
Finland to abandon school subjects in favour of phenomenon-based learning (2016) - simon_000666
https://curiousmindmagazine.com/goodbye-subjects-finland-taking-revolution-education-step/
======
keenmaster
Lecture-style, didactic teaching is significantly better than
conversational/Socratic teaching in most circumstances. I assume Finland’s new
approach will perform similarly to the conversational style, which is to say
poorly.

Students can get the best of both worlds if:

1\. Students get the best didactic instruction for any given subject
(supplementing your Calculus class with videos from the best online Calculus
class can help achieve “best” here, in lieu of a really good teacher - hybrid
online+in-person teaching can also be formalized as the default approach).

2\. Students can be fast tracked to higher level classes if they are fast
learners (with no formal limit on how high they can go)

3\. There is no limit on the number of classes students can take and get
credit for. Simultaneous with in-person instruction, they can take federally
funded online classes that they get grades and credit for. Ideally, enrollment
for the online classes should be on a rolling basis. If a student wants to
start a new class at the beginning of November and spend each holiday break
bashing out an online Intro to Python class that they’ve been itching to take,
let them, and give them the resources they need between those breaks to
solidify their learning.

------
jariel
"Finland has decided to change this in their educational system and introduce
something which is suitable for the 21st century." \- evidence?

"In Phenomenon Based Learning (PhenoBL) and teaching, holistic real-world
phenomena provide the starting point for learning." \- this sounds like the
corporate market babble.

" choose from phenomena from their real surroundings and the world, such as
Media and Technology, or the European Union." \- and so Greek Literature fits
into this how exactly?

Finland it seems has maybe the best education system in the world, and like a
programmer never satisfied, has to do a ground-up re-factor?

"you are now thinking the PhenoBL way!" \- this feels like a cult.

This all sounds interesting, maybe it's something they should try in district
or two for a few years, before doing this across the country?

Why on earth would someone completely refactor an essential and integral
aspect of social function in such a risky way without concrete evidence?

------
ptero
I wish Finland best of luck in this (no irony), but personally I am very
skeptical. While a fraction of time spent this (and/or for some kids) this way
may be great, I personally learned basics best in a more traditional approach
of class time, a list of problems to solve and a book that I could read
_alone_ at my own pace. I will be very interested in what comes out after a
few years, thanks for posting.

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emilfihlman
As a Finn, this is really, really bad. Our performance in PISA and other
metrics have been slipping and slipping from 2k.

We used to lead in education, with these changes we no longer do.

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LatteLazy
I'm a brit, so I'm both cynical by nature and I've watched the defunding of
our public education system and (imho) it's conversion into a babysitting
service.

A major tool in that process has been "reforms" where new approaches are
selected for being cheaper and then sold as a "graet new way to build young
minds".

That was the case when this same approach was introduced 15 years ago to my
schooling: the school couldn't find a physics teacher for less than most
supermarket workers earn, they had to have a physics teacher (with a degree)
to teach physics, but if they taught geography, sciences and physical
education as a combined subject and called it "cross curriculum", a geographer
and a football coach could manage the whole thing for half the price.

It took two years for the failure to become apparent and another 2 to fix it.
The school closed its funding gap. And only the kids suffered.

I really hope this isn't that.

------
tzs
It was unclear to me if this means that you only learn the minimum about each
subject necessary for the phenomena you are studying, or if it is more that
the phenomena are used to make the subjects interesting to the students but
you still learn the subject to the same breadth that you would under the
traditional system.

Note that the "minimum necessary" approach could still teach the same breadth
as the traditional approach if enough different phenomena were covered.

Even if you have enough phenomena to get full coverage of some underlying
subject I would worry that it would lack cohesion. If you learn a subject
piecemeal as it comes up as part of the various phenomena you are studying, it
might be harder to get the big picture for that subject and see it as anything
more than a bag of tricks.

This could possibly be avoided by careful selection and sequencing of
phenomena.

~~~
sitkack
On the second pass of subject, one could definitely go deeper or now compare
it to all past exposures.

I see this as a constructivist technique that could be great at framing
context. Without context ideas cannot adhere to the mind, so getting students
to breakdown a system into all the pieces starts them on a metacognitive
feedback loop. Done right it could be amazing, done poorly and its like an
elementary school play.

------
aaron695
Finland is top of the world (But slowly dropping), famous for their teaching.

So they are abandoning it.

Classic 21st century.

You have a top heavy organisations with working systems, but managers have
ladders to climb and salaries to justify.

"Finland’s schools were once the envy of the world. Now, they’re slipping"

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/finlands-
scho...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/finlands-schools-were-
once-the-envy-of-the-world-now-theyre-
slipping/2016/12/08/dcfd0f56-bd60-11e6-91ee-1adddfe36cbe_story.html)

~~~
jacobush
Before Finland, there was Sweden. You’d think they should glean at us and
reconsider...

