It looks like you are using an ad blocker. That's okay. Who doesn't? But without advertising revenue, we can't keep making this site awesome. Click the link below for instructions on disabling adblock.
Welcome to the Newschoolers forums! You may read the forums as a guest, however you must be a registered member to post.
Register to become a member today!
Lately, there have been news almost weekly about people raving on about the superiority of the modern Finnish education system. Researchers, education ministry task forces and other leaders try to study and emulate our education system because of its supposed effectiveness.
I find this kind of intriguing, as it's obvious that any single educational system or platform doesn't fit each possible student with perfection as there are always outliers, but it's also amazing to hear how flabbergasted people old and young are when they get acquainted with how the school system is operated here, especially cats from North America. One of the more stark differences seems to be that in Finland teachers are very respected and it's percentually even harder to become one than a lawyer or a doctor.
Finland has been #1 or near the very top of the PISA test for students, usually followed by South Korea and Shanghai. It kind of also speaks about the humility of our students, teachers and ministers, that when we first took the number one PISA spot, pretty much everyone here thought it must be a mistake.
If you're interested in the subject or discussing it, telling about your own country's system compared to ours and what you make of this whole hulabaloo then be my guest.
Here are a few recent articles about the subject and a trailer for a documentary about the subject, it's a pretty interesting film, you can find a download for it on Google I'm sure.
your country has less people than my metropolitan area. it has almost no racial diversity, or economic diversity, or cultural diversity. It is a country of doppelgangers...
Having a small group of people so similar in almost every way makes for issues to be much more black and white- either it will work or it wont because everyone buys in, or no one does.
What will work for finland will not work for the USA or other diverse, large countries...and vice versa.
both talk about comparing our education system more wholly on a state-side level in the US, as education is mostly state-regulated instead of controlled by the government. There are a lot of proponents and opponents for this matter, I know. I know 6 mil is still easy compared to Cali's 37 mil, but... I don't know, it's a thing now, so there is room for discussion.
But that's the way it is everywhere, and every part of life of human beings - those who put more effort into something will get better at it if they are not completely and utterly incapable of doing so in the first place.
That doesn't change the fact that there are different possible platforms for learning. I've always wanted to meet someone who was homeschooled.
It is not secondary, place the same motivated student in a lower income "bad" school and the best private school and sure the first will probably do well despite his circumstances, but that same motivated probably could go a lot further in a better school.
Homeschooling is not very usual here. I didn't mean they wouldn't be "normal" by any means.
I just feel that the argument of the education system being secondary is a bit unfounded and strange. It's about how one is taught, tested and pushed that helps define a person's learning motivation and skills. The Finnish style seems to emphasize the autonomy of schools and teacher's when it comes to designing curriculums and also giving children a large amount of free time and less studying than many other countries, but still surfacing on the top of prestigious educational assessment tests. That's what I'm going for here.
Like I said earlier, we have diverged a lot and no one expected us to exactly excel, it just happened, and now we are researching why.
I'm happy for your friend, but still - we don't have any classification here on what is a bad or awful school, as we don't have any standardized tests, so to me and many like me this would just ring a dud.
I think all educational systems from all over the world could lend an ear to each other, cooperation is the key. Of course it happens all the time, but seeing results of new implementations to more rigid systems (compare standardized testing vs. curricular freedom) would be great.
This is exactly what sounded so wrong to me as well.
What I want to express with this thread, and it already seems to have struch yet another few cords, is that there are different ways to look at how education systems are designed and run. Shit, the new system in Finland didn't come into full fruition until 1991, that doesn't make the people who were schooled before that time worse than someone else, but it certainly applies to many results very directly.
I think it is a culture thing, too. In your culture, education is respected much more, I would say. In the US, there's still somewhat of a cultural distrust of smart people. So, less emphasis is placed on education here, meaning that a whole lot more kids will abuse the freedoms you guys have. Our society is also very capitalist. So there's a mentality of "win or lose" and "winners take all". Just about everything here is based on competition.
Well you could say that as such a small country we have to be able to create people who are well-educated to be able compete with larger countries. Innovation is one of the main elements in the Finnish school system, from the ground up - let schools and teachers to have freedom and innovate and students will have freedom and learn to innovate.
There are talks about private universities being set up in Finland and almost everyone is against them. Even if they are proposing just small fees for a semester, like a $1000 or so.
