11 ms·

Finland to abandon school subjects in favour of phenomenon-based learning (2016)

169 points by simon_000666 6y ago

Gravityloss 6y ago
Risky experiment.
- maltelandwehr 6y ago
  If it is a couple of weeks every year, I don’t see too much of a risk.
tremguy 6y ago
Finn here. Results have been negative on this so far, at least for students before high school [1]. Most children at that stage aren't yet capable of self-directed learning. Problem is compounded by the distractive effect of digital equipment in class. [1] https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_digital-based_curriculum_impedes_learning_researcher_finds/10514984 https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_digital-based_cu...
- wirrbel 6y ago
  German here, we also have our fair share of experimentation on children in schools.. From what I have learned while reading about pedagocial reforms, most arguments don't really treat the student body as a diverse set of people, rather they pretend that students are all alike and then present a way of learning that a subset of the students strive with. This is not about the (long debunke) myth that some people would be visual learners and some would learn better with their sense of smell. No. What I mean is, some people fare better with lecture-style classroom presentations, some better with individual experimentation. All kids need guidance. It seems that the reforms that are made are usually a certain pedagocial-model teaming up with monetary or economic interests (cutting costs in education). So in our schools, we saw that Physics teachers were on short supply (they rather earned better money outside of schools). So they mixed all Science subjects in middle school and named it "Natural Phenomena". As a result, the physics is taught by biology teachers who sometimes prepared their lessons with the math teachers of the school because it wasn't their core strength...
  - tilolebo 6y ago
    French living in Germany and married to a primary school teacher here. Theoretically,differentiated learning is what teachers should use. But as you observed, and like in many other countries such as France, reforms supposedly pedagogical are mostly decided based on economic interests. On the field, teachers are understaffed and unable to apply the program.
  - vimslayer 6y ago
    I think pretty much everyone agrees with you on that, I haven't seen anyone advocate that students _should_ be treated all alike. It's just that providing individual guidance requires more teachers and thus more money... And then someone comes in and suggests that we don't need so many new teachers if we "use technology" to help fill the need, like some learning app could be the silver bullet that revolutionizes teaching. Maybe it will some day, but seeing what we've had so far I'm not exactly holding my breath waiting to see that happen.
    - WanderPanda 6y ago
      In Germany the zeitgeist is: equal opportunity = treating all students alike (even ones with special needs). If you are arguing for more individual and specialized education, you are widely considered anti-social and it is suggested that your intend is to build / maintain a small (educational) elite that aspires to enslave all others...
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - watwut 6y ago
        But Germany splits students int different tracks quite soon. There is differentiation when kids are something like 10-12.
        usr1106 6y ago
        Remember that there is no German school system. Education is subject of state (Länder) law. So there are quite some differences between different parts of Germany. Traditionally, some 30-40 years back you were supposed to know whether you go to university or not at the age of ten. However, this is no longer really the case. Many prepare for university in theory, but never go there.
- jacobush 6y ago
  Welcome to Sweden. I was hoping we would catch up with you again, but not this way...
- jay4Oov9 6y ago
  Is there a separation in Finland between public school (where those programs are applied) and private school (which do what they want)? And if so, do the ministers and government officials who decided on that send their kids to public schools? (not implying any scheme, just curious if they eat their own dogfood)
  - asutekku 6y ago
    We really do not have any private schools in finland, almost everything is public.
    - jay4Oov9 6y ago
      Oh, that's great (for equity between citizen, that is). Somehow, you guys always rock :)
  - eMSF 6y ago
    Private schools are rather rare, and most of them follow the national curriculum. I don't think their small existence affects policy changes like this much at all.
  - emilfihlman 6y ago
    There really are not "private" schools in Finland (not in comprehensive school nor in upper secondary). They must all follow the same teaching requirements that public schools offer and they get government funding. And you don't get in with money but via application. So they are more like schools that are run by private individuals.
- chongli 6y ago
  I thought Finland already had the best schools in the world? Had they not heard the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”? This sounds terrible. Not everything in life can be achieved purely by intrinsic motivation. Human beings are a social species. We motivate each other through laws, social norms, and economic incentives. Children, who don’t know about any of those things, need direction lest they be caught totally unprepared.
  - eMSF 6y ago
    >Had they not heard the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”? Not only that, but the current administration may have vastly overestimated their own influence in the previously great PISA results. Putting all their “smarts” into overhauling the system to improve it might not do anything of the sort.
