I wonder if they measured the average IQ of Finnish children as compared other countries...
Organizational theory says that large organizations can only do one task well. When they become too diversified with too may agendas they fail. The American education system is now a way of socializing (as in creating socialists) children and acclimatizing them to the new godless and non-moral society. It is also a means of financing useless eaters and giving jobs and retirement benefits to people who have paid their Democratic party dues. Nowhere on the list is educating in reading, writing and arithmetic. Those have become the cover story.
"This phenomenon"
- or -
"These phenomena"
please, teacher.
Finland has a population of about 5 1/2 million people.
[...educational ideas. After all, education has been in the hands of the Democratic unions for decades.]
Worthless democrat unions who only indoctrinate mush minded children into the new slavery coming for sure.
We want astounding new discoveries from people forced into an education system that is focused on the lowest common denominator.
Our nation still hasn’t figured out the difference between education and training. It hasn’t figured out the difference between knowledge and wisdom.
The Finns are producing people who are good at school. OK. So show me the difference between that from say locking their kids up in prison until they are 18.
Make sure your name is on the paper, and put it in the basket when you are Finnish.
Finland is white so IQs and culture play in the performance of students and teachers.
The US would never be permitted to pick people as teachers based upon real skills and abilities rather than race quotas and rage.
I don’t think the Fins are importing third world non Finnish faking illiterate third worlders and forcing Finnish children to dumb down to their level.
With the entrenched bureaucracy and the teachers unions I wonder how much can really be changed.
This constant change in educational goals/methods/nomenclature is what soured my wife on her teaching career. Every few years, some aspiring PhD candidate would enter the administration with a whole new set of guidelines, goals and methods that were applied to everything from auto mechanics to English lit. And this was at the college level. Her teacher friends in grade school had it even worse, having to submit lesson plans that accounted for every 6 minutes of classroom time. Just insane.
I note that the Finnish method in fairly close to what I experienced in school 60 years ago in the US--the major exception being one teacher for the first 6 years. However, I am aware that this did occur in some one room schools in remote areas.
When I look back on my elementary education, I realize what a genius our principal was. Not only did he hire dedicated teachers, he exposed us to culture and business outside the classroom. By 6th grade we could balance a checkbook, discuss art and classical music and had a working knowledge of world geography and governments. We had not started algebra or foreign language but what we had covered, we knew.
America is modeling it’s education system after China’s. Mindless personality-destroying rote learning, where there is only one correct answer to every test question, including questions like “what did you do on the weekend?” and “what is your favorite color?”
I didn’t see any mention of a teacher union in Finland or how long it takes to fire a bad teacher or of racial quotas.
Finland is a small and and very homogeneous country with common shared values. That is the foundation of the trust that he mentions at the end and that he claims to be the basis of its success.
The only thing that will save US education is to get government out of it at all levels, but that will not happen. People love their subsidized daycare.