The Story of Finland’s Education Success (and How to Reboot the System)
The BBC just broadcasted this new video report documenting the success of Finland’s education system and the story behind it. Finland, as a country, consistently scores at the top of international education ratings – this despite the fact that its pupils spend the fewest number of hours in class relative to the rest of the developed world.
The video is short and succinct, but captures well what makes Finland’s education system work. I’d encourage everyone to watch it. In short, though, Finland’s success really all comes down to a few things: a strong sense of trust – both in students and in teachers and schools; a pedagogy based on deep, meaningful, long-term relationships between students and teachers; and a relaxed, non-competitive culture of education, where learning is seen as natural and is valued and encouraged by everyone in society.
Those may sound like simple solutions, but, as anyone within the education field can tell you, that kind of culture takes a lot of hard work to establish – especially when you’re working against the status quo. That may be one reason why private or chartered alternative education settings – like Montessori, Reggio-inspired and Waldorf schools, and democratic schools like Summerhill and Sudbury, as well as Unschooling – often do so well; they start out with a blank slate when creating that culture, and the people whom these settings draw are either already devoted to a culture of living, breathing democratic education or are open to questioning the status quo and searching out new ways of education. That’s not the case with regular public schools, where the ideologies and frameworks of education are firmly entrenched and to question them is to go up against a vast, monolithic 100-year-old system.
That’s why, in a culture of competition and faux-accountability, with an ‘education’ system that has strayed so far from the real nature of education, alternative settings offer a chance to reboot the system entirely.
I’ll leave you to read Cruz’s piece, but here are a few quick thoughts:
There is no “quick fix” for education. If there was, we would’ve found it long ago. Education is a continual process, not somebody’s toy model that just needs a bit of glue.
While I’ve generally been supportive of the charter school movement and structure as a mechanism that would eventually allow for and cultivate a broader spectrum of educational philosophies (as well as more focused school leadership), I don’t at all see how turning the charter school movement into what is in essence a corporate takeover of schools is a good idea. For Duncan’s education department to be serious about making charter schools work, they’ll have to lay out some pretty clear guidelines for interested parties about what is required to start up charter schools – including, I adamantly believe, a stipulation that they be nonprofit and have a clear, articulated educational vision and philosophy.
To put it another way: the charter school movement works when it’s about engendering a free gathering of pedagogical ideas and philosophies. It doesn’t work when it’s simply about free market capitalism and which corporation can make a more efficient assembly line.
We are relying on the same criteria for measuring charter school performance as what we’ve previously used with older, pre-charter schools – but not stopping to consider whether the measurement tool itself is faulty? Surely we should stop to question this. While there are many philosophies about what purpose education serves (which in turn play into the ways we choose to evaluation education), and it is valid to differ in this regard, there is still a valid and strongly research-based argument to be made that you can’t shoehorn the benefits of education into a simple congregate of school testing scores. Something more’s gotta change.
I think this starts to get at the most fundamental question that has to dominate our efforts, if we’re to be serious about education reform. That question is, simply: What is education really about?
The actual mechanism or mechanisms for how we enact education reform matter far less than the philosophy that drives our efforts. Education in Sweden and the Netherlands, for instance, operate on a partially voucher-based system but seems to consistently fulfill their cultural expectations for education – as well as rank consistently high in global education ratings. Sure, I think there’s a bare minimal chance that a voucher system would be an (immediately) good thing in the United States – but the point is, these (and other) types of mechanisms can have a wide range of effectiveness simply given a country’s cultural and philosophical expectations of education. This is why vouchers can work in Scandinavian countries, but not here in the United States.
A real answer to this “question” of the effectiveness of charter schools, and of the topic of education reform in general, would surely take more words and space than a website can offer – but I will say this: My intuition is that the real key to “fixing” education doesn’t rest at all in the mechanical elements of reform… but rather in the cultural arena, in our collective values and how we approach education altogether.
