My students cheated... a lot

I did an education degree, and come from a family of educators. Every educator and academic I've talked to (I can't remember an exception) wanted our system to be more like Finland's. The people pushing back against changes in that direction were not teachers, but politicians, parents and high-up administrators.

>Teachers are not doctors

Indeed. And you wouldn't tell a doctor how to do their job, even if you had spent years as a patient. People in the education system have opinions that are informed by years of experience in the field and decades of research. With respect, I'm thinking you are an example of the type of person described by the comment you're replying to: not much experience inside the system but confident in your opinion of how to fix it.

> schools are public and payed by people's taxes in many developed countries in the World, so people have a right to say.

My country, and yours too I think, pays for health care with taxes along with education. Again, does that mean you and I get to tell a doctor how to do their job?

> teachers are there because students are forced to go to school, so they serve, they do not lead

Teachers existed long before mandatory attendance laws. Also, what point are you trying to make with this statement? That because they are necessary by law, their professional opinion is negligible?

OK. Then how do you measure competency? Right now, a medical diploma indicates that the person took all the requisites and passed all the tests to be a practicing physician. If you only measure student satisfaction, how do you which medical student is ready to treat real patients and which isn't?

Thanks for posting this.

This was my experience as well, with the added malus that when I went into school, people were still saying things like "what do I need maths for?" or "a computer will never write the next Dante" and things like that, so not only it was frustrating, it was borderline painful and lonely.

Then I discovered kids, I don't have kids on my own, but I have a very big family and I am grateful for being surrounded by people younger than me of any age from 3 to 20.

I saw them being entertained by the most boring stuff just because it was new to them and build up from there, at an incredible pace, and become young experts, with all the limits of being inexpert and also being kids, in a very short time.

I realized that what kept them motivate was a feedback loop that needed no external validation: knowing more about that thing made them happily satisfied and so they kept doing it. They don't care about understanding things the wrong way, eventually they'll get it right, they don't care about not doing any mistake, eventually they'll learn to make new mistake, they just wanna learn more and experience more.

What you call "acceleration".

I saw most of them struggle in school because they were bored, they were getting good grades, most of them at least, they were kin to put up the work necessary to get them, but their motivation started lacking, until they arrived to university and chose something that could (potentially) assure a good job or would make their parents happy.

It's a sad state of things, if I think about it, but it's also a "great filter" and we should strive to make education something that adapts to people receiving it (I'm not talking about schools for the gifted or smth like that) and not the other way around.

When I was in my 30s a friend of mine married a woman from Finland, who was living in Sweden, and then they moved back there when they had kids. I've visited them on many occasions and when I saw how they intend school there I was astonished.

They are not tracked, they are not tested, there is no standardized grade scale, there is virtually no homeworks, they do not compete, they learn by playing and are simply thought that you have to get the basics rights to go on and then helped to follow their paths.

I think that, in general, it makes happier adults.

Which is a good goal by itself.

I didn't complain until after the term was over and was just chatting casually with him while waiting for lunch at a food truck on campus. He was completely oblivious and didn't believe it.