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Finland's Education System Supersedes "Subjects" With "Topics"
jones_supa writes Finland is about to embark on one of the most radical education reform programs ever undertaken by a nation state – scrapping traditional "teaching by subject" in favor of "teaching by topic". The motivation to do this is to prepare people better for working life. For instance, a teenager studying a vocational course might take "cafeteria services" lessons, which would include elements of maths, languages, writing skills and communication skills. More academic pupils would be taught cross-subject topics such as the European Union — which would merge elements of economics, history, languages and geography. There will also be a more collaborative teaching approach, with pupils working in smaller groups to solve problems while improving their communication skills.
Banish it as an anachronism of the failed imperialist feudal system.
So when can we trust bust the American Educators Association under the RICO act so we can get some real reform like Finland
given that people develop at different rates...
myopic
Going to a special building run by the government to learn. Stay pleb my friends.
It would also be nice if the system was setup so that you could spend more time on topics that you have trouble with, and breeze through the ones you already know well.
Finland's going to end up with an army of idiots if they only learn what they need to know.
The topic: Your budget.
Skills needed: Basic math, intro to accounting, some economics to see how viable your job is in the future, home ec to show how cooking your own steak and potato as opposed to the local restaurant is much cheaper,
The topic: Global warming
Skills needed: Basic math, history, statistics, critical thinking. Bonus skills: advanced math, meteorology
The topic: ISIS
Skills needed: history, religion studies, psychology, psychiatry, social studies, George Bush cranial anal extraction surgery techniques.
I get how this can work if everyone doesn't know the basics yet, or is at least at the same level, but how the hell does this work after the first year? So I take my EU class and learn some economics. Then I take my Asia class and learn the same economics? Does it depend on the EU class as a prerequisite? What if I already took some math and physics topics? Then is my "cafeteria services" class gonna waste my time with math again?
I can really understand teaching physics and calculus together, and maybe mixing some history, political science and economics, but does physics/math or EU's economics cover into to deferential equations? Does one depend on the other? You need progressions and prerequisites and mixing everything up makes a mess of it.
"whole language"
Europe these days is a bunch of socialist, maoist and otherwise collectivist cocksuckers whoe will sell our the compatriots to ANY alien person who wields a bunch of dollar bills combined with some sodomy.
Traitors who suck up to US UK occupiers while pretending to be somehow peaceloving collectivists. In reality they only crave for power and to shit into the corner of the nice loo created by great kings like Eberhard, the Duke of Wuerttemberg. He created the Tuebingen University and founded a world class education system. Daimler, Benz, Bosch, Einstein, Schiller all stand of the shoulder of Eberhard.
The perversity of MONEY and its totally corrosive influence on our culture can be seen by the collectivist scum denouncing Eberhard and worshipping some communist devil instead. Burn in flames, Sodom and Gomorrea !
It was called vocational education, and it prepared people for skilled blue collar work. The purpose-driven approach wasn't really geared toward a liberal education or to prepare students for self-determined careers, but it did prepare people to work in auto repair shops, to fix HVAC systems, and so forth. It is not clear to me how the Helsinki system will prepare students for university work in liberal arts, sciences without immediate/clear applications, philosophy and mathematics, and so on. I assume they've thought about it, but I don't get it.
It should be a concern.
This is exactly what Evergreen State College in Olympia WA has been doing throughout it's history including when I attended between 1985 and 1987. One big topic explored from many angles for one to all three semesters of the year.
Finland has one of the best school results in the world so hopefully they know what they are doing it go back to what has worked before.
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Liberal policies running amok.
If you have never experienced the clear, exacting system of thought in physics, mathematics or chemistry, you will always be an IDIOT who can be sold ANYTHING. You will be completely at the mercy of the person selling you some shit or some truth or a mix of both.
Clear thinking is based on standing of the shoulders of great scientists, not by standing on the shoulders of some AgitProp faggots and their paymasters in finance.
I started school with a system called paces or pacers or pace something. We had to do at least 3 pages of each topic, but could crush the science and math books at a time if we so desired. it was neat compared to the text books used in public schools. Each book was 20 - 30 pages long and would focus on a topic. The more topics completed the better you were at school. We lacked the massive cram and exam style of testing that was big in the school I transferred to in junior high.
Isn't this how Apps vary from traditional Applications: Task/Topic orientation vs. Generalized Functionality?