Edit: I can fault Sweden for not reverting back to a traditional curriculum
and back to a state controlled school.

But I can't really fault it _that_ much for trying. Someone's gotta try new
stuff! But Finland is probably the one country most similar to Sweden in the
world, and so they should be able to draw take some valuable inputs from both
our successes and failures. Our school experiment went pretty badly.

------
jkmcf
There are quite a few schools in America already doing this. A friend’s kids
attended all the way to 18yo. They seem to have turned out ok, but I haven’t
checked in recently. IIRC, they found jobs doing things they love.

They are given pretty much total freedom. At the end of the year they have to
justify their time and what they accomplished.

Like another said, I don’t know if ADD me would have thrived here, but we’ll
never know. People say boredom is essential for a variety of reasons, so maybe
this works in the small but for a country.

------
2rsf
Some high schools in the Stockholm area, where I live, are having somewhat
similar approach, although there are still official subject based exams done
by the ministry of education.

My feeling is that this can work great for great and curious students, and not
so much otherwise.

------
alexheikel
It’s about time to change the game

------
netjiro
I'm curious. Is there anyone here that have their children in special schools
for gifted children? Or were themselves placed in specific schools? Not just
accelerated, skipping grades, extra activities, etc.

Which schools? Good/bad? Most notable effects?

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FpUser
Darwin award in education area?

------
Geee
People who are in sports and music are an order of magnitude better when they
start at a very young age and keep practicing methodically their whole life.
If they didn't start at young age, no amount of practice will be enough to
catch up. There's some part of the brain that is able to specialize before
certain age.

I've been wondering if this would apply to other fields as well. What if
someone starts programming at 5 years old and keeps practicing for 5 hours a
day?

Maybe that's what's required to get the real genius out of people. I might be
wrong but I think there used to be more extraordinary talent before the modern
school system.

~~~
finder83
This is completely anecdotal, but my brother first taught me to program when I
was 5. I definitely didn't practice for 5 hours a day, but kept programming
over the years and am a programmer now.

I'm a senior programmer but am pretty average in my estimation. I maybe QA
test things better than the average programmer but I am not what I'd consider
a 10x programmer or anything. I've met programmers who started later in life
and are better than I am. Maybe the only benefit I have is that I'm usually
decent at architecting systems.

With that said, there are plenty of kids who start piano early and never
really become virtuosos. It may help to become a genius if you start earlier,
but it still seems to be rare.

------
Gravityloss
Risky experiment.

~~~
maltelandwehr
If it is a couple of weeks every year, I don’t see too much of a risk.

------
organicfigs
After seeing so many posts on Finland recently, I feel an obligation to
emphasize something (as someone who used to live in Finland): While it's safe,
affordable, and definitely one of the best places to raise a family, it's
nothing to romanticize. If you're not Finnish/Swedish, there's a lot of
implicit racism and it's an upward climb for many aspects of life. I was
speaking with someone pretty high up in the DNC: if you're an ambitious
refugee, America is still the best place for you. You can drive taxis, pay for
your education, and become a software engineer without anyone questioning you.
I literally know a handful of refugees who got free education in Finland but
were denied most job opportunities because of systematic racism.

~~~
originalvichy
While I can’t disagree since I am not a refugee:

As a child of african immigrants I’ve been pretty fortunate to pursue what I
want thanks to good school success (not amazing, but enough to make me a smart
young adult).

The this country has too a very high bar for employment because of ubiquitous
education. It’s probably very hard for a refugee from a country which doesn’t
have schools that are known to be ”good”.

Could it be racism? Yes, I can’t deny that. But my family members and friends
have not had trouble finding employment that matches their education level.

I think a place like Finland suffers from at the same time taking in refugees
and immigrants as potential workers, but at the same time requiring too much
skills/degrees for fairly simple work that shouldn’t require degrees, but goes
to someone with a degree.

~~~
organicfigs
Moikka, I'm happy you've found a stable life. The thing is that
subtle/implicit racism is quite difficult to pick up on. It involves not
being:

* given the benefit of the doubt in difficult situations

* realizing how easy it is to socialize normally

* given a fair shake in a candidate pool

I, unfortunately, was a witness to many minorities not being given these
benefits easily (not being one of them). Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" explains
the mechanisms of these implicit biases well, and unfortunately, they're much
more evident in Finland than most American metropolitan cities. It's difficult
to pick up on them and unless you realize the hurdles in front of you, you're
just built to jump higher without giving it a second thought.

