Why Finland has the best schools

Demographically (culturally) Miami and LA are polar opposites with Finland.

Comparing Finland to Iowa is apples to oranges.

Comparing Finland to LA is apples to spaghetti.

 

Really their methodology is more like Phillips Exeter Academy's in the US. PEA uses the Harkness method, replete with Harkness tables, and the students are officially Harness learned. It is like magic.

 

Yes one group went from 8-12 and the other 12-3. And we all learned.

 

This is about ways to stimulate learning. It isn't a debate about the difference between LA and Finland. If you have some reason why a method used to stimulate learning in Finland wouldn't work in LA, other then the fact that they are different, let me know. But just because LA isn't Finland, or Hollywood High isn't Exeter, or Andover, or Milton, or Deerfield, isn't good enough.

 

But what is better? I don't really hear about any Finish entrepreneurs changing the world ever. Besides Nokia, what are these student churning out?

The description sounds nice but without real measurements how do we know how well they're doing? Like the article above mentioned, trust. I think I'm the 80s we trusted teachers and administration to do the right thing. We trusted parents to do the right thing.

How can we trust students being raised by sociopaths? Parents who are literally
Insane. My wife deals with these people. It's astounding. How can we trust administration that thinks a student is crazy if he makes a gun sign with his hands?

 

You can certainly try to make that argument.

 

Where did NCLB originate? Where did the cuts to education that resulted in cuts to PE and the arts? Duh

 

Why don't you bring the Finnish school plan to South Central LA or the South Bronx. Send the kids out into the neighborhoods with a compass. Then get back to me on the results. I hope you succeed, but I doubt that will happen. The demographics and environment aren't remotely close to Finland.

 

You're talking about what would happen when you mechanically copy Finland's educational system rather than when you learn from them and use those lessons to benefit our system.

 

I forgot. Schools out.

 

Crank has been vague about what country she's from, but I would guess the UK based on that information. It's one that I know of that African immigrants routinely beat "native" Brits on standardized tests.

 

I see, only a school with a forest nearby can use this method. I wondered what method they use in Helsinki?

So, America can't use the Finnish method because their cities don't have a forrest close enough to have a compass class, and African Americans are too dumb.

Good stuff.

 

Yeah agreed, that's why I said France or the UK.

Either way the averages prove him/her wrong

 

Our system works fine when the parents and teachers care. Upper middle class areas and private schools do extremely welI. There is still insanity from liberal administration. But I understand in cities where the parents don't even know how many kids they have and kids would sooner steal the teachers purse than learn from her, there aren't many options. I wonder how long a Finish teacher would survive in LA or Detroit? I'm guessing a week before they run screaming. Put them in Boca Raton FL and they would feel right at home.

 

Any culture that believes Ebonics is a valid language isn't ready for Finnish education.

 

Ah huh, those dumb African Americans again.

 

Not dumb. NEVER dumb.

Just culturally incompatible.

 

Can they swim?

 

Good question.

 

Really, Republicans created the concept of standardized test scores? Now, I don't doubt that Republicans (in a bipartisan effort with Democrats) made standardized test scores the measure by which we score schools as effective or ineffective, but I thought that educational professionals created the idea of a standardized test score.

 

Education is all about household discipline and, of course, individual talent. Kids of families where parents put heavy emphasis on education and help their kids with the homework perform better. Then, of course, it is important to confess to ourselves that not everyone is "academic leaning", others are more practical and for these kids, school is often not only boring and difficult, but also useless.

Race has nothing to do with it really. A white boy from a "working class" family where parents do not have the time and/or do not have enough knowledge to help out with homeworks will perform worse than the Afram from an "academic background" where parents value education and help out with homework.

I met an elementary school teacher and in his class, he said he has two Asians who outperform the others in math because their parents force them to do maths when they come home instead of letting them play and sometimes even make them their own homeworks.

 

Bush was no right winger, neo-con maybe. NCLB didn't stop local school districts from keeping those programs.

 

Decency has nothing to do with numbers. Maybe those things like disease, violence, malnutrition, pollution, etc. are the egg to the chicken, or the chicken to the egg.

What we do know is that they score incredibly low in IQ tests that have been standardized to take all cultural biases out over the years. Are they poor because they are not intelligent, or are they not intelligent because they are poor?

Right now, I'm looking at the historical evidence and don't find a lot there to put any faith in. They have no cities worthy of the name, unlike the mesopotamians, the syrians, the romans, the greeks, etc. etc. etc. There's just nothing there. Neither is there anything in the written record to suggest that at some point they might have managed to raise a mighty nation, unlike the egyptians who share the same continent. There is no historical record to fall back on, no sub-saharan herodotus who might shed some light on the greatness that used to be south Africa.

You can have all the faith you want that the lack of any historical record isn't indicative of anything, but right now, it's up to the southern Africans to figure their way out of their lack of any historical relevance. Anybody with two brain cells to rub together has called it a day.

 

Funny how when I went to school in the 50's and 60's we learned our math tables, we sat in a circle and read Dick and Jane books, we studied American History out of the same books and science out of the same books and we had good outcomes and we all graduated able to read and at least do basic math and we something about the history of the country and how science works.