It makes a lot of sense to merge "economics, history, languages and geography" and talk about a slice of all of this while talking about really any event, organization, or nation. History is linked to all of these. But when do you teach calculus and chemistry? Even if you could find some reasonable time to intersperse them, it would never work. Some fields require current and indepth understanding of a whole host of concepts. Courses in Chemistry and mathematics are a constant ramping up of concepts. You cannot break it up without reteaching past concepts every time you do so.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The purpose of college is to give you a better life, make you a better human. Although it's true that many people go there merely to increase their salary, the wise professors are supposed to guide and open the eyes of their pupils.
Focusing so much on 'working life' can lead to a seriously deficient education.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Anything? Is it like a cult? Are they athiests? Communists?
Given the success of Finland's existing education system, this could be the dumbest move by the Finish government since invading the Soviet Union in 1941.
We don't need no edukasion...
Somehow I don't think that will work out too well.
How many people will regret their childish decision without any chances to switch career later, because they received "cafeteria only" education? And often parents force kids to take certain "family" career path, but kids can grow up and switch careers... if they have got generic education.
The teach by topic sounds more like streaming at an early age. China does that because they cannot afford to give all students the same level of "higher education" so they stream people out earlier into more "technical vocations" earlier. This leads to a less flexible society that will not be able to adapt in the future. What you teach in school to some 15 year old may not be valid skills when they are 26. Teaching all the "subjects" to people in a "Cafeteria Services" program in an integrated way may seem like you are teaching them in a way that interests them, but in reality you are really streaming people at an early age into being a "cafeteria servant" and when those jobs are made redundant... so are most of those kids cum adults.
Becoming a teacher in Finland is as competitive as getting into an Ivy League school, and Finland offers no other route into the profession. So, there is no Teach for Finland. To teach in Finland requires a five-year master's degree in education. Admission to a teacher preparation program includes a national entrance exam and a personal interview. Only one of every 10 applicants is accepted into a teacher preparation program in Finland; competition to become a primary school teacher is even tougher, with 1,789 applicants for only 120 spots, for example, at the University of Helsinki in 2011-12. Only eight universities offer teacher preparation programs in Finland, which allows the country to ensure consistency from program to program. Contrast that with Minnesota which has about the same population as Finland (5.2 million) but about 30 colleges that offer teacher preparation programs.
I also remember reading that about 90% of Finnish teachers graduated in the top quintile of their class. In the US, that figure is more like 4%. American students of education typically get the worst SAT and GRE scores of all the majors. We cannot ignore these facts when we're comparing educational systems. In the US it's easier to get into med school than it is for a smart Finn to get into teacher school. The quality of the people who make it through means that pretty much every innovation they try is bound to produce satisfactory results, because highly their best and brightest are in charge.
I am from Sweden, a neighbouring country to Finland. 30 years ago, we reformed our school system to death (communitybased instead of state based, allowing private profit-driven enterprises and so on). Our results have kept dropping and dropping ever since, and it seems it will only keep on this way. We admire Finland; They have the great results we used to have. I really hope their politicians don't disrupt their system with unneccesary and untested reforms.
Don't worry, these politics and top level bullshit has nothing to do with our school results. We have smart, educated, well paid teachers wh odo great job as long as they have enough freedom to do it in their personal styles, which they do.
'cause bullshit makes the world go around.
So far they have better results then most developed countries. Can that be said of US?
My opinion is that education is about a great deal more than becoming a trained worker ant for some [US usually] multinational. Hey, a topic could be 'optimal picking in an Amazon warehouse', what joy! That would combine sports, graph theory, manual dexterity and subservience to the man.
Against this, I don't know exactly what the 'plan' is, so my comments could be wide of the mark. I hope so, in fact.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
When an (American) football player wants to become stronger, he doesn't go practice football. He goes to a weight room and does one round of weight lifting for his pecs, one for his biceps, etc. It doesn't matter that the game of football never involves using just your biceps. You develop the muscles one by one, each one in its most effective way, and then you can use all of them as the need arises.
Similarly, in school, you develop skills in reading, arithmetic, critical thinking, and so on. Teaching them separately allows you to focus on each one by one, evaluate each one separately, and fix whatever lack of knowledge appears. A "cafeteria services" class which features a little math, a little writing, and a little communication, will not effectively identify when a student is weak in just one of those skills.
this "preparing for the workplace" mantra is the thing that ripped computing out of primary and secondary schools and replaced it with Microsoft Office training. The assorted coding in schools initiatives (Codeclub, the Barclays code playground, Rewired State Codecademy and so on) are the rest of the industry trying to put teaching back into schools. Even Microsoft know they went too far pushing training and want to get teaching of coding back into schools.
I have a suspicion that Finland will make this work (they have a good track record of making stuff work) but I think it is important to distinguish between training and teaching.