  - rgblambda 6y ago
    >> Had they not heard the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”? I remember watching an interview with a Finnish teacher where they were asked this very question. Their answer was something like "Being best in the world doesn't mean we can't be better" When you realise that Finland has little in the way of natural resources and it's economy is very much tied to the skills of the population it makes a lot of sense to be this focused on education.
    - chongli 6y ago
      Of course you can always be better. The question is whether you should flip the table with a radical experiment when you’re already number one. You don’t hear of many sports teams doing this. Businesses that try it risk a shareholder revolt.
  - AQuantized 6y ago
    I think this is at odds with how they achieved that result to begin with. To become the best you have to be willing to experiment. It makes sense to keep iterating the process so long as you continue the majority of good practices and return to a previous iteration if it doesn't work out.
- smoe 6y ago
  From the article linked: "[...] phenomenon-based learning requires students have strong self-discipline and initiative. They also require students to be independent, focused and flexible." I'm not a teacher nor do I have children, so I'm mostly ignorant about this topic. But reading this made me think, if we shouldn't but maybe much more focus on qualities like being independent, focused and flexible early on instead of strictly following subjects as measured by Pisa tests? Given just how hard it is to focus and not procrastinate in today digital world, even for adults. I'm not sold on pure Phenomenal Education as I understand it. But my hunch is, that a mix could work quite well. Spent part of the time on focused bottom up learning on a single topic, and another in a more exploratory top down way.
  - Viliam1234 6y ago
    Sometimes people and institutions who say "I am going to focus on nice-sounding nebulous goals instead of this measurable stuff" achieve neither. I'd like to keep some measurable goals in school system. But maybe we could have both. Self-directed learning, and then participating in Pisa tests. With no bad consequences for the student if they utterly fail because they studied something else. But to have some feedback like "while you congratulate yourself on this and that, literacy in your country is the worst in the world".
    - smoe 6y ago
      I think I was/am one of the students that would have benefited from more cross-pollination of topics and a mix between self direction and directions. I never enjoyed math for its own sake when I was in school and my grades where pretty mediocre, later I had the same with algorithms & data structures. On their own, how they are often presented in books and platforms like hacker rank, I find them rather boring and solving challanges just with a correct and optimal solution in mind is not very appealing to me. But as soon as I'm in a work context, or when I dabbled in computational biology or digital signal processing for music on the side I can completely lose the sense of time while digging into whatever is necessary to get done what I want to do. So I think there a ways to get from nebulous goals and activities into measurable impacts.
- kstenerud 6y ago
  The problem stems from trying to make a one-size-fits-all solution. You can never fit everyone into the same box, but people like simple solutions so we keep trying. In the 2nd grade, I had a teacher who recognized potential in some of her students and separated them from the rest of the class to engage in self-directed learning. There were three of us chosen. I achieved grade 5 level proficiency in a number of subjects, while the smartest kid reached grade 7 in almost all of them. The following year, I changed schools, and spent the next 3 years re-doing the same boring shit over and over. My protestations were countered with "Well, if you've already done it, then it should be easy to do it again!" I learned my lesson, and my grades from that point on slipped from straight As to the minimum required to pass. I'd only apply myself when doing my own projects (mostly programming). Like in anything else, if you want to see success, you need to hire teachers who can recognize and focus potential, and then give them the leeway to do so based on their good judgment.
  - netjiro 6y ago
    I've seen test numbers where the top 5% group learn around 5-10x faster than the 50% group. The numbers hold for short term recall, long term recall, problem solving, critical and creative thinking, etc. There is no way "school" can equalise this. There is no reason to keep stuffing everyone in one box.
    - danenania 6y ago
      I believe that in Japan, they deal with this disparity by asking the top students to help teach others in the class. It seems like an interesting approach in that teaching something well requires a much higher bar of understanding than doing well on a test, and it’s an excellent way to reinforce knowledge for the one doing the teaching. So the top students get a more difficult challenge than just coasting along, and the other students benefit as well. And, of course, it promotes teamwork and solidarity. I’m sure there are downsides too. Perhaps it could create tension between the “teacher’s pets” and the others?
      - kstenerud 6y ago
- zerr 6y ago
  Off-topic: can you please share where the materials (curriculum, books/ref, etc..) of coding classes at Finnish schools can be found?
