Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...will eat them alive Why will it? > Long live natural selection and the annual culling of the herd. How does that occur in the Finish model?
Mindshare in the global age. Finland is a 5M country. The world is 1000 times larger. They can't go against the tide of globalization. They may have the better product, it doesn't matter. The global mindshare battle is already won by anglo capitalism.
Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t).
81–90 of 117 posts
Re: Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t).
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
So far the results have been fair. But Finland especially is somewhat prone for brain-drain. All that stuff is paid with hefty, progressive taxation which hurts the most skilled and salaried the most. Combining all the mandatory expenses, taxation etc, your wages easily end up to be less than half of what you could be gaining abroad. Especially since the level of (tuition-free and gvment-sponsored on all levels) educ…
I am more familiar with Singapore and from all signs it seems they do not have the brain drain problem so they are capturing more value from the output of their great education system than Finland.
I said Finland could be fairly prone for brain-drain if stuff would get significantly worse in the future. (Like what is happening at Greece these days.) But right now I'm pretty sure that the progress will be, though not outright good, less bad than most of the world. A safer bet, to say.
And healthy amount of emigration is good for a nation. People go abroad for a few years or decades to make money, gain experience and positive influences and then can bring 'em back home.
Re: Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t).
#83"Finnish educators were astonished ... made no sense to them... surprised ... did not understand the idea ... can’t understand ... don’t make sense to them. Nor do they understand ...." Ignorance and stupidity are nothing to be proud of. Disagreeing with us is one thing - they could be right. Willful disingenuous bug-eyed goggling is something else altogether.
I think the author is using the term "didn't understand" as in "I don't understand why you use LOC as a measure of a developer's productivity".
Being a little deliberately obtuse can be nicer, less judgmental, and less confrontational way of disagreeing with someone than saying outright "that's a bad way of doing it". And Finns do tend to avoid social confrontations, in my experience.
Re: Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t).
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Afro-caribbean and first generation American chiming in here. I can assure you it is a cultural and institutional racism here. Being colleagues with other 1st generation Ghanaians, Nigerians, Haitians, and Jamaicans it is a recurring issue amongst the black community. Where 1st gen children who keep their culture of origin do well academically (if their culture demands it) but subsequent generations absorb more of th…
>Where 1st gen children who keep their culture of origin do well academically (if their culture demands it) but subsequent generations absorb more of the african-american culture which shuns academia. You can't really change a culture though. Is there any way you think it can be fixed?
Changing cultures happens all the time. I am a fifth-generation descendant of my family living in this state, but I think and act considerably differently from my great-great-great grandfather and his son who first settled in this state before the Civil War. I differ pretty substantially culturally from my late dad, really, as does America as a whole from his generation to mine.
One thing that promotes cultural change is interchange and communication among different cultures. Individual human beings are acculturated by their upbringing in one culture or another, but also pick and choose what cultural practices they desire to follow among the cultural practices they know about. Leadership of a school system (or of a country) involves urging people to follow cultural practices that will be to their long-term advantage, and setting up incentives so that individual human beings are nudged into following those practices.
(Basis of knowledge: many-generations European-American who has lived overseas in east Asia twice in his life, married to a spouse who grew up in east Asia of east Asian ancestry since earliest historical times. We have a pick-and-choose blended culture in our family, and note that we have genuinely multicultural relatives, friends, neighbors, clients and work colleagues who pick and choose what cultural influences they follow.)
Re: Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t).
#85I taught English in the public school system in South Korea last year. There were a few stark differences that I couldn't help but notice and I feel they shed light on our failing education system here in America. They have a curriculum that is set forth on a national level. This accomplishes two important things: One, teachers can now collaborate and share resources on topics that all teachers around the country are…
I've always wondered why the US has a Department of Education but it doesn't produce a national curriculum. It's mission isn't directly tied to teaching itself [1]. Looking at the rise of sites like the Khan Academy and other services, it seems clear to me that content creation and delivery of core subjects could be centralized, and tutoring, homework, testing, and assessment could be localized. I know that would thr…
It's going to be hard to have a national curriculum without either watering down subjects like biology or US history to the point that they're totally useless, just rote memorization of falsehoods.
Re: Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t).
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, Finns speak a Finnish, a Finno-Ugric language, which is said to be really easy to learn. It's phonetic, and technical words tend to be built out of simple Finnish words, not a weird mash of Latin, Greek, and other words. This makes it easy to do sciences, as you don't have to teach as much wacky vocabulary. (Note, I don't speak Finish, this is just what I've read). I've also heard that Lithuanians (who also spe…
Most say it's hard to learn. Putting that aside, I know Finnish contains many borrowed words. Take church, which in Finnish is "kirkko", Swedish is kyrka, and in Scottish English, kirk. This form almost certainly comes from the Norse "kirkja". For a more technical term, consider "democracy", which is "demokratia". The Greek roots are obvious.
