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.
The problem stems from trying to make a one-size-fits-all solution. You can never fit everyone into the same box, but people like simple solutions so we keep trying.
In the 2nd grade, I had a teacher who recognized potential in some of her students and separated them from the rest of the class to engage in self-directed learning. There were three of us chosen. I achieved grade 5 level proficiency in a number of subjects, while the smartest kid reached grade 7 in almost all of them. The following year, I changed schools, and spent the next 3 years re-doing the same boring shit over and over. My protestations were countered with "Well, if you've already done it, then it should be easy to do it again!" I learned my lesson, and my grades from that point on slipped from straight As to the minimum required to pass. I'd only apply myself when doing my own projects (mostly programming).
Like in anything else, if you want to see success, you need to hire teachers who can recognize and focus potential, and then give them the leeway to do so based on their good judgment.
I've seen test numbers where the top 5% group learn around 5-10x faster than the 50% group. The numbers hold for short term recall, long term recall, problem solving, critical and creative thinking, etc.
There is no way "school" can equalise this. There is no reason to keep stuffing everyone in one box.
I believe that in Japan, they deal with this disparity by asking the top students to help teach others in the class. It seems like an interesting approach in that teaching something well requires a much higher bar of understanding than doing well on a test, and it’s an excellent way to reinforce knowledge for the one doing the teaching.
So the top students get a more difficult challenge than just coasting along, and the other students benefit as well. And, of course, it promotes teamwork and solidarity.
I’m sure there are downsides too. Perhaps it could create tension between the “teacher’s pets” and the others?
My two best teachers (this was in Norway) took two very different approaches. One basically gave me a free reign to move ahead of the rest of the class and brought in more advanced text books for me, let me suggest my own homework etc. It took extra work for her, so I was lucky she put in the effort.
The other did what you suggest, and would have me go around and help others as soon as finished my own work. It was useful as a means to learn to understand what other people found difficult and why. It might not have helped that much with my understanding of the subject (maths) itself, but it helped with problem solving skills - having to come up with different ways of explaining things or approach a problem from different angles to whichever one I thought was most obvious when that "obvious" angle didn't work for someone else, and I think that was useful.
This is also how the school houses of old worked. You'd have all ages present since the population was so small, and the older kids would teach the younger kids while also doing their own studies.
This was a big help for socializing skills and empathy, since you were no longer segregated by age or sex and were exposed to many age groups with their own challenges throughout your early schooling.
That seems to be true, that teaching something solidifies one's understanding. Trouble is when top students are always teaching things that are well below their capability, rather than pushing onwards and upwards to more challenging levels. A balance between the two might be better, which is hard to do even in smaller classrooms.
Sticking the smart kids in one classroom or segregating their work means they don’t gain empathy for those who aren’t as gifted with academics. I’d argue the most important skill for a smart young person is empathy.
Well, knowing how to “play with the other children”.
Social skills that work with a variety of people are something you can’t get by studying alone.
That said, it doesn’t take years and years to learn.
On the other hand, there have been numerous studies conducted by educators regarding what to do with the “best and the brightest”. Above all, we have learned what NOT to do. What you don’t do is make too big a deal out of it. The label rapidly becomes their identity and they hold onto it for dear life. This translates into becoming highly risk averse. In time this means they get passed by the average students who don’t have such fear of “no longer being considered a genius” and happily take more risks.
We know a few points
* don’t talk about it much, it’s just “fun stuff” the kid is doing
* let him do it. Kids learn to hate school that makes them feel bored
* let them ease out or drop out if it without guilt or warnings about how their future will be average
Being “gifted” is one thing. Having the self drive to show something for it over a period of years is another.
And it is also a waste of resources. The top slice of population can do amazing things if given resources and time. Why waste that? It's the most crucial resource we have!
I don't consider it a waste of resources. It will help them develop their leadership and communication skills. This will be essential if they want to motivate a team of people to achieve something later in life.
A curious kid can pace themselves along with a the rest just fine. Are the topics taught too long for your talent? Then dig deeper in each. Say, you're learning about magnetism in physics class but you learn the requirements in half the time allocated. Then textbooks usually contain small print optional advanced topics or references, you can read additional stuff online maybe ask the teacher for further direction. Any topic has almost vast depth with specialists spending their career studying just a tiny section of it. You can never exhaust a topic. Don't just skip ahead to the next lesson as that will make things boring but engage each more deeply.