- em-bee 6y ago
  but that's not the students fault. self directed learning had to be practiced with guidance. it doesn't emerge by itself. the montessori method comes to mind as an approach that potentially enables self directed learning.
- mordae 6y ago
  Digital equipment was never designed with teaching in mind. Take a typical Android installation for an example. - There is no tutorial mode for a true newcomer. - There is no central naming scheme - every application is an island. - Most of the applications are hostile and present you with ads. - Most of the applications won't let you study them. It resembles a street market more than a safe learning environment.
- ivan_ah 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing that article. Would you happen to have other recent articles that describe the results after 3 years of the new approach? [Even if you google search for me in Finnish and share the top-five relevant results, this would be super helpful for me. I can use google translate after that.] I agree with you that primary and middle school students are too young to be self-directed, but that doesn't necessarily contradict the no-subjects approach. The phenomenon-based learning can still be led by a teacher. Also as far as technology being distracting, that doesn't surprise me much. I think some very careful selection of the apps and tools is needed, but it can totally be done (e.g. offline or local installation of web apps and tools specific to learning and not open access to the internet or game-like apps).
- vmception 6y ago
  There are grade-flexible schools systems with mixed classrooms. I wonder if Finland evaluated that. I saw one school system where the students vote on everything. It wasn't Montessori but something else I can't remember the name of.
wirrbel 6y ago
We have that in Germany with regards to Science subjects in grade 5-7 (depending on the state / region). So roughly speaking there is a class about science topics where children would learn about things that would normally be taught in biology, geography, chemistry, physics. From what I hear no one is really happy with it (except principals who are more flexible assigning their staff to classes). So parents and teachers alike aren't very happy. A fixed and subject based curriculum is easier to teach and and easier to pick up. The things you learn are presented in a proper order, that gives orientation. If you present them more interspersed its disorienting, and at times appears random. And its beyond me how the "interconnectedness" of subjects cannot be taught within a classical subject-based model.
- maltelandwehr 6y ago
  In which Bundesländer is that done and when was it introduced? I am German but never heard of it.
  - wirrbel 6y ago
    BaWü, definitely in Unterstufe at Realschule. Don't know if they have remodelled it in the meantime but I haven't heard so.
- TsiCClawOfLight 6y ago
  I had something like that in elementary school in Belgium and it was amazing. I have never been taught so well since then, except for 1 case in University! Many topics are much easier to understand (and generalise from, and memorise!) if they are tackled from multiple angles, without regard for "subjects". We would approach them with some math, some history, physics, biology, ecology - whatever helped. And since everything was well organized, lessons built upon the previous ones and all prerequisites were introduced at the correct time. This even had the advantage that we would remember more abstract math and formulae well, because we knew where we had used it to learn interesting things! :) Of course, that probably took a lot of work and dedication (1 teacher did all of it for each school year), even more so for high school I suppose. But it was worth it, and the lack of integration/connection is one of the biggest problems I see with the current school system in Germany/Austria.
aaron695 6y ago
Finland is top of the world (But slowly dropping), famous for their teaching. So they are abandoning it. Classic 21st century. You have a top heavy organisations with working systems, but managers have ladders to climb and salaries to justify. "Finland’s schools were once the envy of the world. Now, they’re slipping" https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/finlands-schools-were-once-the-envy-of-the-world-now-theyre-slipping/2016/12/08/dcfd0f56-bd60-11e6-91ee-1adddfe36cbe_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/finlands-scho...
- jacobush 6y ago
  Before Finland, there was Sweden. You’d think they should glean at us and reconsider... Edit: I can fault Sweden for not reverting back to a traditional curriculum and back to a state controlled school. But I can't really fault it that much for trying. Someone's gotta try new stuff! But Finland is probably the one country most similar to Sweden in the world, and so they should be able to draw take some valuable inputs from both our successes and failures. Our school experiment went pretty badly.
FpUser 6y ago
Darwin award in education area?
2rsf 6y ago
Some high schools in the Stockholm area, where I live, are having somewhat similar approach, although there are still official subject based exams done by the ministry of education. My feeling is that this can work great for great and curious students, and not so much otherwise.