Am I right in thinking that in a discussion about a world event they'd shift between teaching literature, economics, math, geography, etc?
The whole concept baffles me.
The problem with this approach from what I would guess is that you're not going to get a functional foundation in the "skills" people go to school to learn.
I'm going to assume it isn't as stupid as it sounds... I wish them well.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Recently I was reading The Seven Day Weekend by Ricardo Semler on my day off. There's a chapter or so devoted to the Lumiar School he founded, which runs on a Mosaic curriculum—a curriculum which discards the traditional subject orientation for learning experiences. Here's an article written about it shortly after the school opened: Learn what you want.
What we need to change to go along with this (if we keep them) are the standardized tests (by subject). I think there need to be many questions offered, from which the student can choose, and the final score needs to be more like tower diving, where your score on what you attempt is presented alongside with the average difficulty rating. Brownose U. could prefer to admit students with a 100% score at the high-school senior difficulty level, while Speed College could prefer to admit students with an 80% score at the level of a third-year undergraduate (in their chosen major)—tailoring their environment appropriately. Survival of the fittest lacks vitality unless there's real diversity in the methods employed.
Once upon a time, the problem with taking this approach is that having some of your brightest students going deep into difficult sub-topics (such as a bright high school math student who takes a shine to number theory), was that too many students would get too far ahead of the teachers, because few high school math teachers (for example) would be able to ace the entire panoply of twenty offered questions.
With the technology of social networking, it's a solvable problem to hook bright students up with teachers with expertise in the subject area, no matter how deep and narrow. If there are ten high-school math prodigies in all of Brazil who take a shine to number theory, you just need one math teacher (available online) who is good at number theory to help shepherd their studies in a productive direction.
No matter what the child wants to learn, find the teacher who can teach it. In a system as large as Brazil (to continue with my Lumiar example) it can't be that hard to have a least one teacher who can keep up with a bright child no matter how unusual the learning passion (excepting all things Narnia, like astrology and phrenology and intelligent design).
We have far less excuse to funnel every child down the same subject-matter cattle chute than ever before.
That's what happens to schools when the left get hold of schools policy. There's a general levelling down. It's OK to get a shit education because everybody else is too. It's Equality of Outcome.
If "Subjects" are vertical then "Topics" are horizontal slices of the same overall block of knowledge.
I have no idea.
But someone who probably does know is Professor John Hattie of the University of Melbourne.
"His research interests include performance indicators and evaluation in education, as well as creativity measurement and models of teaching and learning. He is a proponent of evidence based quantitative research methodologies on the influences on student achievement. Prior to his move to the University of Melbourne, Hattie was a member of the independent advisory group reporting to the New Zealand's Minister of Education on the national standards in reading, writing and maths for all primary school children in New Zealand. Hattie undertook the largest ever meta-analysis of quantitative measures of the effect of different factors on educational outcomes. His book, Visible Learning, is the result of this study."
This link has a short extract from an interview from a 30minutes BBC interview, which I recommend listening to if it's accessible from your domicile.
We do this in the US too: my childs public elementary school teaches topics as well. It just means that the different teachers coordinate their lesson plans around a particular topic. The Math teacher teaches match around the topic and the Science teacher teaches science around the topic, etc.
Not particularly novel, but it is a good idea.
As others have already mentioned, the summary is blatantly wrong. What's actually happening is that as of 2016, this sort of topic-based teaching will become mandatory for all elementary schools for at least once a year and the schools get the freedom to decide how long these projects will last. So yes, while this is a rather big change in a way, it's not like they're doing away with subjects altogether, not at all,
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Because you got it completely backward. Finland's education is one of the most egalitarian in the world.
Everyone gets the same educational opportunity in Finland and it is *all* state run. And in fact it is aimed very much at the working class, starting with free daycare starting at 8months. Finland's teachers are FULLY UNIONIZED.
Finland's education system is a system of LEVELLING UPWARD, and has lifted their entire nation. US education is screwed up,but it is NOT because the left got what they wanted.
--PM
Sounds a lot like the Montessori method. It's been around for a long time. http://www.montessori.edu/
I went to school in Finland, now live in Sweden.
The problems with Swedish school system is, as I see it, mostly four-fold: the privatization of schools and the (national?) mind-set of insisting school to be "fun", political lack of will and a more complex fourth problem.
Problem one: the privatization of schools. With the profit motive, the company running the school has a disinterest in wanting to know and caring about how well the students are doing. They might not test student knowledge at all. If they do it, they have an interest in sugarcoating the results. If they lose kids from their school they lose money, therefore they try to avoid losing a new batch of kids from their school. To lure in students, the schools give out iPads, laptops and other useless junk with the excuse of things like "e-learning". Once the kids are in the school, it doesn't matter what happens to the students, since no-one is really tracking what happens to them later. Bright students will succeed regardless of the poor school, and poor students will not improve, they will rather get worse.