The reason to stuff everyone in one box is socialization. A group of students subjected to shared experiences will develop community and solidarity easier than every individual student bouncing in their own special way in the system.
It has even been observed that people can bond over a shared meal better than if everyone eats their own different food.
Overall a huge huge part of school is about socializing, with fellow students or against fellow students, obeying and rebelling against teachers, being honest or cheating to copy your homework, the dynamics of bullying and protecting from bullies, snitching on others or lying to protect minor wrongdoers, feeling guilt when you made the wrong decision, feeling proud for the right decision, discovering the difference of rules and morals, of friendship and togetherness and betrayal and loyalty, of acting tough or showing compassion, of romance and heartbreak, etc. So many lessons that aren't taught by teachers explicitly or asked on a test. But these add up to a stable individual later on who can draw from a rich well of experiences for later reference, even in adulthood. You can do a lot of low risk experimentation at that age. If people become atomized, dropped into a class full of almost strangers in each subject, there is no way to develop group dynamics of the above sort. Maybe you can do some of it with your sports team but you spend much less time with them than with a shared class.
>A curious kid can pace themselves along with a the rest just fine. Are the topics taught too long for your talent? Then dig deeper in each.
This is not as practical as one would hope, because all of the assigned work and hours of lecturing would still be repetitive and boring. Can a smart kid stop doing times tables on problem 5 and do calculus for the rest of the worksheet? Can a smart kid decline to show up to class if they already know what will be covered? No, and that's why smart kids think school is too slow.
Admitted that I wasn't an outlier-level smart kid (so often top of class but not top of school), when I was done understanding the requirements, I could always find a way to study things from different angles, think about the why's, how to derive the formula we had to memorize, why the on-paper division method works where we just had to memorize the steps, etc.
Now if someone is a real outlier in IQ, then maybe these things are still too easy, but you can't design the system for the 1% smartest. They have to go to special schools really.
But anyways, schools are already tiered somewhat at least in Hungary. You get admitted based on centralized test scores, so your peers are roughly similar.
> The reason to stuff everyone in one box is socialization.
Also not going so well for the top 5%. They develop much better if they are not stuffed in the same prison every day as the rest of the population. I'd guess the same would be true for the the corresponding slower slice, but I have seen no studies to that effect.
I think there was a study on this highlighted here on hn recently, but my google-fu is too weak.
Well I don't know how it is in the US but in Hungary, secondary schools (some of which start at age 10, some at 12, some at 14 - before that is primary school) use centralized admission exam scores and compete for smart kids or artsy ones, some are geared for trades or tourism and gastronomy etc.
You only have to endure 4, 6 or 8 years among the general population of your neighborhood, but at least that exposes people to some socialization with the different "classes". I'm doing a PhD now, but made good friends with people who now do blue collar jobs which makes the working class less of an "other" in my eye, compared if I had been to elite high brow schools the whole time.
There are also practical reasons to stuff everyone in one box.
With class sizes steadily growing, teachers are often stretched thin - from speaking with a few friends who happen to be teachers, they also often get lots of well-intentioned advice on pedagogy. Very little of it is actionable, especially when you're already overburdened and have little time to rigorously investigate further, some of it comes with thinly-veiled edtech pitches ("this shiny new tool will solve all your problems for every kid!"), and yet other parts are utter nonsense from helicopter parents who will insist that you're teaching their kid incorrectly no matter what you do.
As a result, it's a lot easier if you can simply teach everyone to the same template - if that works for 90% of kids, that's arguably better than catering to the other 10%, especially if half of that 10% is comfortable with self-directed learning. Plus you can point to standards to argue that you're just doing your job, which is much more straightforward than defending your profession / methods and their value to every last person who believes something random they found off the internet or a vague feeling about how best to educate over those with actual practical and theoretical expertise in the field.
I remember observing a 2nd grade classroom (when I was considering being a teacher) and seeing the teacher yell at a kid for going to fast in a practice test, same thing happened to me in 2nd grade. In middle school if I finished in-class work early, I would pull out a book or two, which might be tough to put down when the teacher moved to the next topic. So I think it's pretty common for students going too fast to butt heads with teachers (fortunately most of my teachers liked me for other reasons, which meant the butt-ing head moments did not build and tensions got dispersed)
That being said, the recommendation I heard when I was studying education was to offer enrichment activities. Which allows smart kids to do their own thing without going in front of the rest of the class in the normal material (so that you do not need full-on tracking and class separation). I generally like that recommendation, although it is not a cure-all. I may be biased since this fit my learning style well well since my academic behavior was chronically inconsistent at times (on-set of mental illness), and the enrichment activities often counted for extra credit which helped me make up for times when I was underperforming.
