “You kind of wonder how could our country get to that?” says Mr. Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, an association of school technology officers that organized the trip.
Not to mention the free tuition at universities (and high taxes!). And, instead of high school until 18 years old, they stop high school at age 16, and then you get to continue education or go into a vocational program. Here’s the wiki entry:
In particular, an important difference compared other systems is that there is no common “youth school” — ages 15-19 are spent either in a trade school, or in an academic-oriented upper secondary school. Trade school graduates may enter the workforce directly after graduation. Upper secondary school graduates are taught no vocational skills and are expected to continue to tertiary education.
So, when I hear the Secretary of Education with his answers:
I think the school day is too short, the school week is too short and the school year is too short. And I worry particularly about poor children — children who don’t have two parents at home, children who don’t have a household full of books. You look at all the creative schools that are getting dramatically better results. The common denominator of all of them is they’re spending more time, doing more after school, doing more on Saturdays, doing more over the summer.
Canada has the same number of hours per day and days per year of schooling. We don’t (or didn’t anyway) kill our kids with homework and pressure. Quebec, unlike the rest of Canada, adopted one similar thing to Finland, and that is to stop school at age 16 (rather than 17), and have a two-year “pre-university” program (on the way to a three-year, not four-year bachelor’s).
Instead of reinventing the wheel, why not look and adapt the successful education system in Finland? And, if Finland offers too differing a contrast, why not look toward Canada?
As it stands, everyone thinks they have the theoretical answer, when other systems have the practical ones.