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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.
Let's not be hyperbolic. While it's clear that you don't like what they're doing, can you point to anything they're doing that is actually illegal? Because that R in RICO refers to racketeering, and while they are indeed organized (which is their right under the First Amendment, since we have freedom of association) and do at times place their own interest ahead of those whom they are supposed to be serving (which is true of all of us, to some extent), you would be hard-pressed to argue that everyday schoolteachers are active participants in organized crime.
It's hard to have a reasonable discussion about the actual problems when you're practically Godwin-ing this conversation by implying schoolteachers bear such striking similarities to the Mafia that they deserve to be prosecuted using the same set of laws.
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.
My high school in the US had a single joint history/lit class for 9th and 10th graders in the late 90s. Seemed like a natural union: learn classical civilzation, read Homer; learn about the scramble for africa, read Achebe. Not sure math and physics would get an entirely fair shake this way, but at least weaving it into a story might provide some better motivation than the study of platonic ideals for their own sake does.
given that people develop at different rates...
I wouldn't be surprised if the Finish school system.. Or well, maybe not, I don't know really, .. the the same as the Swedish one as in that everyone is supposed to progress at the same rate.
Which likely mean some are held back by those who are doing more poorly. But possibly also that those who are doing better can help those who are doing poorly go further.
Good or bad?
I think here it has even been claimed even for the good students this is beneficial.
I'm not really buying that.
Maybe beneficial in the same way as immigration.
In some non-real imagined ideological way.
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.
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."
Bullshit. I refuse to let the ignorant decide what's right and wrong. You should too.
Because finnish teachers are not unionized at all, right?
As you presumably suspected - or already knew - was the case, they most definitely are unionized.
You do know that 95% of teachers in Finland are teacher's union members right?
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.
Maybe you should study history enough to know who actually did invade in the end.
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.
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!
why do we have unions?
because there is no balance of power in the workplace without them, and workers will be impoverished without that balance
this is not a theoretical assertion on my point, this is american history: the gilded age and robber barons, the birth of the labor movement because the working class was being fucking shafted
look at jobs without unions benefits, and they pay shit, with shit benefits. that's what you want?
unions indeed introduce a whole new spectrum of abuses, that is true
but i assert to you that whole spectrum of abuses is smaller than the bullshit the plutocrats got away with a hundred years ago, and want to get away with again, because morons like you believe "right to work" propaganda and lies in your ignorance of american history. you want us to learn the painful labor lessons all over again
i never understood conservatives who argue against unions and universal healthcare. unless you are a rich asshole. otherwise, you're basically arguing for your own impoverishment, and are too stupid to understand that. plutocrats call you "useful fools." they buy media channels to keep you adequately outraged over moronic half lies and red herring topics. fed bullshit, kept in the dark, unleashed on the voting booths, outraged over simpleton depictions of complex topics, voting happily for those who work hard to make you poorer so a few of their rich friends can make yet more than they deserve, weakening the american economy overall
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Math teachers are terrible at teaching math.
I think the biggest problem I've seen with math teachers is a lack of empathy and context. That is, by nature, math teachers are people who were probably pretty good at math, and found the subject interesting and fun. As such, they can't understand why other people don't find it as fascinating and intuitive as they do. Many people find math to be difficult, frustrating, and completely unnecessary to their lives, at least in the abstract form. In college, I had a professor teaching matrix math who had no idea that it was used in 3D graphics and robotics. He was perfectly fine teaching it in a completely abstract form, which likely left many students wondering "what the hell is this stuff even good for", and "why in the world am I learning this?"
So, the math teachers often explain the concepts in a purely abstract form, and the students are left to try to memorize the rules without understanding the context in which they're learning them. Learning anything without a proper context to frame it in, at least for me, made things 10x harder than it needed to be. It was only when I was long out of school and working in videogames that I finally felt like I found an actual use for trigonometry, geometry,and linear algebra.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I am not in a union, there isn't a union involved at all within the company I work for, and they have north of 350 employees.
We all negotiate our own pay scales, for which mine is above average because I am a valued worker and can negiotiate for myself, and we receive very good benefits (private health care, sports tickets, days away etc) for free.
Why do I need a union? I'm not impoverished, despite you saying I should be without a union...
But then again I'm in the UK.
What sucks in the US is the concept of "union shops" where you *have* to join the union, or at least pay union dues, regardless. You can't work there without paying the union their cut of your pay packet. That's bullshit right there. A union should not be able to stop either an employer or a employee from having a relationship which fully excludes the union. Being part of a union should be 100% voluntary.
Unions are the equivalent of dragging everyone down to the same common denominator - if you are a decent employee working for a decent employer, you lose more than you gain through being part of the union and unable to negotiate for yourself.
LOL, another right-wing history crackpot...
Einstein lived one year as a toddler in Württemberg, he was educated in Munich and Switzerland (Aarau and Zürich). Later he worked at Zürich, Bern and Prague, and then for the Humboldt University of Berlin and the Prussian Academy of Sciences, before he emigrated to the US because of the nazis in 1933, where he spent the rest of his life mostly at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton.
He loved your Eberhard's Württemberg so much, he even denounced his citizenship of Württemberg in 1896 in order to avoid military service!
What they have in the USofA are not really unions. At most they are guild. In Belgium, you can join any of several unions. Basically there are three to choose from and those then have sub-divisions per industry.
Some smaller are limited to only one (large) company.
In no way will you be forced to join one and in no way will it affect your chance of employment.
It will also not affect your rights as an emplyee.
The main difference between joining and not are (unless you are a representative of the union and work, than you DO have different rights) is that you get your unemplyemnet benefits much easier when you are entitled to them and they can give you legal advice. Also if you want to join a strike, they will pay you for the loss in pay.
I pay about 8EUR per month. My employers NEVER asked me or even shown interest if I was in a Union or not. When I was in a position where I lead people and hire them I was NEVER interested if they were union or not.
The talks that happen between companies and unions are in general pretty lame. They talk about having a bigger space to have lunch. They talk about the temperature of the offices and how vacation should be more (or less) flexible.
Once in a while they will ask for more money and that is what you read in the papers.
Some people say they have to much power, but also re,member where we came from: a situartion where the rich exploited the poor. Working illegal long hours and not paying for overtime. Getting away with paying less than what was legaly allowed and what not.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
strong correlation between dismantling of unions and stagnant wages ? Workers get approximately 6 to 9 times as much work done as they did 40 years ago, but make less money. awesome.
Finland has some of the highest test scores in the world But don't let that stop your baseless rant.
Why do I need a union?
Unions lobby the government to make them pass laws that make your work life more enjoyable even if you don't belong to one. This is needed to counter balance the lobbying power of the employers. For example, if fire breaks out at the place where you work, most probably you'll find fire extinguishers and emergency exits, and this fact is not due to your employer's benevolence or your professionality: your employer would be compelled by market forces to make you work in a dangerous place, if there weren't laws in place preventing malevolent employers from competing with him.
I'm not impoverished, despite you saying I should be without a union...
You don't need to be a communist to actually believe in the role of unions: the IMF, certainly not a lair of leftists, found out that inequality and poverty rise when the power of unions falls.
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