More generally I think letting smart kids build up a cushion of extra credit takes the edge off of the "always-need-to-be-perfect" pressure smart kids often feel.
> The reason to stuff everyone in one box is socialization. A group of students subjected to shared experiences will develop community and solidarity easier than every individual student bouncing in their own special way in the system.
Curious to see what the retention rate for school friends are.
Not sure how that's relevant to my point. You still learned to act in a group and soaked up experiences of various emotions, dilemmas, love, hate, embarrassment, courage etc. Enduring the pointless, the mundane and boring stuff and complaining about it or occasionally rebelling against it is how you bond with others. At least that's how we do it in Eastern Europe.
TAG were people that planned on doing good in school, generally focused better. Significant overlap with Honors.
Honors seemed to sacrifice a life for prestige (tons of Advanced Placement classes) and it didn't seem to really make a practical difference, unless going to college at all is a practical difference to you, everyone went to state schools, maybe one went to Ivy League.
The main distinction was that it was a bad school district, non-designated students had almost no expectations, which is why there was a separation at all. The "good schools" in the bad district had Tag and Honors programs.
I think it created some solidarity, where philisters would have ostracized the people making an attempt at coursework.
The general concept can work in better school districts though.
There is, but it involves identifying the high achievers and putting them on a different track. Without too much thought, this sounds great. Except in real life, you end up with kids who are late-bloomers stuck in the "average" track. Or poor kids who didn't learn to read until kindergarten stuck in the "remedial" track for life.
As a society (in the US), we haven't been willing or able to solve those problems. The closest we've come is offering a few "gifted" courses to those high achievers (or forcing parents to pay for a private education). But, at the primary school level, that's generally a few hours/week of extra instruction. And at the secondary school level, it's AP/IB courses, but we've pushed the "college for all" narrative so hard that those are now watered-down crap at a lot of schools.
Sadly, these are aggregates of unpublished results, from multiple sources I've talked to over the years.
Last year of "gymnasium" (grade 12), right before I started my university masters program: I was travelling most of the year and only returned to school two months before graduation. I spent less than two months, on my own, reading up on a year's worth of what amounts to a specialised "science focused high school" program. Then testing through, taking all tests and assignments for a year, and got the top result from both schools in the city. 1000+ students graduating that year.
This was pretty insane, so I started digging. How was it possible to score so well after so little time, studying alone, when everyone else had 10 months of class. I'm not 200 IQ with eidetic memory.
So I started talking with teachers and professors I came in contact with. Very few actually had data available, but those who had... Wow!
Regardless of whether it's young children, high school, or university students the numbers were similar.
The top few are simply so much faster than the rest. I'm absolutely sure that good pedagogical methods have a huge effect on the students' learning. But even the best methods and tutors can't make up the difference.
The "5%", specifically, comes from two sources. A physics teacher and a math professor. They were both very interested in pedagogical methods and were experimenting and keeping detailed data on every student they had taught, over decades. Scoring them on a wide variety of tests and situations. Both had similar numbers, falling around 5-10x between the top 5% and the median.
My impression is that this is simply an issue that most societies don't want to know or deal with. It certainly is not hard to test for. Specifically, the physics teacher mentioned above told me that the municipal head of schools had threatened to fire him when he tried to discuss the data to improve the teaching for high capacity students.
I'd like the link as well. Good luck finding anything related to this on Google or Google Scholar. At this point, I'd have more luck starting from the IQ page on Wikipedia.
> "Well, if you've already done it, then it should be easy to do it again!"
The teachers in my son's school (6-12 year olds) solve this by either giving them more difficult exercises, or letting them help the kids that don't grasp it yet.
The latter is really interesting because helping others is a lesson on its own.
German here, we also have our fair share of experimentation on children in schools..
From what I have learned while reading about pedagocial reforms, most arguments don't really treat the student body as a diverse set of people, rather they pretend that students are all alike and then present a way of learning that a subset of the students strive with.
