Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 69 posts

Re: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

#31

Post by penny500 »

smutticus wrote: post #27

Can we talk about poverty? In many communities in America schools are the only places students can get something to eat. We know that academic performance correlates closely with the economic conditions parents. So why don't we talk about it more? Schools are in many ways just reflections of a society and its values. Schools don't exist in a vacuum, so comparing American schools to Finnish schools can not be done as…

"Can we talk about poverty? In many communities in America schools are the only places students can get something to eat."

I've worked with inner city youths, and that is completely false. If that were true, we'd expect a very skinny poor population. Instead, a large percentage of America's poor are overweight.

Re: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

#32

Post by arethuza »

penny500 wrote: post #20
droithomme wrote: post #16

The author of this article would have his readers believe that out of all the things about Finland which make sense regarding their better achievement, the only element that really matters is that Finland doesn't have private schools. Stated another way, the only thing that is causing public schools to fail in the US is the existence of private schools. Eliminate private schools and suddenly the US will have achievem…

America's top schools are privately-run (Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Andover, Exeter, etc). If we eliminated private schools, does the author expect better test scores?

The use of "school" here is about primary and secondary education, not University/College level tertiary education.

Re: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

#33

Post by DividesByZero »

penny500 wrote: post #31
smutticus wrote: post #27

Can we talk about poverty? In many communities in America schools are the only places students can get something to eat. We know that academic performance correlates closely with the economic conditions parents. So why don't we talk about it more? Schools are in many ways just reflections of a society and its values. Schools don't exist in a vacuum, so comparing American schools to Finnish schools can not be done as…

"Can we talk about poverty? In many communities in America schools are the only places students can get something to eat." I've worked with inner city youths, and that is completely false. If that were true, we'd expect a very skinny poor population. Instead, a large percentage of America's poor are overweight.

A large percentage of the poor are overweight or obese because of the low nutritional value of cheap, readymade food.

Re: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

#34

Post by eli_gottlieb »

smutticus wrote: post #27

Can we talk about poverty? In many communities in America schools are the only places students can get something to eat. We know that academic performance correlates closely with the economic conditions parents. So why don't we talk about it more? Schools are in many ways just reflections of a society and its values. Schools don't exist in a vacuum, so comparing American schools to Finnish schools can not be done as…

No, we can't talk about poverty. That requires critically examining the American fetishes for proprietarian, neoliberal capitalism and the inequality it drives. In fact, the problem is even deeper: it requires Americans to critically examine the cultural assumption that Life Itself is a competitive game to win or lose as individually as possible.

Re: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

#35

Post by penny500 »

arethuza wrote: post #32
penny500 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America's top schools are privately-run (Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Andover, Exeter, etc). If we eliminated private schools, does the author expect better test scores?

The use of "school" here is about primary and secondary education, not University/College level tertiary education.

So? My point still stands. The best secondary schools, like Andover, Exeter, Harvard-Westlake, St. Paul's, Horace Mann, to name a few, are privately-run.

Re: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

#36

Post by efdee »

rtpg wrote: post #18

A point that seems to come out of this: > Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance. Schools should be more about this. Creating a good environment for kids, especially those from poorer backgrounds. We somehow delude ourselves into thinking that schools are about test scores, but it's about forming children into decent human…

> but it's about forming children into decent human beings.

This used to be the parents' job.

Re: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

#37

Post by flexie »

argonaut wrote: post #29
flexie wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet students in Finland start off with a lower English level than students in South Los Angeles.

I bet students in South Los Angeles start off with a lower Finnish level than students in Finland.

Well, that's an easy bet to settle. 97 percent of Finns have either Finnish, Swedish, Russian or Estonian as native language and only 0.26 percent of Finns are native English speakers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Finland

Re: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

#38

Post by arethuza »

penny500 wrote: post #35
arethuza wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use of "school" here is about primary and secondary education, not University/College level tertiary education.

So? My point still stands. The best secondary schools, like Andover, Exeter, Harvard-Westlake, St. Paul's, Horace Mann, to name a few, are privately-run.

I wasn't disagreeing with your point, merely pointing out that in this context those were poor examples.

Re: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

#39

Post by rlpb »

"Instead, the public school system's teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools."

Children aren't being taught to pass tests. They're being educated. Teaching quality is maintained using sampling. Could this be the key?

Re: What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

#40

Post by carlob »

A very interesting read on the subject of equality and competition in education is Lorenzo Milani students' book 'Lettera a una professoressa' (Letter to a Teacher) [1].

Milani was a catholic priest that was deemed a bit too radical by the church establishment and was sent in a tiny rural community as a teacher so that he would stay away from the workers in large cities. There he developed a full time school, where older students would teach the younger and there was no notion of marks, testing or even holiday.

Learning was a collective experience that relied on critical thinking and research rather than rote learning. The book is also seminal (at least in Italy) since it uses hard numbers to show the social inequality of the school system. The statistical and economical analysis was performed by his students as a research project.

[1] http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/LTAT_Final.pdf

Post reply on HN