Razengan 6y ago
School should be like onboarding tutorials for a game. You've just signed into the greatest MMORPG ever. This is planet Earth. You chose the Human species. You were randomly spawned in this country, which is here. You share this world with these other players and critters. Here's some of the common technology we use, and the basics of how it works, made possible by the players working in these professions. There are limited resources, for now, but there are other worlds out there. What would you like to do?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- op03 6y ago
  If its done well people would never leave school :)
  - satysin 6y ago
    One of the issues I have with todays world is this attitude most have to stopping education once you hit ~21 for the majority of people. I genuinely believe the world would be a better place if we had as much support for people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, to go back into education as we do for 18-21 year olds going to university. I didn't have the opportunity to go to university at 18 for a number of reasons (some fault of my own and some not) and would love to go now but it just isn't realistic without negatively impacting my life (mostly financially) for a few years. Sure you can argue "if you really wanted to do it you would" and that is a fair point but I don't feel the struggle should be so high. Why can't we make it easier for someone in their 30s or 40s, for example, to get a degree and change the direction of their life? So many people are where they are now and cannot change that because the start of their life was disadvantaged through no fault of their own. Now they are adults, give them the chance to be more. I know I know I am being idealistic but I just hate seeing people with so much potential going to waste because they lost some geographic/privilege lottery at birth. While I have questions regarding things like UBI I do hope that with automation changing how we work that we invest more in education for older people as well.
m4r35n357 6y ago
We used to understand how to educate. The hippies broke all that. Education is about learning skills, not "having fun".
- emilfihlman 6y ago
  Agreed. While having fun can increase learning it's not a direct requirement nor is having fun all the time beneficial to learning. It's much more important that people feel like they have learned instead that they feel like they are having fun learning.
  - falcor84 6y ago
    I would strongly disagree with that. From my experience, someone who feels like they have learned would be proud of themselves for a while and then usually go on and forget the learning while happy with their "success"; someone who is having fun learning will go on learning.
    - emilfihlman 6y ago
      In my experience, having fun while learning really takes away from learning. It slows down and hinders progress and becomes obnoxious after a while. The target of comprehensive school and upper secondary is to teach people as much about different things as possible, have them learn social interaction and a small amount of how to learn and how to adapt information. They will likely not learn as much and as varied information ever again. The target of a university education is to have people learn how to learn, do research and apply that information, and drill into a single field and learn about that field and make progress in that field. Mixing "fun" into this is counter productive for the most part.
    - mymythisisthis 6y ago
      I think that intrinsic motivation is almost important. If a child shows an interest in something that they should be encouraged to pursue it. For example if a student in grade 8 says that they are interested in scuba diving, they should be giving the opportunity to take a 2-3 week intensive 16hr a day boot camp. A motivated kid can easily do 16hrs days. Such programs should be ready to implement the moment a kid shows interests. Strike while the metal is hot. I've seen bored kids in class, not understanding a lesson, and not caring. They're doodling away, and interested in graffiti. If I could, I'd put such a kid in a calligraphy boot-camp, 16hrs a day. Not only would they learn something that they are interested in but, all learn to learn - and be better in all subjects. In Toronto some kids that are on verge of dropping out are transferred to a special school that focuses on skate-board building, and the business around selling skate-boards. http://oasisskateboardfactory.blogspot.com/ http://oasisskateboardfactory.blogspot.com/ Its had some success.
Ensorceled 6y ago
The biggest problem preteen me faced as a curious and voracious reader was not knowing what I didn't know. With limited experience and limited knowledge of the world, I didn't know what phenomenon were actually interesting to me. So, I became an limited expert in medieval weaponry, which didn't even serve me well in later D&D sessions because a "long sword is a sidearm damn it". Other kids became experts in dinosaurs. How many kids would actually pursue learning about the phenomenon of "cafeteria services" and would that actually be something that was taught, that just seems ludicrous on the face of it. Also, I have ADHD, the idea of pre-diagnosis me being dropped into this environment makes me wonder; would I have done better or far, far worse.
- phalangion 6y ago
  I agree that kids might have a hard time deciding what they want to learn, but it sounds like this approach is less "learn whatever is interesting to you" and more "let's pick some topics together and go from there." And I disagree that "cafeteria services" is ludicrous. Think of how many things go into planning and preparing meals in the cafeteria. There's the cooking, serving, staffing, ordering, combining, purchasing, and planning. Math goes into estimating how much of each thing to buy, food safety and biological processes can be taught in the context of how long food can be kept safely. Communication goes into creating the menu, and also in the ordering processes. A persuasive essay on cafeteria food selection could be part of the work.
