wildrose wrote:The Finland Phenomenon
Most of the answers to the questions posed at the beginning of this video come down to demographics and cultural issues. Our teachers are perfectly capable and the school system is actually about the same as it is in Finland, but we have cultural issues outside of the school system which limit what happens inside classrooms. Some are political and some have to do with greedy corporations trying to undermine public schools so they can privatize education, and other factors have to do with cultural diversity. Finland has been held up as a model for several years now and for good reason, but it's not so much a matter of their system being better, but of their culture being more supportive of the educational process. (BTW, surfsteve posted this video elsewhere, but for the sake of meaningful discussion I reposted it here.)
Most of what you hear in the corporate media is negative when it comes to public education. When they aren't talking about some teacher committing some form of child abuse, they talk about the schools failing. Then there are parents who believe their kids are perfect and never cheat or misbehave in anyway. Add to that opportunistic parents who are always looking to sue schools and you have a pretty negative social climate. I'm just getting started, there's a whole lot more! A large segment of the population places little or no value on "book learning" and then there are those who talk like they value education, but really don't. Add to all that, dysfunctional families and those with an entitlement mindset and it's little wonder that schools struggle to make progress. Salmon swimming upstream have it easy compared to teachers in public schools. Did I forget to mention the antagonistic corporations waiting on the banks of the stream like vultures hoping for any sign of failure so they can pretend to come to the rescue? And they're the ones who control the media which creates the negative social climate in the first place!