School in Finland – Student Centered Learning

I have felt that for years our system is inadequate and broken. Our system isn’t about teaching us, its about making us on an assembly line. School doesn’t care about the needs of the student, and that isn’t a good model to teach on. Teachers get paid next to nothing to babysit the children of America and they can’t even have the time they get at home to themselves. The system is ludicrous, as are many other things in America. People need to learn to be humble and pay attention to things like evidence and signs that give us the message that we need to change.

But, we won’t because we live in a nation run by morons who operate in vacuums of trust and knowledge, who work only on the “I know best”, mentality rather than being forward thinkers… You know what happens to forward thinkers in America? The get shot by back room politics. America isn’t the best, because we used to innovate not we stand on tradition. Money doesn’t make us great, people do and it’s high time we as a nation start working on our people. And where does that start? In school aged children, and in the strength of our education system.

LikeLike

A system that focuses on the children rather than on competition, a system that allows the children you use and develop their natural talents. A system that doesn’t put pressure on standardized testing which unfortunately ruins the experience of learning, puts too much pressure, isn’t student centric, and takes care of and puts the power back into teaching. Ruining your education system is the easiest way to ruin a nation.

LikeLike

Because that is what the evidence says? Year to year our students get worse and worse, and we don’t beat it. I don’t know where you get your statistics but our school are bad, our teachers are underpaid, and their resources are poor. Furthermore, extensive studies of human psychology have revealed that the model under which the school systems and the workforce operate are by far the worst you can have for per capital productivity.

Maybe if you were reading the statistics, and paying attention to the cold hard science you’d know that, but you don’t. Arb’s blog as even beat that drum on many occasions. And you know what, when you look at the results in Finland the message is pretty clear. When a societies education system fails the nation also begins to fail. It’s that simple. You can’t make up for the learning you didn’t receive when you are a child when your mind was still shaping and forming.

You get what you pay for, and our education comes dirt cheap with a for sale sign on it. Poorly funded education system = poorly run, executed and ineffective education system.

LikeLike

There are as many opinions about why education has declined, but your finger pointing is not backed by evidence. It insists to me at least, that your assimilation of “party-line politics” is also based on little or no evidence. Our system doesn’t focus on the equality of the students (which no overtly competitive system can do), our system is designed to make our children automatons to the work force, to literally crank them out like a factory. That makes our children rather undereducated compared with other nations, but gives them ‘soft skills’ that makes them better worker bees. Now, our employers expect people to be that, and those with more in depth, elaborate and specified careers are losing jobs because the “American Way” is apparently unsustainable growth, and productivity that is quantity over quality.

However, the problem with that model, like anything in economics is that you over saturate the market and end up with lots of merchandise you can’t sell, rampant unemployment, and lots of “over-skilled people” doing jobs involving menial labor if they can even get one at all. America’s economic policies as well as it’s laissaz-faire and mediocre investment in education have led to state of our education and to the highest level of unemployment in 30 – 50 years (depending on the area). Teachers barely make anything, the standards have been lowered because people don’t want to be teachers with shitty pay, and often they have to reach into their own pockets for supplies for their class. But if you want to tout on about bogus “leftist conspiracies” do so at your own expense. There is no evidence for you claims, and many others you make at Arb’s blogs.

This education system exist in a void, that lies between what the student needs, and the “normalization” of economic ethics of our culture. It usually caters to the later, ignoring the former. But science has taught us more about our learning processes, and we have the evidence to create a new model that is both successful and produces a future generation of people who are both productive members of society, as well as integral members of the work force. All our system is going to do is create bodies for an already supersaturated market, and continue to devalue both the quality of our lives, and the disparity of wealth we currently see. It’s not just a factor poor economic policies, deregulation, and the lowest taxes for the rich that is the problem on it’s own, it’s the whole concept of “American Productivity” which needs an overhaul.

However, the conservative party line is more than willing to sell us up the river for enhanced dividends, record profits, and “Trickle Down Politics” as if those things had any real value outside of putting more worthless money in their pockets. When the bubble pops, and it will pop, it will be the most devastating in all of economic history. Many people believe we are “Over the hump” of disaster, when all we did is prop the bubble back up. Indefinite growth, is a finitely unsustainable goal, and the American Mentality of Economics is fueled only by greed, and produces no substantial long term investment, infrastructural change as none of it is based directly on concrete assets. It’s gambling plain and simple, and lower class exploitation. And so long as our policies follow that bottom line, and our education system is geared to that system we will fail as a nation.

It’s almost written in the stars (no, actually its in the numbers of mathematics in which the rules of the calculation aren’t subject to the whims of your party). I think you approach my points as though I am some leftist because you lack the capacity to understand my point of view in your state of ignorance. I am a liberal independent, and sometimes my point of view is with the left, sometimes with the right, sometimes with the middle, sometimes with no one. My position is based on critical analysis not on magical thinking… I am not sharing my beliefs with you, I am sharing the conclusions I draw from the evidence I’ve seen, and from my own personal experiences. You’d do well to recognize people out side of your apparently black and white thought process, and face the evidence, look at reality and stop producing false dichotomies of “Us Verses Them” like so many other conservatives to.

You are squandering you intellect by allowing such intellectual fodder to cloud your conscience, and it doesn’t serve you.

LikeLike

Once again you missed the entire point, you focused on only one problem and used that as if it refutes my entire comment, and I refuse to explain so repetitively just how mistaken you are. Competition is only part of the problem, and there is many, many other issues that I mentioned as well as many problematic side issues that emerge from systems overly focused on standardized testing, competition, and “Market Driven Education” formats. Learning shouldn’t be about competition or it undermines education.

You are living under a false pretense about our school system, and your comparisons are faulty. Korea works their children literally to death. The problem is that we expect our children to be competitive, while providing the least to facilitate that. We don’t appreciate our teachers, and make them into underpaid, over-glorified baby sitters because parents are force to work 4 jobs just to support their families. I know that you feel economics is a side issue, but economics and education are two very, very interrelated topics.

Competition is just one pollutant killing our education system, underfunding is the second, and the inequality it produces is the third. Competitiveness isn’t making bad scores, but I am only admonishing them for the fact that they work their kids all year round 6 days and week to achieve those scores, and that is no way to live. It sucks the joy out of learning. You missed the entire point of the video, and without understanding that basis trying to explain to you why competition undermines the process is moot.

No one said that competitiveness makes bad rankings, we are saying that competitiveness does not produce the most effective results. You have to work your kids to death to get those scores in Korea and Japan, and Finland beat them by focusing on equality, and giving everyone a fair chance, rather than forcing them through a “Factory Like” system or putting pressure on them to learn a rigid curriculum. The example that is made is that focus learning on the student for the children rather than on competition, standardized testing produces the most efficient results.

LikeLike