Paul Beaufait's List: Global Education

• We live in a world of increasingly complex and intractable problems. These are especially evident in the environmental and social domains. They range from climate change and destruction of ecosystems, to scarcity of water and other critical natural resources, and to the disproportionate effects these growing scarcities are having on the poor of the world

  • In this book..., ¶1
• We have deep intractable social issues, such as youth unemployment around the world and the growing gap between rich and poor. All these ultimately are economic in the same sense that all social and environmental issues ultimately show up in our economic system. No one is very happy with the ability of their economies to establish pathways of sustainable progress

  • In this book..., ¶2
• In terms of people’s careers and opportunities both as employees and entrepreneurs, I believe the combined foundation of social, emotional, and systemic intelligence will be pivotal

  • In the book, ¶3
    career opportunities
    multiple intelligences
• businesses know very well that the skill sets they need today and in the future are very different than those in the past
• they will need students who can think for themselves, work in teams, work with cross-cultural boundaries, and especially work together to solve complex ill-defined problems
• our opportunity to be lifelong learners of systems thinking is unlimited

  • For professionals..., ¶1
    life-long learning
• But for most of us, the way to take advantage of these opportunities is to start locally

  • For professionals..., ¶2
    act locally
• How can we foster reflection, so that people can begin to think about their thinking, starting with ourselves?

  • For professionals..., ¶2
• Without reflection, people tend to just assume their point of view is the right point of view and defend and argue from that point of view. Reflection is a key gateway that opens people to beginning to think together and move from just arguing for about who is right to collaboratively solving the problems we all face

  • For professionals..., ¶3
    learning systems thinking: reflection

7 more annotations...

• All over the world, there is a growing recognition by governments of the need to produce graduates equipped with global competency—individuals who not only can live and work in foreign cultures but can also navigate the complexities of a world society
• Japanese industry worries that its own universities are turning out graduates who cannot function in the global system
• The global pressure on education is exerted primarily by industry but is also coming from families. It takes the form of a demand for high-quality graduates with global knowledge, skills, and values, who can find high-paying jobs and pursue stable careers in the world economy

1 more annotation...

• ALISON provides free online interactive education to help people acquire basic workplace skills.
• Right now, a lot of free education is thrown online without a clear sense of how it will help people prepare themselves for employment.
• The decision to make everything on ALISON free remains the key factor that distinguishes the site from others of its type, and makes it globally valuable.
• At ALISON, all students receive a learning record, a kind of archive of their response to life’s vicissitudes.

2 more annotations...

• As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs.   "There's no word for accountability in Finnish," he later told an audience   at the Teachers College of Columbia University. "Accountability is something   that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."
• The main   driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between   schools, but cooperation.
• Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the   goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success   today, was never excellence. It was equity.
• Finland -- unlike, say, very similar   countries such as Norway -- was producing academic excellence through its  particular policy focus on equity.
•  the number of foreign-born residents in Finland doubled during the decade leading up to 2010, and the country didn't lose its edge in education. Immigrants tended to concentrate in certain areas, causing some schools to become much more mixed than others, yet there has not been much change in the remarkable lack of variation between Finnish schools in the PISA surveys across the same period.
• Educational policy, Abrams suggests, is probably more important to the success of a country's school system than the nation's size or ethnic makeup.
• When Finnish policymakers decided to reform the country's education system in the 1970s, they did so because they realized that to be competitive, Finland couldn't rely on manufacturing or its scant natural resources and instead had to invest in a knowledge-based economy. 
• It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.

6 more annotations...