  - Ensorceled 6y ago
    Right, but what high school student is dreaming of a job in cafeteria services? Why are they developing curriculum for this? What poor kid gets to become an expert in how long drums of fry oil can safely be stored before they turn 18? Would not general management or general nutrition be a far more interesting, useful and universally applicable skill set?
    - xpaqui 6y ago
      Speaking from experience, none of the high school skills apply to my current job or day to day. Why would this utilitarian argument that doesn't apply to the current curriculum have to apply to the new one?
bjarneh 6y ago
Thought the reason the Finnish were so successful was that they had opted out of all the new modern ways of teaching in the past 50 years...
- emilfihlman 6y ago
  100%
- jeltz 6y ago
  Yeah, they seem to use a slightly modernized version of how schools used to teach here in Sweden and are hugely successful unlike us. So if they implement this it is more likely that they will make things worse rather than better.
  - netjiro 6y ago
    From what I've seen, the decline in Swedish education started with moving primary education from centralised state control and funding to municipal control and (significantly less) funding. Then accelerated with removing national testing, removal of grading of younger kids, removal of the centralised bell curve grading, the "friskola" reform. Each change is visible in general statistics from the early exams in the university programs if you look at statistics going back to the 60s.
- organicfigs 6y ago
  As someone who used to live in Finland, their "success" is mostly driven by an excellent student:teacher ratio and a phenomenal social services system. Any adult who is struggling through a crisis will be helped by a system that 1) doesn't stigmatize 2) is able to retain talent (because they probably only make 10% less than a software engineer so you have many more capable people interested in it). Conversely, education in America fails for people in low socio-economic conditions primarily because of a lack of these two, not because Finland's found a magical/effective way of teaching an average 10-year-old kid.
ptero 6y ago
I wish Finland best of luck in this (no irony), but personally I am very skeptical. While a fraction of time spent this (and/or for some kids) this way may be great, I personally learned basics best in a more traditional approach of class time, a list of problems to solve and a book that I could read alone at my own pace. I will be very interested in what comes out after a few years, thanks for posting.
alexheikel 6y ago
It’s about time to change the game
mymythisisthis 6y ago
Another approach would be to teach a child only one subject and base all lesson around that subject till college. For example, biology; all math examples would deal with biology, all fiction books would have something to do with bio, the classroom would be filled with biographies of people in biology, art would be based around drawings in biology. You can do the same thing for car-mechanics, etc. A series of small, extremely focused schools. Run these schools parallel to the mainstream, normal schools.
- falcor84 6y ago
  This sounds to me like the fastest possible way to increase social stratification
  - mymythisisthis 6y ago
    I base the idea on this - ""The experiment began in 1970 "with a simple premise: that any child has the innate capacity to become a genius in any chosen field, as long as education starts before their third birthday and they begin to specialise at six."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r The idea is not for every family.
    - sitkack 6y ago
      Rather than some weird society based off of specialized geniuses, why not just make metageniuses that are good at general learning? Isn't that what the education system should be doing? Most things in life really aren't that hard and with <80 hrs of hands on training people are able are often able to self teach and know when to ask questions and where to ask them. What if we got that down to 20 or 10?
emilfihlman 6y ago
As a Finn, this is really, really bad. Our performance in PISA and other metrics have been slipping and slipping from 2k. We used to lead in education, with these changes we no longer do.
LatteLazy 6y ago
I'm a brit, so I'm both cynical by nature and I've watched the defunding of our public education system and (imho) it's conversion into a babysitting service. A major tool in that process has been "reforms" where new approaches are selected for being cheaper and then sold as a "graet new way to build young minds". That was the case when this same approach was introduced 15 years ago to my schooling: the school couldn't find a physics teacher for less than most supermarket workers earn, they had to have a physics teacher (with a degree) to teach physics, but if they taught geography, sciences and physical education as a combined subject and called it "cross curriculum", a geographer and a football coach could manage the whole thing for half the price. It took two years for the failure to become apparent and another 2 to fix it. The school closed its funding gap. And only the kids suffered. I really hope this isn't that.
tzs 6y ago
It was unclear to me if this means that you only learn the minimum about each subject necessary for the phenomena you are studying, or if it is more that the phenomena are used to make the subjects interesting to the students but you still learn the subject to the same breadth that you would under the traditional system. Note that the "minimum necessary" approach could still teach the same breadth as the traditional approach if enough different phenomena were covered. Even if you have enough phenomena to get full coverage of some underlying subject I would worry that it would lack cohesion. If you learn a subject piecemeal as it comes up as part of the various phenomena you are studying, it might be harder to get the big picture for that subject and see it as anything more than a bag of tricks. This could possibly be avoided by careful selection and sequencing of phenomena.