Problem two: school should be "fun" and shouldn't mean workload of any kind. Of course school shouldn't be a boot camp but it shouldn't be entertainment either. The primary purpose of a school is to learn how to learn, and to acquire a good base knowledge of the surrounding world, the society, the necessary foreign languages, and so on. It's not "fun" to get a lot of homework, it's not "fun" for the teacher to grade tests either. It's not "fun" to give students quantitative feedback about how well they are doing in various subjects - this feedback process begins too late in the schooling process to be of any good. Why? Because someone might feel bad about it and no-one should feel bad, that would be anti-"fun"!
Problem three: political lack of will to change anything. This is probably driven by strong lobby from private actors in the school market. All kinds of panacea has been proposed and will be proposed but no concrete actions will be done. The Social Democrats and the Left do not want to acknowledge that people can actually be different when it comes to mental capacity and motivation, the Moderates do not want to touch privatization in the end, the Feminist Initiative wants to crush the patriarchate by initiating something like sex-based quotas whether it makes sense or not, and so on. In the end nothing happens.
Problem four: problem students are almost untouchable. These students might not even be able to speak Swedish, they might not have any interest in being in a class room where they don't understand what is happening and what is discussed, yet still they are thrown in with other kids because "no-one is no worse than others". Trying to suggest that a child who has spent the previous 3 years malnourished at a refugee camp and does not yet speak the local language cannot cope with the education on the same level as others is almost considered a racist hate-crime in the current society climate. Instead of helping these children get up to the level of others, by learning the local language first and then accelerating them with whatever basic education they have missed, such kids are just thrown into the classroom. Sink of swim. What will happen with the rest of the class when the teacher spends all their time trying to either hand-hold someone to understand basic things or just generally try to prevent them from rioting in the classroom and disrupting others?
There is also a fifth problem which is the currently emerging relativistic climate, in which "facts against facts" should be avoided in schools, everyone should be allowed to keep their opinions as facts since they are facts to them, even though those might not be established facts, like gravity, or the large number of males among the great scientists of the past, or King X invading country Y 200 years ago or a dictator ordering the destruction of millions of people 60 years ago.
With the exception of the seriously handicapped all students should receive an academic education suitable for admission to one of the better universities. Those who are not able should be diverted into groups taught to function in the lesser trades. The problem is that failing to offer academic education to every able student in a way labels and limits them for life. Expectations should not limit academics. For example some rural counties do not offer even an algebra class in high school as it is assumed that the graduates will work in the fields or slaughter houses. There is no way that that is fair to young people whose goal might be to get the heck out of areas like that.
Does that mean they finally give up teaching science to the lower classes, since they don't need them anyway?
Are they getting the new topic, 'How to mooch off the state' in class?
Additionally to the "which amusement park to go when other people vote"
Topic based will sure solve short term interests. But topics basically push a system into being trend based.
Last big industry I know that is trend based is Hollywood. There [in general,] are pop-actors (forumlated), discovered actors (savants), technical (by the book), and method actors (experience). That's not including the wannbes (your nightschool students?) and "wealthies" (buy their way into Hollywood, aka buy your degree).
Next thing you know, Finland's system will become similar to the above scenario, common in the Hollywood community of actors. Those would learn the old ABC's (method and technical) and those by topics (formualted and savants).
And we'll all be called talent instead of students by then... and need agents.
The article suggest that "Only far eastern countries such as Singapore and China outperform the Nordic nation in the influential Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings."
NOT true! This is based on the much older PISA study. According to the new one Lichtenstein and Switzerland are ranked before Finnland. Get your facts straight!
...needs to implement a change in strategy, so consults a thesaurus and learns that "topic" and "subject" are synonyms but not equally used in corporate and public life.
Next issue press releases. Substitute one word for the other, point out the 'significant difference' between the words, define them the way the Administrator wants (which is to say, delay definition as long as possible while talking in vague aspirational terms), and bingo! The organizational change can be implemented under a cover of confused staff, confused parents and confused students. Brilliant! Most oppositional forces will be diverted on a fool's errand to discover a difference in the words, when what is required is to discover a difference in the policy.
good to see finland's new system of teaching subjects for children, but would like to see in reality on how it works? how the children are going to manage the topics, and how teachers are going to transform this is a major factor to monitor. (http://www.theschoolworld.com)