This is not about the (long debunke) myth that some people would be visual learners and some would learn better with their sense of smell. No.
What I mean is, some people fare better with lecture-style classroom presentations, some better with individual experimentation. All kids need guidance.
It seems that the reforms that are made are usually a certain pedagocial-model teaming up with monetary or economic interests (cutting costs in education). So in our schools, we saw that Physics teachers were on short supply (they rather earned better money outside of schools). So they mixed all Science subjects in middle school and named it "Natural Phenomena". As a result, the physics is taught by biology teachers who sometimes prepared their lessons with the math teachers of the school because it wasn't their core strength...
French living in Germany and married to a primary school teacher here.
Theoretically,differentiated learning is what teachers should use.
But as you observed, and like in many other countries such as France, reforms supposedly pedagogical are mostly decided based on economic interests.
On the field, teachers are understaffed and unable to apply the program.
I think pretty much everyone agrees with you on that, I haven't seen anyone advocate that students _should_ be treated all alike. It's just that providing individual guidance requires more teachers and thus more money...
And then someone comes in and suggests that we don't need so many new teachers if we "use technology" to help fill the need, like some learning app could be the silver bullet that revolutionizes teaching. Maybe it will some day, but seeing what we've had so far I'm not exactly holding my breath waiting to see that happen.
In Germany the zeitgeist is: equal opportunity = treating all students alike (even ones with special needs). If you are arguing for more individual and specialized education, you are widely considered anti-social and it is suggested that your intend is to build / maintain a small (educational) elite that aspires to enslave all others...
Remember that there is no German school system. Education is subject of state (Länder) law. So there are quite some differences between different parts of Germany. Traditionally, some 30-40 years back you were supposed to know whether you go to university or not at the age of ten.
However, this is no longer really the case. Many prepare for university in theory, but never go there.
"[...] phenomenon-based learning requires students have strong self-discipline and initiative. They also require students to be independent, focused and flexible."
I'm not a teacher nor do I have children, so I'm mostly ignorant about this topic. But reading this made me think, if we shouldn't but maybe much more focus on qualities like being independent, focused and flexible early on instead of strictly following subjects as measured by Pisa tests? Given just how hard it is to focus and not procrastinate in today digital world, even for adults.
I'm not sold on pure Phenomenal Education as I understand it. But my hunch is, that a mix could work quite well. Spent part of the time on focused bottom up learning on a single topic, and another in a more exploratory top down way.
Sometimes people and institutions who say "I am going to focus on nice-sounding nebulous goals instead of this measurable stuff" achieve neither. I'd like to keep some measurable goals in school system.
But maybe we could have both. Self-directed learning, and then participating in Pisa tests. With no bad consequences for the student if they utterly fail because they studied something else. But to have some feedback like "while you congratulate yourself on this and that, literacy in your country is the worst in the world".
I think I was/am one of the students that would have benefited from more cross-pollination of topics and a mix between self direction and directions.
I never enjoyed math for its own sake when I was in school and my grades where pretty mediocre, later I had the same with algorithms & data structures.
On their own, how they are often presented in books and platforms like hacker rank, I find them rather boring and solving challanges just with a correct and optimal solution in mind is not very appealing to me. But as soon as I'm in a work context, or when I dabbled in computational biology or digital signal processing for music on the side I can completely lose the sense of time while digging into whatever is necessary to get done what I want to do.
So I think there a ways to get from nebulous goals and activities into measurable impacts.
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.
>> 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.
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.
But even the best education system we have in the world could well be orders of magnitude worse than some other system that's never been realized before.
It's also possible (I don't know - i'm just admitting the possibility) that a system that focuses on teaches young children self-motivation, goal-formation, critical-thinking, personal-responsibility at the expense of traditional academic knowledge could produce adults that are vastly more capable while at the same time leaving kids far behind on traditional academic abilities until they get older and catch up. _If that were the case_, measuring outcomes by something like a standardized test after a 4 year period would show all of the drawbacks and none of the benefits.
young children self-motivation, goal-formation, critical-thinking, personal-responsibility at the expense of traditional academic knowledge
But do those things really require decades of exclusive instruction to form? Or are they mostly something you pick up on the way, as part of your study habits?