- sitkack 6y ago
  On the second pass of subject, one could definitely go deeper or now compare it to all past exposures. I see this as a constructivist technique that could be great at framing context. Without context ideas cannot adhere to the mind, so getting students to breakdown a system into all the pieces starts them on a metacognitive feedback loop. Done right it could be amazing, done poorly and its like an elementary school play.
Geee 6y ago
People who are in sports and music are an order of magnitude better when they start at a very young age and keep practicing methodically their whole life. If they didn't start at young age, no amount of practice will be enough to catch up. There's some part of the brain that is able to specialize before certain age. I've been wondering if this would apply to other fields as well. What if someone starts programming at 5 years old and keeps practicing for 5 hours a day? Maybe that's what's required to get the real genius out of people. I might be wrong but I think there used to be more extraordinary talent before the modern school system.
- finder83 6y ago
  This is completely anecdotal, but my brother first taught me to program when I was 5. I definitely didn't practice for 5 hours a day, but kept programming over the years and am a programmer now. I'm a senior programmer but am pretty average in my estimation. I maybe QA test things better than the average programmer but I am not what I'd consider a 10x programmer or anything. I've met programmers who started later in life and are better than I am. Maybe the only benefit I have is that I'm usually decent at architecting systems. With that said, there are plenty of kids who start piano early and never really become virtuosos. It may help to become a genius if you start earlier, but it still seems to be rare.
organicfigs 6y ago
After seeing so many posts on Finland recently, I feel an obligation to emphasize something (as someone who used to live in Finland): While it's safe, affordable, and definitely one of the best places to raise a family, it's nothing to romanticize. If you're not Finnish/Swedish, there's a lot of implicit racism and it's an upward climb for many aspects of life. I was speaking with someone pretty high up in the DNC: if you're an ambitious refugee, America is still the best place for you. You can drive taxis, pay for your education, and become a software engineer without anyone questioning you. I literally know a handful of refugees who got free education in Finland but were denied most job opportunities because of systematic racism.
- golf3 6y ago
  The audacity for a Finnish refugee to think he's more important than a Finnish child.
- originalvichy 6y ago
  While I can’t disagree since I am not a refugee: As a child of african immigrants I’ve been pretty fortunate to pursue what I want thanks to good school success (not amazing, but enough to make me a smart young adult). The this country has too a very high bar for employment because of ubiquitous education. It’s probably very hard for a refugee from a country which doesn’t have schools that are known to be ”good”. Could it be racism? Yes, I can’t deny that. But my family members and friends have not had trouble finding employment that matches their education level. I think a place like Finland suffers from at the same time taking in refugees and immigrants as potential workers, but at the same time requiring too much skills/degrees for fairly simple work that shouldn’t require degrees, but goes to someone with a degree.
  - organicfigs 6y ago
    Moikka, I'm happy you've found a stable life. The thing is that subtle/implicit racism is quite difficult to pick up on. It involves not being: * given the benefit of the doubt in difficult situations * realizing how easy it is to socialize normally * given a fair shake in a candidate pool I, unfortunately, was a witness to many minorities not being given these benefits easily (not being one of them). Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" explains the mechanisms of these implicit biases well, and unfortunately, they're much more evident in Finland than most American metropolitan cities. It's difficult to pick up on them and unless you realize the hurdles in front of you, you're just built to jump higher without giving it a second thought.
netjiro 6y ago
I'm curious. Is there anyone here that have their children in special schools for gifted children? Or were themselves placed in specific schools? Not just accelerated, skipping grades, extra activities, etc. Which schools? Good/bad? Most notable effects?
jkmcf 6y ago
There are quite a few schools in America already doing this. A friend’s kids attended all the way to 18yo. They seem to have turned out ok, but I haven’t checked in recently. IIRC, they found jobs doing things they love. They are given pretty much total freedom. At the end of the year they have to justify their time and what they accomplished. Like another said, I don’t know if ADD me would have thrived here, but we’ll never know. People say boredom is essential for a variety of reasons, so maybe this works in the small but for a country.
