Yule Heibel's Library tagged oecd_pisa →  View Popular, Search in Google

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.

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.