If a child reaches adulthood without learning any reading, writing, or arithmetic then it is a terrible tragedy. As a mature student in my mid 30s studying math in university I would not recommend this life to anyone. I’ve lost the better part of two decades of my best working years for building wealth. I’m going to need to do extremely well after graduation if I ever hope to retire.
>Had they not heard the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”?
Not only that, but the current administration may have vastly overestimated their own influence in the previously great PISA results. Putting all their “smarts” into overhauling the system to improve it might not do anything of the sort.
>>Had they not heard the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”?
My favourite riposte to the latest directive from the Education Dept was by a fellow teacher who said he always knew when change was coming: it would happen just when he had finally worked out how to implement the present policies.
I think this is at odds with how they achieved that result to begin with. To become the best you have to be willing to experiment. It makes sense to keep iterating the process so long as you continue the majority of good practices and return to a previous iteration if it doesn't work out.
You can also become the best accidentally, by some right things happening that you don't even correctly recognize and attribute. Then you can ruin that with experimenting.
Digital equipment was never designed with teaching in mind.
Take a typical Android installation for an example.
- There is no tutorial mode for a true newcomer.
- There is no central naming scheme - every application is an island.
- Most of the applications are hostile and present you with ads.
- Most of the applications won't let you study them.
It resembles a street market more than a safe learning environment.
Thanks for sharing that article. Would you happen to have other recent articles that describe the results after 3 years of the new approach? [Even if you google search for me in Finnish and share the top-five relevant results, this would be super helpful for me. I can use google translate after that.]
I agree with you that primary and middle school students are too young to be self-directed, but that doesn't necessarily contradict the no-subjects approach. The phenomenon-based learning can still be led by a teacher.
Also as far as technology being distracting, that doesn't surprise me much. I think some very careful selection of the apps and tools is needed, but it can totally be done (e.g. offline or local installation of web apps and tools specific to learning and not open access to the internet or game-like apps).
Is there a separation in Finland between public school (where those programs are applied) and private school (which do what they want)?
And if so, do the ministers and government officials who decided on that send their kids to public schools? (not implying any scheme, just curious if they eat their own dogfood)
Private schools are rather rare, and most of them follow the national curriculum. I don't think their small existence affects policy changes like this much at all.
There really are not "private" schools in Finland (not in comprehensive school nor in upper secondary). They must all follow the same teaching requirements that public schools offer and they get government funding. And you don't get in with money but via application.
So they are more like schools that are run by private individuals.
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.
~50 years ago, Buckminster Fuller called this the ‘World Game’. Its objective:
Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.
If your 7yo really likes DBZ and wants to become Super Saiyan, isn't this a good moment to help teach your kid that it took Goku years of training before he could do that? Get him started on workout routines, just like young Goku in the original DB.
This. My son recently discovered Saitama, aka One Punch Man. Now he is crazy about doing the One Punch Man workout - 100 situps, pushups, pullups, etc, etc and running 10km per day. He has actually achieved the 100 situps milestone, still a ways to go on the others. And he insists I do it with him, which is a bonus.
Take an inspiration from 'existing' ones - extremely hard and focused work on your goals, no excuses, no slacking. As with most things in real world, you need some talent/genes to start with but that alone won't get you there
Slightly related, why do kids have so less influence in what they are being taught?
Because they don't know what they should learn to become a wagie at FAANG?
Help me understand why parents try to push the same life they had on their kids.
It seems fairly hypocritical to want better life for your kids while forcing them into an education path to a 9-7 job and never doing anything about the system.
Let me be the one risking your ire and criticize your and GP viewpoints...
Let me start off by asking if either yourself or GP have kids of your own, and just mention for a short moment, talking about how hypocritical parents are, while judging them while not having kids of your own, well...
The fact is, kids take up a lot of your time, and I mean really a lot. No you are not prepared for how much of your time kids take up. While you decided to have kids, you still have hopes and ambitions of your own, and would still like to be the master of how you spend your own time to some degree.
So in order for sanity to prevail, and for parents to be able to work a job and not have to look after their kids the whole time, society created the schooling system. This systems main purpose is to take care of the children while the parents can earn an income, and the secondary purpose is to provide an education while looking after the kids.
Can this system be optimised? Sure. But who has time? Certainly not the parents.
And the points I am making above, are being realised by a hell of a lot of parents trying to work from home while having to home school the kids at the same time...