keenmaster 6y ago
Lecture-style, didactic teaching is significantly better than conversational/Socratic teaching in most circumstances. I assume Finland’s new approach will perform similarly to the conversational style, which is to say poorly. Students can get the best of both worlds if: 1. Students get the best didactic instruction for any given subject (supplementing your Calculus class with videos from the best online Calculus class can help achieve “best” here, in lieu of a really good teacher - hybrid online+in-person teaching can also be formalized as the default approach). 2. Students can be fast tracked to higher level classes if they are fast learners (with no formal limit on how high they can go) 3. There is no limit on the number of classes students can take and get credit for. Simultaneous with in-person instruction, they can take federally funded online classes that they get grades and credit for. Ideally, enrollment for the online classes should be on a rolling basis. If a student wants to start a new class at the beginning of November and spend each holiday break bashing out an online Intro to Python class that they’ve been itching to take, let them, and give them the resources they need between those breaks to solidify their learning.
jariel 6y ago
"Finland has decided to change this in their educational system and introduce something which is suitable for the 21st century." - evidence? "In Phenomenon Based Learning (PhenoBL) and teaching, holistic real-world phenomena provide the starting point for learning." - this sounds like the corporate market babble. " choose from phenomena from their real surroundings and the world, such as Media and Technology, or the European Union." - and so Greek Literature fits into this how exactly? Finland it seems has maybe the best education system in the world, and like a programmer never satisfied, has to do a ground-up re-factor? "you are now thinking the PhenoBL way!" - this feels like a cult. This all sounds interesting, maybe it's something they should try in district or two for a few years, before doing this across the country? Why on earth would someone completely refactor an essential and integral aspect of social function in such a risky way without concrete evidence?

169 points by simon_000666 6y ago

Gravityloss 6y ago

Risky experiment.

maltelandwehr 6y ago
If it is a couple of weeks every year, I don’t see too much of a risk.

tremguy 6y ago

Finn here. Results have been negative on this so far, at least for students before high school [1]. Most children at that stage aren't yet capable of self-directed learning. Problem is compounded by the distractive effect of digital equipment in class. [1] https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_digital-based_curriculum_impedes_learning_researcher_finds/10514984 https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_digital-based_cu...

wirrbel 6y ago
German here, we also have our fair share of experimentation on children in schools.. From what I have learned while reading about pedagocial reforms, most arguments don't really treat the student body as a diverse set of people, rather they pretend that students are all alike and then present a way of learning that a subset of the students strive with. This is not about the (long debunke) myth that some people would be visual learners and some would learn better with their sense of smell. No. What I mean is, some people fare better with lecture-style classroom presentations, some better with individual experimentation. All kids need guidance. It seems that the reforms that are made are usually a certain pedagocial-model teaming up with monetary or economic interests (cutting costs in education). So in our schools, we saw that Physics teachers were on short supply (they rather earned better money outside of schools). So they mixed all Science subjects in middle school and named it "Natural Phenomena". As a result, the physics is taught by biology teachers who sometimes prepared their lessons with the math teachers of the school because it wasn't their core strength...
- tilolebo 6y ago
  French living in Germany and married to a primary school teacher here. Theoretically,differentiated learning is what teachers should use. But as you observed, and like in many other countries such as France, reforms supposedly pedagogical are mostly decided based on economic interests. On the field, teachers are understaffed and unable to apply the program.
- vimslayer 6y ago
  I think pretty much everyone agrees with you on that, I haven't seen anyone advocate that students _should_ be treated all alike. It's just that providing individual guidance requires more teachers and thus more money... And then someone comes in and suggests that we don't need so many new teachers if we "use technology" to help fill the need, like some learning app could be the silver bullet that revolutionizes teaching. Maybe it will some day, but seeing what we've had so far I'm not exactly holding my breath waiting to see that happen.
  - WanderPanda 6y ago
    In Germany the zeitgeist is: equal opportunity = treating all students alike (even ones with special needs). If you are arguing for more individual and specialized education, you are widely considered anti-social and it is suggested that your intend is to build / maintain a small (educational) elite that aspires to enslave all others...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - watwut 6y ago
      But Germany splits students int different tracks quite soon. There is differentiation when kids are something like 10-12.
