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Mar

2008

Richard Florida and The Creative Class Exchange: Real Education

Richard Florida quotes from a WSJ article (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.html) that describes how successful Finnish high schoolers are compared to other students in other countries. I left a very long comment on this entry, as it's a topic obviously close to my area of concerns.

Click through to read Florida's post, and the numerous comments this one generated.

creativeclass.typepad.com/...real-education.html

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education finland finnish_schooling kids oecd oecd_pisa richard_florida

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. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world's C students even as U.S. educators piled on more homework, standards and rules. Finnish youth, like their U.S. counterparts, also waste hours online. They dye their hair, love sarcasm and listen to rap and heavy metal. But by ninth grade they're way ahead in math, science and reading -- on track to keeping Finns among the world's most productive ...
Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. "In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs," says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international student test in 2000 ...
- Yule Heibel on 2008-03-02
  Taylorization in public (and private) education hasn't allowed students to leap into post-factory economies. The factory model of education deserves to get the boot.
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2 more annotation(s)...
- I have at least 3 friends who are former teachers. They all said they left because "I loved the kids and teaching. I hated the union, the mandatory testing, the bureaucracy."
  
  My wife's sister and her husband taught at a rural California school. They're avid birders and every year as part of science would take middle schoolers to the Klamath refuge to look at migrating waterfowl, bald eagles, etc. The kids loved it. But when No Child Left Behind came along they were told to stay in the classroom and teach to the tests.
  
  Combining the Finnish model with the City as Classroom ideas of the Remixing cities would probably do more to reform education than another decade of blue ribbon studies.
  
  Posted by: Michael Wells | February 29, 2008 at 01:11 PM
- Further, it's interesting to think about your excellent ideas around spikiness, Richard, and consider them in relation to the PISA study and to American education. I would argue that right now the American system is *very* spiky, with some kids performing way beyond the average, while others languish at the bottom. If you graphed the Finnish system and its population, I bet their world would look "flatter."
  
  But just as cities -- to reference Richard Sennett's citation of Aristotle -- need all sorts of different citizens, I'd say that childhood needs to have its differences respected, and even nurtured. At present, we're telling too many kids that with enough effort, they too can be tall spikes -- and in this way we're perhaps flattening out their world. But the real beauty might be in letting them come into it when they're ready -- and then watch spikiness take off as a kind of synergy between the different talents.
  
  Posted by: Yule Heibel | March 01, 2008 at 04:55 PM