Finland’s Latest Educational Move Will Produce a Generation of Entrepreneurs
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When I was at school we were forced to read. Not exercises. Books. Entire books. Not over months. Days. The ability to sit down and focus on a topic for hours is a skill that should not be forgotten.
From the OP:"...easily discoverable knowledge makes classic school subjects seem archaic, slow-paced and inapplicable to daily life."
No it doesn't. It makes them seem all the more important.
Yes, but unless you're in Finland, what this suggests is that you should move to Finland's model, not away from it. Finland has a 100% literacy rate.
> The ability to sit down and focus on a topic for hours is a skill that should not be forgotten.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with Finland's initiatives.
Finland wants to move towards skill-based rather than fact-based learning. They want students who know how to find and organize information rather than those who simply know facts. I'm saying that the oldschool skills of reading and remembering apparently useless facts is important. It gives you the necessary reading abilities to handle topics beyond highschool.
And can you experimentally control for this outside of your own particular students? In other words, can you say that there's no correlation between their ability and your teaching skill?
They are capable of understanding the topics. They have problems with sitting down and learning the topic through reading vast amounts of text. It is all well and good to have professors or search engines boil things down to bullet points for easy absorption, but some topics (law, literature, medicine, physics, religion, history) require the reading of original text. That text could be 100 years old and cover hundreds of pages. Understanding it sufficiently to discuss and debate with others means spending hours, days, doing nothing but reading. No cooperation, no building teams, just you and a book/screen. The students I see, products of modern highschools, lack that skill.
First of, you cannot nurture and educate a child if they spend eight hours a day in a horrendously underfunded inner city school and the rest of the day living in a poor dysfunctional household without any mentors and good role models.
From that article:
. kids don't go to school until age 7
. classes are 7:30-1pm with lot's of breaks
. lessons only 45mins long
. no standardized tests
. nobody can fail
. learning disability kids given custom lessonsI'm not sure that's a good thing.
And, yes, it's a good thing that a child cannot fail in their first few years of school. Nobody should ever brand a child trying to learn a failure, especially not literally in their first year of education.
Each child should be encouraged to learn and, if needed, helped to learn at their own pace. It is far more important that each child gets a strong foundation to learn and truly learns the basics needed to continue their education in their first years than that they get a ranking.
The best values are never cultivated through fear and threats. Just ask this of yourself: how many of you are here because you were told to get better at computers rather than you found cmputers fun and interesting?
I've never considered "fear" when I was told that I got to have more than x score to pass in next grade. That's just called expectations - and settings expectations on your growth as a human being is a positive thing.
Would you think it's acceptable that a 12 years old still can't read properly ? Because that's what happening in several countries now where we have removed any barrier to ensure kids have a certain level to progress on the education ladder.
We are talking about small children here. Specifically five to seven year old children being admitted to school in the Globe and mail article. Managing and setting expectations should be done age apropriately. Telling a seven year old that you are going to fail this grade unless you get so and so on an exam is far from appropriate and not a positive thing. It will most certainly instill fear and anxiety in a lot of small children.
> Would you think it's acceptable that a 12 years old still > can't read properly?
Don't be silly. It's hardly an appropriate comment in any case as litteracy in Finland is at 100% in age groups 15 and older.
> Because that's what happening in several countries now > where we have removed any barrier to ensure kids have a > certain level to progress on the education ladder.
Which countries are we discussing now?
Please list these countries.
Unless you have a better idea?
A failing grade is pretty useless to all parties involved unless it is used to assess and correct what the underlying problem is.
Now guess how much you contribute to the NSA's ability to prevent terrorism. (Hint: if you're unwilling, they'll extract the value from you anyways.)
No, that's not exactly what I am saying at all. Not just their "ability", their willingness is equally important. Even if you don't care about the outcome, the effort should be rewarded somehow. Because in real life you rarely get anything for nothing.
I said that was the message you were sending.
School should educate children, not sort children into winners and loosers.
It's true that Finnish spelling is very simple. The mapping of sounds to letters is quite regular, and much more so than in English. As an example, the word 'computer' is 'tietokone'. The pronunciation is [tietokone].
As a result, a "spelling bee" is a completely foreign concept in Finland. A Finnish spelling bee would go on for days.
The grammar of Finnish, on the other hand, is very irregular and full of exceptions. There are 16 noun cases. This makes Finnish laborious for English-speakers to learn.
The thing that makes Finnish alphabet very easy, is that every character corresponds to one sound (with the exception of "c", which can be either "k" or "s", but it isn't actually used in Finnish (it just exists for legacy and compatibility with Swedish)) and vice versa (with the exceptions of "w=v" and "å=o", but, again, they're not used in Finnish)
That is, a character will always sound the same, regardless of what is around it. There are no silent letters. No things like "ea -> ee" or "ph -> f" (if you write two different characters, you also pronounce two different sounds). No single vowels that randomly became long vowels (like English "ski -> skee" rather than "sky").
This sound, to my knowledge, doesn't exist in Standard German.
Maybe its because I'm an English speaker, but I don't understand what you mean by this statement - can you explain it?
13 -> thirteen -> three ten
14 -> fourteen -> four ten
15 -> fifteen -> five ten
11 -> eleven -> why not oneteen?
12 -> twelve -> why not twoteen?[0] "Cardinal Numerals: Old English from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective", http://bit.ly/1HhPzOB, page 161.
eleven -> one left
twelve -> two left
thirteen -> three and ten
fourteen -> four and ten
"All students learn at least two foreign languages, mainly English and obligatory Swedish, up to high school."
I don't know if the Finnish people I have known are exactly representative of the whole, but they were all bilingual (ie. parents spoke finnish and english or swedish at home).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_advantages_of_bilingu...
So it's a bit hard (in my opinion) to compare it to the US, let along North America, which consists of the following countries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de...). I guess you meant the US though :)