
Finland’s Latest Educational Move Will Produce a Generation of Entrepreneurs - prostoalex
http://singularityhub.com/2015/04/04/finlands-latest-educational-move-will-produce-a-generation-of-entrepreneurs/
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sandworm
As someone who teaches young adults (part time, local college) I find this
approach unsettling. Being able to work in groups and bounce between topics is
all well and good, but I'm running into adults who have trouble reading. I
don't mean people with learning troubles. I mean functional, intelligent,
adults who cannot get through more than a dozen pages without lapsing into a
fog.

When I was at school we were forced to read. Not exercises. Books. Entire
books. Not over months. Days. The ability to sit down and focus on a topic for
hours is a skill that should not be forgotten.

From the OP:"...easily discoverable knowledge makes classic school subjects
seem archaic, slow-paced and inapplicable to daily life."

No it doesn't. It makes them seem all the more important.

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saraid216
> but I'm running into adults who have trouble reading.

Yes, but unless you're in Finland, what this suggests is that you _should_
move to Finland's model, not away from it. Finland has a 100% literacy rate.

> The ability to sit down and focus on a topic for hours is a skill that
> should not be forgotten.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with Finland's initiatives.

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sandworm
I don't teach reading. I teach adults in years 3/4 of a 4-year degree program.
They are all literate. That have issues when confronted with large amounts of
"dry" text.

Finland wants to move towards skill-based rather than fact-based learning.
They want students who know how to find and organize information rather than
those who simply know facts. I'm saying that the oldschool skills of reading
and remembering apparently useless facts is important. It gives you the
necessary reading abilities to handle topics beyond highschool.

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saraid216
I might be reading you incorrectly, but what you appear to be saying is that
the ability to "find and organize information" _doesn 't_ give you the
"necessary reading abilities to handle topics beyond high school". Can you
substantiate this claim at all? Are any of your students significantly capable
of "skill-based learning" and yet require your particular instruction?

And can you experimentally control for this outside of your own particular
students? In other words, can you say that there's no correlation between
their ability and your teaching skill?

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sandworm
Well I probably should have said "necessary reading abilities to acquire
topics through available means."

They are capable of understanding the topics. They have problems with sitting
down and learning the topic through reading vast amounts of text. It is all
well and good to have professors or search engines boil things down to bullet
points for easy absorption, but some topics (law, literature, medicine,
physics, religion, history) require the reading of original text. That text
could be 100 years old and cover hundreds of pages. Understanding it
sufficiently to discuss and debate with others means spending hours, days,
doing nothing but reading. No cooperation, no building teams, just you and a
book/screen. The students I see, products of modern highschools, lack that
skill.

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lumberjack
The obsession with Finland's education system is rather stupid. I mean, they
are doing innovative stuff and someday the US might want to follow those
footsteps, but first you need to fix the basic stuff, stuff that Finland had
fixed a long time ago.

First of, you cannot nurture and educate a child if they spend eight hours a
day in a horrendously underfunded inner city school and the rest of the day
living in a poor dysfunctional household without any mentors and good role
models.

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geomark
The Finnish education system is consistently praised for its great results.
But in addition to innovative educational methods there may be an underlying
advantage that Finland has over many other countries - its language. I read a
study (can't find a link at the moment) that compared the time it takes
children to learn to read and write English versus Finnish at the elementary
school level. It was about three years for American school children to learn
English and one year for Finnish children to learn Finnish. The Finnish
language is apparently very regular with a simple grammar and small number of
exceptions (I don't know; that's what the study said). The result is that
Finnish kids move on to more advanced subjects sooner and have less friction
in their learning due to the language.

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pakled_engineer
They have an entirely different school system
[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/why-m...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/why-
my-children-were-lucky-to-get-accepted-to-a-finnish-school-in-
qatar/article20284411/?page=all)

From that article:

    
    
      . kids don't go to school until age 7
      . classes are 7:30-1pm with lot's of breaks
      . lessons only 45mins long
      . no standardized tests
      . nobody can fail
      . learning disability kids given custom lessons

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ekianjo
> nobody can fail

I'm not sure that's a good thing.

~~~
WalterBright
I've always found the pressure of exams to be motivating.

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ekianjo
Same here, and having "something to lose" gives you a sense of responsibility.
If you can never lose, i'm not sure what message you are sending : like, being
lazy and unwilling to be productive is an OK attitude ? in the end it
basically defines your values as well.

~~~
saraid216
In this case, the message you're sending is, "A human being is only as
valuable as their ability to contribute."

Now guess how much you contribute to the NSA's ability to prevent terrorism.
(Hint: if you're unwilling, they'll extract the value from you anyways.)

~~~
ekianjo
> "A human being is only as valuable as their ability to contribute."

No, that's not exactly what I am saying at all. Not just their "ability",
their willingness is equally important. Even if you don't care about the
outcome, the effort should be rewarded somehow. Because in real life you
rarely get anything for nothing.

~~~
saraid216
I didn't say that was what you were saying.

I said that was the message you were sending.

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cknoxrun
It's amazing how much you can innovate and improve a learning environment when
the basic needs of all children are met in society. I don't think this would
work in public schools in North America.

~~~
parennoob
Also, Finland has a way smaller number of people that constitutes their
society, so I'd think it's dramatically easier to make changes. Finland, for
instance, has fewer people than NYC -- and only about twice as many as
Chicago.

So it's a bit hard (in my opinion) to compare it to the US, let along North
America, which consists of the following countries
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_in_North_America)).
I guess you meant the US though :)

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WalterBright
It's an interesting idea, but it's a bit premature to say what results it
'will' accomplish.

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xname
Funny, after read through the whole article, I saw nothing related to
"entrepreneurs"....

