Finland to abandon school subjects in favour of phenomenon-based learning (2016)
curiousmindmagazine.com
curiousmindmagazine.com
[1] https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_digital-based_cu...
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...
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.
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.
However, this is no longer really the case. Many prepare for university in theory, but never go there.
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)
So they are more like schools that are run by private individuals.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"[...] 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.
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 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.
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.
There is no way "school" can equalise this. There is no reason to keep stuffing everyone in one box.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Is it worth spending 1h of the day learning new things then 7h teaching others? I say that is wasteful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The first few paragraphs are fun / scary.
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.
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.
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.
Curious to see what the retention rate for school friends are.
Normal
Talented and Gifted
and Honors
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.
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.
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.
the montessori method comes to mind as an approach that potentially enables self directed learning.
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).
I wonder if Finland evaluated that.
I saw one school system where the students vote on everything. It wasn't Montessori but something else I can't remember the name of.
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?
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.
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?
Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.
> without ecological offense
I'm glad that clause is explicitly included.
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 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...
We have been kids.
> Can this system be optimised? Sure. But who has time? Certainly not the parents.
Then society needs to be optimized for parents too.
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?
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
Would not general management or general nutrition be a far more interesting, useful and universally applicable skill set?
Why would this utilitarian argument that doesn't apply to the current curriculum have to apply to the new one?
If I were to have known what the world had to offer, and how important subjects were I would have made more of my education.
It's really hard when you're young to even get a sense for how powerful knowledge can be.
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...
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.
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.
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.
We used to lead in education, with these changes we no longer do.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)_/¯
My feeling is that this can work great for great and curious students, and not so much otherwise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The idea is not for every family.
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?
Which schools? Good/bad? Most notable effects?
It's much more important that people feel like they have learned instead that they feel like they are having fun learning.
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.
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.