I would approach this book very, very sceptically.
You might find it interesting to read and comment on the actual article then. It dates the beginning of the recent reform of Poland's education system to 1997, just one year before you graduated, so it may be that a lot has changed since your time.
I think that thinking is not something that can be taught, more that it's something that can be encouraged to be learned. In fact, I think overbearing instruction can encourage kids that they don't need to think for themselves. They will be provided the answer, and if they come to a different conclusion, the person with more authority is right.
I remember having a math test graded incorrectly. I knew I was right, I challenged the teacher. I was told that it was still wrong, but the teacher couldn't explain why, the teacher didn't really understand what they were teaching. I brought it home to my parents who also agreed that I was right, but the test wasn't worth enough to get into a fight over.
That experience was one that, if it were repeated, would have hurt my willingness to think critically.
Then I went to college. Most of the people praised their high schools. I really felt that my school must have been at the bottom of the heap. As soon as the first set of grades started coming out, I realized how much better prepared I was than everyone else. The people pushed through "Rah Rah, aren't we great!" factories lacked critical thinking. But their schools did have great basketball teams and marching bands.
When someone pitches how awesome their educational was, I wonder where their critical thinking is.
[Note -- those were two different people in two different conversations.]
E.D. Hirsch [1] has written a lot about needing to know content in order to properly reason. Some of this goes by classical education, elsewhere it's cultural literacy [2].
Poland has been through a lot of BS. There was constant government propaganda for generations and you never knew who you could trust, so people learned to use their brains to keep themselves safe. Until communism fell, it was a poor country with shortages of pretty much everything, so people had to learn to fix and tinker with things, because they couldn't go out to buy new ones. Kids played differently than they do in the US, with little in the way of toys and lots of imagination and in mixed age groups.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the differences are cultural, and maybe that hardship breeds more critical thought than plenty. I'm not advocating hardship by any means, but I think it's very important to teach kids to play creatively and hopefully, this will carry on through school. It's disingenuous to say that school reform and funding are responsible for critical thought.
For example, when I was at school 20 years ago, we had to memorise formulas for common thing ( speed = distance over time, and similar). Apparently the kids are given the formulas in exams now. There doesn't appear to be such a thing as a "fail" these days, just a "foundation level pass".
As such, I can see where the UK is failing, and see positive things mentioned about Poland in the article.
There is (imho) nothing of value in memorizing simple formulas, and everything in the value of knowing how and when to apply those formulas, or where to Google for them.
In my highschool physics exam, about 2/3rds was of questions based on memorised formulae. For example, the bouncing ball problem, with a series of questions to tease out our application of calculus, memorisation of compression rules and so on.
Then comes the final question. I remember it well because at first, I did not know which formula to apply. Water wells into a pool at rate X per hour, falls over a waterfall into a second pool below, which drains at rate Y per hour. When it falls over the edge of the waterfall, the water is at temperature A; at the start of the problem the temperature in the bottom pool is C.
After an hour, what will the temperature in the second pool be?
To solve this problem you actually need to consider the thermic effect of water falling. You need to build a single equation to accounts for acceleration due to gravity and the beginning temperatures of each pool. Then you need some calculus to transform it into an equation that will spit out the final numerical answer.
The only reason I was able to attempt and solve this problem was because I had memorised the equations. There simply would not have been enough time to try to reverse-engineer a bunch of anonymous letters in-flight.
Similarly, when I studied law, all exams were open-book. This is because, as a law professor told me, "it lets us ask harder questions". There's simply no way to synthesise thousands of pages of material in an exam setting. Either you learnt it beforehand, including a whole bunch of flat out memorisation of details of cases, or you didn't. Having your casebooks for reference is useful, but only to check a detail or reuse a quote.
I suspect you got this question wrong.
I am currently teaching a bunch of very bright graduate students from a number of countries. On the most recent midterm, students from countries that force people to learn to compute and learn some formulas finished in an hour, while US students and some others took two. US students in particular were caught up on figuring out the solution to x+y+z=1, x=y+z, y=4z. Just impossible.
US students in my class are wasting time on mechanical calculations rather than understanding the meanings of the theorems they illustrate, because they have weak computational skills. I can't write problems that are computationally easy enough. They are unable to apply their much-vaunted "creativity" and "critical thinking" because even once they Google a formula they can't carry out meaningful work with it.
I can Google how to use a hammer and a table saw, but I'll produce a crappier table than the person who has so much practice she can use them without thinking. That person can think about the final design while I think about not hitting my thumb or slicing off a digit. The argument about knowing how and when to apply formulas misses the fact that practice in applying those formulas is essential to competence.
Instead of threading my point, I have quoted you and hived it off as a separate reply.
I don't see a problem with that. Memorizing formula is as useful as memorizing anything else, it's not very useful and not a measure of knowledge. Knowing how to use the formula, how to manipulate them, are what they are supposed to be being taught.
The best is to give the students a cheat sheet with a lot formulas, but not a reminder in each exercise of which formula is useful in that exercise. In that case they have to think about which one to use.
