Article on the No. 1 country in educating their children, OH SO DIFFERENT

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High-school students here rarely get more than a half-hour of homework
a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no
valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted. There is
little standardized testing, few parents agonize over college and kids
don't start school until age 7.

Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the
smartest in the world.

online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.html

I have been a proponent that we push our children out of their child hood. We create artificial fear in them that paralyzes them and stops them from succeeding. This is proof that homework is not a teaching tool, that kids are just that, kids and should not be punished for being a kid, exhibiting kid behavior, and that the best fix for our kid's educational needs is to tear down the top heavy administrative layers and put the control back in the classroom to the teacher and the parent! But there is the crux, they have 30 applicants for each teaching position so that they recruit the best. Here stateside we are so teacher short (due to the administration's rule making and heavy handed treatment of staff) that we just need live bodies to fill space. Our higher education institutions continue to churn out mediocre prepared "teachers". They get to practice on our kids and the stats tell us that they either wash out in the next 2 - 3 years or stick if out but do not hit a groove of teaching ability until 6 - 7 years on the job. That means how many kids were not getting an education while the teacher learned how to be a teacher? We have to reform our educational system and it is quite apparant that the educational field is not willing to create that change so it is up to usparents who are going to have to get it done. So let's roll up our sleeves and get going!

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I had hoped for some input from the frustrated parents out there concerning education in Finland as opposed to that we are currently experiencing in the U.S. There can be no doubt that the Finnish system works much better than ours, so I laid out some clues for all of you to find out why this is so in my comment dated May 12. Go back to the original question posed by fedup52 on March 4. Then ask yourself " Can we do this in our country?" And why not? There are several obvious answers that I can think of, but I want to hear from you, our members. Will somebody please tell me what you think?

I don't believe that the common Finnish teaching methods would work with the general populace in the United States. We have so much more diversity here -- kids coming to school with very different issues and challenges. (The poster who mentioned the very low crime rate and low rate of violence was totally correct -- the Finnish tolerate a lot less violence than we do in the U.S.) Something else to think about is that the Finnish language is much "easier" to read than English -- each letter has only one sound while I think that we have at least 43 sounds represented by 26 letters in the written English language. While there are cases of dyslexia etc. in Finnish schools -- the related issues are handled much better than here in the U.S. because the teachers are better educated about how to deal with learning differences than U.S. teachers. Very few U.S. teachers are taught anything worthwhile about learning differences. (I've found that even some of the better teachers are ill-informed about issues related to dyslexia, auditory processing, etc. -- and have no incentive to become informed because they're too darn busy having to deal with lack of support as well as standarised testing nonsense...)

My father has been a teacher all his life. He has taught in South Africa, England and the US in Mass.at Groton and in Ca. at the community colleges. Guess what! He says teaching is one of the hardest jobs to do properly and if you don't pay enough ( and for a full year not just 9 months) you don't get very good teachers! Plus all teachers would have to be properly evaluated on their teaching skills. Also the school year is way too short with too many vacations. The school hours are way too short ( he went to school from 8am until 4pm and half days on Saturdays,he only had a month off in the summer and a month off in the winter) Most of our teaching methods are weak, and he always said I never had enough proper homework and that most of what I had to do was busy work and did not help me to understand what I was supposed to learn! I could go on and on! Probably that's why I am a nurse not a teacher!

Interesting!
I met quite a few Turks in Tampere too.

It is all very simple and you can do it yourself! 1) Read the article from the Wall Street Journal, available on this site. 2) Go to Google and enter Education and training in Finland. Push Search. You will find a 7 page article on the topic. 3) Ask yourself " Can we do this in America?"

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Article on the No. 1 country in educating their children, OH SO DIFFERENT

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Parent Comments on "Article on the No. 1 country in educating their children, OH SO DIFFERENT "