------
bjarneh
Thought the reason the Finnish were so successful was that they had opted out
of all the new modern ways of teaching in the past 50 years...

~~~
jeltz
Yeah, they seem to use a slightly modernized version of how schools used to
teach here in Sweden and are hugely successful unlike us. So if they implement
this it is more likely that they will make things worse rather than better.

~~~
netjiro
From what I've seen, the decline in Swedish education started with moving
primary education from centralised state control and funding to municipal
control and (significantly less) funding.

Then accelerated with removing national testing, removal of grading of younger
kids, removal of the centralised bell curve grading, the "friskola" reform.

Each change is visible in general statistics from the early exams in the
university programs if you look at statistics going back to the 60s.

------
mymythisisthis
Another approach would be to teach a child only one subject and base all
lesson around that subject till college. For example, biology; all math
examples would deal with biology, all fiction books would have something to do
with bio, the classroom would be filled with biographies of people in biology,
art would be based around drawings in biology.

You can do the same thing for car-mechanics, etc.

A series of small, extremely focused schools. Run these schools parallel to
the mainstream, normal schools.

~~~
falcor84
This sounds to me like the fastest possible way to increase social
stratification

~~~
mymythisisthis
I base the idea on this - ""The experiment began in 1970 "with a simple
premise: that any child has the innate capacity to become a genius in any
chosen field, as long as education starts before their third birthday and they
begin to specialise at six.""
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r)

The idea is not for every family.

~~~
sitkack
Rather than some weird society based off of specialized geniuses, why not just
make metageniuses that are good at general learning? Isn't that what the
education system should be doing?

Most things in life really aren't that hard and with <80 hrs of hands on
training people are able are often able to self teach and know when to ask
questions and where to ask them.

What if we got that down to 20 or 10?

------
Ensorceled
The biggest problem preteen me faced as a curious and voracious reader was not
knowing what I didn't know. With limited experience and limited knowledge of
the world, I didn't know what phenomenon were actually interesting to me.

So, I became an limited expert in medieval weaponry, which didn't even serve
me well in later D&D sessions because a "long sword is a sidearm damn it".
Other kids became experts in dinosaurs.

How many kids would actually pursue learning about the phenomenon of
"cafeteria services" and would that actually be something that was taught,
that just seems ludicrous on the face of it.

Also, I have ADHD, the idea of pre-diagnosis me being dropped into this
environment makes me wonder; would I have done better or far, far worse.

~~~
phalangion
I agree that kids might have a hard time deciding what they want to learn, but
it sounds like this approach is less "learn whatever is interesting to you"
and more "let's pick some topics together and go from there."

And I disagree that "cafeteria services" is ludicrous. Think of how many
things go into planning and preparing meals in the cafeteria. There's the
cooking, serving, staffing, ordering, combining, purchasing, and planning.
Math goes into estimating how much of each thing to buy, food safety and
biological processes can be taught in the context of how long food can be kept
safely. Communication goes into creating the menu, and also in the ordering
processes. A persuasive essay on cafeteria food selection could be part of the
work.

~~~
Ensorceled
Right, but what high school student is dreaming of a job in cafeteria
services? Why are they developing curriculum for this? What poor kid gets to
become an expert in how long drums of fry oil can safely be stored before they
turn 18?

Would not general management or general nutrition be a far more interesting,
useful and universally applicable skill set?

~~~
xpaqui
Speaking from experience, none of the high school skills apply to my current
job or day to day.

Why would this utilitarian argument that doesn't apply to the current
curriculum have to apply to the new one?

~~~
Ensorceled
That's my point, the example "phenomonon" given, cafeteria services, is
extremely utilitarian.

------
wirrbel
We have that in Germany with regards to Science subjects in grade 5-7
(depending on the state / region). So roughly speaking there is a class about
science topics where children would learn about things that would normally be
taught in biology, geography, chemistry, physics. From what I hear no one is
really happy with it (except principals who are more flexible assigning their
staff to classes). So parents and teachers alike aren't very happy.

A fixed and subject based curriculum is easier to teach and and easier to pick
up. The things you learn are presented in a proper order, that gives
orientation. If you present them more interspersed its disorienting, and at
times appears random.

And its beyond me how the "interconnectedness" of subjects cannot be taught
within a classical subject-based model.

~~~
TsiCClawOfLight
I had something like that in elementary school in Belgium and it was amazing.
I have never been taught so well since then, except for 1 case in University!

Many topics are much easier to understand (and generalise from, and memorise!)
if they are tackled from multiple angles, without regard for "subjects". We
would approach them with some math, some history, physics, biology, ecology -
whatever helped.