This is the way I've seen it done, the same way you give chemistry students a periodic table.
We don't want people to learn formulae. We don't particularly need people to do mental arithmetic. We want people to understand problem solving and gathering information and relationships between different bits of the formula.
See also the viral video "meaning of MPH" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhm7-LEBznk)
There's some unpleasant "HURR DURR GURLS ARE STOOPID" in some videos (and don't for the love of god read the comments) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br0OsGu9B2o)
I'd say that you have to look at particular education levels and types of studies to get a good understanding on what's good and bad in PL education system.
The conclusions I'd draw (and mind you, this is knowledge from ~15-20 years ago, and it is my knowledge and my opinions):
* Polish high school students indeed know more and are better at problem solving than most US high school students, * that said, there are high schools (public!) in the US that offer university-level courses and are excellent, * and university-level education seems to be much better in the US, * the US approach of "if the answer has one too many significant digit, it is wrong and you get zero points" is virtually unknown in Poland and comes as a shock to Polish students, who are often taught that "it is the approach that counts". I find the US approach much more realistic: it doesn't matter how you "approached" the design of a bridge, if the bridge collapsed. * French schools are quite similar to Polish ones, but: * mathematics taught at French technical universities (the best ones) is WAY WAY WAY above what a Polish high-school graduate would expect,
My main point is that it is very difficult to compare educational systems and draw meaningful conclusions. Dealing with society-wide aggregates doesn't tell you much about the outliers: best schools, best students, specific curriculums, or specific sciences.
My secondary point is that based on my experience I wouldn't say the Polish system is better than any other. And I don't see any sweeping changes that would improve the situation in recent years (the reshuffling of schools and age groups doesn't do much in my opinion).
My problem with this all-or-nothing approach to grading, you aren't designing a bridge in a 2 hour exam with a graphing calculator and pencil and 3 sheets of scratch paper. These aren't representative of real world situations, engineering rarely operates under that sort of time crunch. Apollo 13 is an exception, but by that point it isn't novices but experts doing the work, experts who'd studied the physics and math for years, if not decades. This approach is used to weed out students from programs that admit too many to their freshman classes. They should reduce their class size if this is so important. Many upper-level undergraduate courses, and a lot of graduate courses, don't even expect the sort of time-crunched, mental feats expected from freshman level calculus and physics students.
I'm curious how you compare students in different educational systems. Like what is "high school" and "university" in Poland. I ask, because every time I read something about the American education system I have quite some trouble assessing the statements because of the foreign categorizations.
For example "school" in Germany comprises the first 12 or 13 years of education, with the first change of school happening after 4 or 6 years in primary school (with school starting at the age of 6). The following 13th till 18th year of education is held at a "university" where you earn a Bachelor and a Master degree. A PHD would be 3 to 5 further years in university.
I've pieced together that the American Bachelor seems to be more broad than the German one. My Bachelor degree was in Mathematics and it did not contain some mandatory stuff in humanities for example. Yet it seems we learned that stuff in the first 12 (/13) years already and thus the German Bachelor starts later than the American one? But that would also mean that German students would spend more time overall in education (the current average (of people with higher education) might be about 18 years) and I also find that implausible.
Basically I'm asking: Does someone know of a good comparative introduction to the American education system?
I agree that our higher education is doing something right. The problem is what comes before that. In France, to have an engineering degree (equivalent of a MSc) from a top school, you go through:
- High school, where the quality of education and the technical level is very low IMO.
- CPGE. This is a French specificity, two years dedicated to preparing competitive exams. Basically, you only study maths and physics in the abstract there. This is the reason why our math level is so high compared to other countries. But the math we study is not the most useful: lots, lots of analysis, a decent amount of algebra, almost no statistics and nothing discovered since the end of the XIXth century (exit Turing, exit Gödel...).
- Only after that do you study at a "Grande École" for three years... But you have to catch up things like project management and so on so real technical education is limited.
In the end, we produce generalists that are often good at everything but very good at nothing. Those of use who want to understand a domain in depth often go study abroad.
This is what I did, I went to the UK to study distributed computing. I had students from all over the world in my class and I was impressed by those from Poland. I don't know how you do it, they may not have not know the most on arrival but they were certainly learning the fastest (along with student from Czech Republic).
1) it's verifiable
2) it's probably more about having good average than having some students be super-smart
3) it says more about PISA than Poland
The article believes making more children have more shit on their head is the way to go...
No, seriously, that is not "learning to think" that is learning formulas and other random shit that you will never use on your life with few exceptions.
Learning to think is when you allow kids to learn on their own, what they are curious about, when curiosity drives learning, THEN people learn to think, because they have to.
When you just hammer random facts on someone head, you just fill that someone head with random facts... And the only need for that, is to hammer those random facts on someone else head.
"How to think" shouldn't interfere with thinking for themselves.
Poland is the number one USA ally, offset against the EU, and, especially, Russia, the evil bad guy in this current cold war.
[0] http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/ec...