It actually comes all the way from a Greek word that means "the Lord's," short for a term for churches that means "the assembly of the Lord" or "the house of the Lord."
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=church
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Church#Etymology
(Basis of knowledge: student of Biblical Greek, native speaker of English, sporadic student of various Germanic and Ugro-Altaic languages.)
Re: Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t).
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mindshare in the global age. Finland is a 5M country. The world is 1000 times larger. They can't go against the tide of globalization. They may have the better product, it doesn't matter. The global mindshare battle is already won by anglo capitalism.
The original comment used "anglo corporatism", which I understand, but why are you hopping to "anglo capitalism"?
1. Money, an economic concept, and the freedom to accumulate as much money as one can possibly do, an economic freedom, wield real political power. The political power then acts as a positive feedback over the economic field resulting in an unstable polarized system.
2. The system assumes infinite resources. This is blatantly false both in the short term, economy grows only at X% annually, and in the long term, there is just one Earth and one Sun. This places people on the lower rungs of the economic system on an intrinsic inferior bargaining position, as their very existence is under question. This time the effect is that people on the top ownership rungs have more economic power, which acts as a positive feedback resulting in an unstable polarized system.
Historically, anglo capitalism has been controlled via a number of negative feedback loops:
A. Democracy, as a counterweight to point 1. The 99% used to have a significant share of the political power. Not anymore. There is no more democracy in America, it's a political market where the deepest pockets but the most representatives.
B. Trade unions, as a counterweight to point 1 and 2. Trade unions used to have enough money to match the 1% contributions to politics. Trade unions used to give the 99% some bargaining power. Thanks to Reagan and the modern Republicans, there are no more trade unions to speak of.
C. Taxes, as a counterpoint to 1 and 2. There used to be taxes, that both detracted from the ability of 1% to wield unfettered political power and served at building a safety net that improved the bargaining power of the 99%. Not anymore, we now raise about 25% less in taxes as a share of GDP as we used to (19& -> 15%), and the trend towards "smaller government" is only accelerating.
We observe how the finest anglo capitalism economic entities have more and more power, both economic and politic. These economic entities are called "corporations".
Re: Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t).
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
The original comment used "anglo corporatism", which I understand, but why are you hopping to "anglo capitalism"?
Thanks for the attention to terminology detail. The anglo corporation is the finest outcome of the anglo capitalism. If you build a system around anglo capitalist rules, you end up with anglo corporations. The reason is that the anglo capitalism prides itself economic freedom and turns a blind eye to the political aspect of the economy. The fundamental problems with anglo capitalism are: 1. Money, an economic concept…
Re: Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t).
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am more familiar with Singapore and from all signs it seems they do not have the brain drain problem so they are capturing more value from the output of their great education system than Finland.
Sure about that? There is a nice graph at http://www.peoplemov.in/ . Don't know about their sources, but Finland and Singapore seem to have around the same amount of emigration/capita (6.2 - 6.3%). Granted, Finns go more to United States and wealthy Europe (probably a bit more weighted towards skilled labor moving...) than singaporeans. But I would not say those levels qualify yet for significant brain drain. From Ho…
Another cool data point would be the GDP growth and citizen sentiment over the years.
Re: Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t).
#90Finland's schools are great because they are full of Finns, in the same way that schools with many Finns in the US do very well. Hong Kong and Singapore's schools are great because they are full of Chinese, in the same way that schools with many Chinese in the US do very well, even in poor neighborhoods: http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/16/local/me-lincoln16 To begin with, the eight students agreed on a few gener…
Afro-caribbean and first generation American chiming in here. I can assure you it is a cultural and institutional racism here. Being colleagues with other 1st generation Ghanaians, Nigerians, Haitians, and Jamaicans it is a recurring issue amongst the black community. Where 1st gen children who keep their culture of origin do well academically (if their culture demands it) but subsequent generations absorb more of th…
If you're referring to the oppositional culture hypothesis, there's a whole body of research that show it isn't nearly as common as widely perceived - most recently there is this: http://www.amazon.com/Kids-Dont-Want-Fail-Oppositional/dp/06... but I also linked to some other research in this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2046616
Certainly using school money to buy more football bleachers rather than invested in academics is not just something you'll find in poor minority schools - see pretty much any US university with a Div I or II basketball, football or hockey program.