And since everything was well organized, lessons built upon the previous ones
and all prerequisites were introduced at the correct time. This even had the
advantage that we would remember more abstract math and formulae well, because
we knew where we had used it to learn interesting things! :)

Of course, that probably took a lot of work and dedication (1 teacher did all
of it for each school year), even more so for high school I suppose. But it
was worth it, and the lack of integration/connection is one of the biggest
problems I see with the current school system in Germany/Austria.

~~~
qayxc
The biggest problem in public schools is money above everything else. My
mother is a teacher and so I have to listen to her horror stories at least
once a week.

There's simply not enough teachers, run-down schools, outdated equipment,
unmotivated teachers some of whom spend more time "sick" at home than in
school and regular experiments with curricula teaching methods...

I never thought I'd become _that guy_ , but as of late I've come to realise
that the best teachers I had were indeed the "Neulehrer" \- people who, after
WW2 were assigned teaching jobs without formal pedagogical education due to
lack of personell back then.

These teachers knew their subjects, didn't give a crap about "advisories" from
the state's education board and taught based on decades of experience. Their
methods sometimes seemed oddly out of place and even archaic, but they were
effective ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
m4r35n357
We used to understand how to educate. The hippies broke all that. Education is
about learning skills, not "having fun".

~~~
emilfihlman
Agreed. While having fun can increase learning it's not a direct requirement
nor is having fun all the time beneficial to learning.

It's much more important that people feel like they have learned instead that
they feel like they are having fun learning.

~~~
falcor84
I would strongly disagree with that. From my experience, someone who feels
like they have learned would be proud of themselves for a while and then
usually go on and forget the learning while happy with their "success";
someone who is having fun learning will go on learning.

~~~
mymythisisthis
I think that intrinsic motivation is almost important. If a child shows an
interest in something that they should be encouraged to pursue it. For example
if a student in grade 8 says that they are interested in scuba diving, they
should be giving the opportunity to take a 2-3 week intensive 16hr a day boot
camp. A motivated kid can easily do 16hrs days. Such programs should be ready
to implement the moment a kid shows interests. Strike while the metal is hot.

I've seen bored kids in class, not understanding a lesson, and not caring.
They're doodling away, and interested in graffiti. If I could, I'd put such a
kid in a calligraphy boot-camp, 16hrs a day. Not only would they learn
something that they are interested in but, all learn to learn - and be better
in all subjects.

In Toronto some kids that are on verge of dropping out are transferred to a
special school that focuses on skate-board building, and the business around
selling skate-boards.
[http://oasisskateboardfactory.blogspot.com/](http://oasisskateboardfactory.blogspot.com/)
Its had some success.

------
Razengan
School should be like onboarding tutorials for a game.

You've just signed into the greatest MMORPG ever. This is planet Earth. You
chose the Human species. You were randomly spawned in this country, which is
here. You share this world with these other players and critters. Here's some
of the common technology we use, and the basics of how it works, made possible
by the players working in these professions. There are limited resources, for
now, but there are other worlds out there.

What would you like to do?

~~~
mattbee
If you ask my 7yo: Skip Tutorial. Become Super Saiyan.

~~~
Razengan
That's good! A perfectly reasonable ambition. Now let's figure out how to make
that happen. :)

~~~
mattbee
Give the lockdown a few more weeks, his hair is getting there ;)

------
tremguy
Finn here. Results have been negative on this so far, at least for students
before high school [1]. Most children at that stage aren't yet capable of
self-directed learning. Problem is compounded by the distractive effect of
digital equipment in class.

[1] [https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_digital-
based_cu...](https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_digital-
based_curriculum_impedes_learning_researcher_finds/10514984)

~~~
chongli
I thought Finland already had the best schools in the world? Had they not
heard the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”?

This sounds terrible. Not everything in life can be achieved purely by
intrinsic motivation. Human beings are a social species. We motivate each
other through laws, social norms, and economic incentives. Children, who don’t
know about any of those things, need direction lest they be caught totally
unprepared.

~~~
rgblambda
>> Had they not heard the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”?

I remember watching an interview with a Finnish teacher where they were asked
this very question. Their answer was something like "Being best in the world
doesn't mean we can't be better"

When you realise that Finland has little in the way of natural resources and
it's economy is very much tied to the skills of the population it makes a lot
of sense to be this focused on education.

~~~
chongli
Of course you can always be better. The question is whether you should flip
the table with a radical experiment when you’re already number one. You don’t
hear of many sports teams doing this. Businesses that try it risk a
shareholder revolt.

