What can we learn from the way we educate our children?
Hi there,
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With the rise of remote work, a small but growing percentage of the population is now able to choose where to live independent of their ambitions. This apparent freedom though very quickly gets limited to places where you can find a good school for your kids. That remote island you've always dreamt of or the house by the beach is likely not within 15 mins commute of the school that gives your kids the best chance in life. For quite a few years this has left me fascinated about how we may solve this.
Even if you’re not interested in education, the articles below end up being interesting to read because our education systems reflect our society. What motivates students to learn does not seem that different to me from what motivates us in our jobs. The culture that Finland has set forth to produce some of the world’s most well educated children seems very similar to what we observe in great companies. And the stress and pressure that parents face in New York City to always get their children to the highly competitive “next step” is not that different from how many people view their role in society.
11 Ways Finland’s Education System Shows Us that “Less is More”
This article talks about how less is more in Finnish education. Underlying Finland’s philosophy is an infrastructure built on trust, and a culture where more is not always better. By giving work life balance to both the teachers and students, Finnish students outperform even their Asian counterparts. How can these students spend half the time working but receive better results? Some take aways:
Teaching primary education is Finland’s most competitive degree, only 10% of applicants get accepted.
Education is focused on providing enough time for the teacher and the students to go over the curriculum.
In primary school the same teacher will stay with a class of 20 students for six years.
Teachers aren’t required to stay at school when they’re not teaching.
Students have less hours of lessons then most Western countries.
https://fillingmymap.com/2015/04/15/11-ways-finlands-education-system-shows-us-that-less-is-more/
When the Culture War Comes for the Kids
This first hand account of a couples experience of getting their child educated in New York from 2009 to 2016 is fascinating because it reveals more about modern day American society then it does about the education system itself.
The hyper competitive nature of getting into the right school, starting at the age of 2, combined with the constant anxiety and pressure to get to the next step puts an immense amount of pressure on both the parents and the children. While this extreme is more easily found in the US or South Korea, universally parents want the best opportunity for their kids and end up competing in one way or another.
This article alludes to a topic I'll be writing more about, a world that is moving more and more towards a meritocracy but is leaving many people behind in doing so.
"In The Meritocracy Trap, the Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits argues that this system turns elite families into business enterprises, and children into overworked, inauthentic success machines, while producing an economy that favors the super-educated and blights the prospects of the middle class, which sinks toward the languishing poor. Markovits describes the immense investments in money and time that well-off couples make in their children. By kindergarten, the children of elite professionals are already a full two years ahead of middle-class children, and the achievement gap is almost unbridgeable."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/when-the-culture-war-comes-for-the-kids/596668/
Students Learn From People They Love
This short opinion piece by David Brooks reminds us that emotion is needed for us to attach value to our learning, it is what keeps us motivated. In it he quotes Antonio Damasio, whose book The Strange Order of Things I am still trying to find time to complete but whose work on linking emotion and reasoning is worth exploring more.
“Then work by cognitive scientists like Antonio Damasio showed us that emotion is not the opposite of reason; it’s essential to reason. Emotions assign value to things. If you don’t know what you want, you can’t make good decisions.
That early neuroscience breakthrough reminded us that a key job of a school is to give students new things to love — an exciting field of study, new friends. It reminded us that what teachers really teach is themselves — their contagious passion for their subjects and students.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/learning-emotion-education.html
Thank you for reading!
Eiso
P.s. Want to go deeper into this topic? I can highly recommend Amanda Ripley’s book The Smartest Kids In The World
P.p.s. If you thought this was interesting please tell your friends and always feel free to reply with your own thoughts.