What people have been doing recently is radically different from what has been called “home schooling” for many years. Home schooling is where parents provide their children with the education, whereas what’s going on in many places now is a form of distance learning, where the educator is elsewhere; in this instance, the parents are taking the role of enforcer.
> Let me start off by asking if either yourself or GP have kids of your own, and just mention for a short moment, talking about how hypocritical parents are, while judging them while not having kids of your own, well...
I am well aware of how much effort it takes to raise a kid and I wish I hadn't existed myself because I don't see why my parents would think it was a wise decision. You don't need to have kids to understand that...that would be stupid.
Your other statements are too broad to answer correctly. There is not enough data, only anecdotes. So I would rather not.
Need more funds to put into research on parenting and stats related to parents.
What is to prove that parents are not spending their time on useless things? Do you have stats backing that they are efficiently using their time because I couldn't find for either? Only that their social media usage is approximately 20% of their working day but that is not useful.
Millennial parents are in bigger debt than the older generation and it's from credit cards but how is that useful considering Millennials had less chance of earning more than their parents?
Millennial spending on temporary experiences is way more even when they are jobless but is that a systematic problem resulting from depression/other mental health problems? Was the previous generation better? Maybe not. Did they do a better job at parenting? I don't know. There is no valid statistical data. Millennials leech off from their parents more, are more dependent so maybe they did do poor job at parenting or the economy is more fucked.
> Can this system be optimised? Sure. But who has time? Certainly not the parents
Why does it need to be parents?
You start putting in effort to get into college as soon as you hit middle school...why not start putting in effort to change the system as soon as you hit an age where you realise you want kids? Even if you don't, what's the problem with wanting everyone else's kids to live better?
Does everyone in the world not have enough time now?
One of the issues I have with todays world is this attitude most have to stopping education once you hit ~21 for the majority of people.
I genuinely believe the world would be a better place if we had as much support for people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, to go back into education as we do for 18-21 year olds going to university.
I didn't have the opportunity to go to university at 18 for a number of reasons (some fault of my own and some not) and would love to go now but it just isn't realistic without negatively impacting my life (mostly financially) for a few years.
Sure you can argue "if you really wanted to do it you would" and that is a fair point but I don't feel the struggle should be so high. Why can't we make it easier for someone in their 30s or 40s, for example, to get a degree and change the direction of their life? So many people are where they are now and cannot change that because the start of their life was disadvantaged through no fault of their own. Now they are adults, give them the chance to be more.
I know I know I am being idealistic but I just hate seeing people with so much potential going to waste because they lost some geographic/privilege lottery at birth.
While I have questions regarding things like UBI I do hope that with automation changing how we work that we invest more in education for older people as well.
> Sure you can argue "if you really wanted to do it you would" and that is a fair point but I don't feel the struggle should be so high. Why can't we make it easier for someone in their 30s or 40s, for example, to get a degree and change the direction of their life? So many people are where they are now and cannot change that because the start of their life was disadvantaged through no fault of their own. Now they are adults, give them the chance to be more.
in your opinion, what exactly makes it harder for an older person to go back and get a degree? AFAIK, all the same loans are available to older folks. if someone in their forties were actually willing to live like a college kid for four years, it seems like they would at least be on the same financial footing as kids that don't get support from their parents. is it that the opportunity cost is higher, since they have at least some earning potential already?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
As someone who used to live in Finland, their "success" is mostly driven by an excellent student:teacher ratio and a phenomenal social services system. Any adult who is struggling through a crisis will be helped by a system that 1) doesn't stigmatize 2) is able to retain talent (because they probably only make 10% less than a software engineer so you have many more capable people interested in it). Conversely, education in America fails for people in low socio-economic conditions primarily because of a lack of these two, not because Finland's found a magical/effective way of teaching an average 10-year-old kid.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)_/¯
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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/ Its had some success.
In my experience, having fun while learning really takes away from learning. It slows down and hinders progress and becomes obnoxious after a while.
The target of comprehensive school and upper secondary is to teach people as much about different things as possible, have them learn social interaction and a small amount of how to learn and how to adapt information. They will likely not learn as much and as varied information ever again.
The target of a university education is to have people learn how to learn, do research and apply that information, and drill into a single field and learn about that field and make progress in that field.
Mixing "fun" into this is counter productive for the most part.
[1] https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_digital-based_cu...