      - usr1106 6y ago
        Remember that there is no German school system. Education is subject of state (Länder) law. So there are quite some differences between different parts of Germany. Traditionally, some 30-40 years back you were supposed to know whether you go to university or not at the age of ten. However, this is no longer really the case. Many prepare for university in theory, but never go there.
jacobush 6y ago
Welcome to Sweden. I was hoping we would catch up with you again, but not this way...
jay4Oov9 6y ago
Is there a separation in Finland between public school (where those programs are applied) and private school (which do what they want)? And if so, do the ministers and government officials who decided on that send their kids to public schools? (not implying any scheme, just curious if they eat their own dogfood)
- asutekku 6y ago
  We really do not have any private schools in finland, almost everything is public.
  - jay4Oov9 6y ago
    Oh, that's great (for equity between citizen, that is). Somehow, you guys always rock :)
- eMSF 6y ago
  Private schools are rather rare, and most of them follow the national curriculum. I don't think their small existence affects policy changes like this much at all.
- emilfihlman 6y ago
  There really are not "private" schools in Finland (not in comprehensive school nor in upper secondary). They must all follow the same teaching requirements that public schools offer and they get government funding. And you don't get in with money but via application. So they are more like schools that are run by private individuals.
chongli 6y ago
I thought Finland already had the best schools in the world? Had they not heard the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”? This sounds terrible. Not everything in life can be achieved purely by intrinsic motivation. Human beings are a social species. We motivate each other through laws, social norms, and economic incentives. Children, who don’t know about any of those things, need direction lest they be caught totally unprepared.
- eMSF 6y ago
  >Had they not heard the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”? Not only that, but the current administration may have vastly overestimated their own influence in the previously great PISA results. Putting all their “smarts” into overhauling the system to improve it might not do anything of the sort.
- rgblambda 6y ago
  >> Had they not heard the phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”? I remember watching an interview with a Finnish teacher where they were asked this very question. Their answer was something like "Being best in the world doesn't mean we can't be better" When you realise that Finland has little in the way of natural resources and it's economy is very much tied to the skills of the population it makes a lot of sense to be this focused on education.
  - chongli 6y ago
    Of course you can always be better. The question is whether you should flip the table with a radical experiment when you’re already number one. You don’t hear of many sports teams doing this. Businesses that try it risk a shareholder revolt.
- AQuantized 6y ago
  I think this is at odds with how they achieved that result to begin with. To become the best you have to be willing to experiment. It makes sense to keep iterating the process so long as you continue the majority of good practices and return to a previous iteration if it doesn't work out.
smoe 6y ago
From the article linked: "[...] phenomenon-based learning requires students have strong self-discipline and initiative. They also require students to be independent, focused and flexible." I'm not a teacher nor do I have children, so I'm mostly ignorant about this topic. But reading this made me think, if we shouldn't but maybe much more focus on qualities like being independent, focused and flexible early on instead of strictly following subjects as measured by Pisa tests? Given just how hard it is to focus and not procrastinate in today digital world, even for adults. I'm not sold on pure Phenomenal Education as I understand it. But my hunch is, that a mix could work quite well. Spent part of the time on focused bottom up learning on a single topic, and another in a more exploratory top down way.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  Sometimes people and institutions who say "I am going to focus on nice-sounding nebulous goals instead of this measurable stuff" achieve neither. I'd like to keep some measurable goals in school system. But maybe we could have both. Self-directed learning, and then participating in Pisa tests. With no bad consequences for the student if they utterly fail because they studied something else. But to have some feedback like "while you congratulate yourself on this and that, literacy in your country is the worst in the world".
  - smoe 6y ago
    I think I was/am one of the students that would have benefited from more cross-pollination of topics and a mix between self direction and directions. I never enjoyed math for its own sake when I was in school and my grades where pretty mediocre, later I had the same with algorithms & data structures. On their own, how they are often presented in books and platforms like hacker rank, I find them rather boring and solving challanges just with a correct and optimal solution in mind is not very appealing to me. But as soon as I'm in a work context, or when I dabbled in computational biology or digital signal processing for music on the side I can completely lose the sense of time while digging into whatever is necessary to get done what I want to do. So I think there a ways to get from nebulous goals and activities into measurable impacts.
kstenerud 6y ago
The problem stems from trying to make a one-size-fits-all solution. You can never fit everyone into the same box, but people like simple solutions so we keep trying. In the 2nd grade, I had a teacher who recognized potential in some of her students and separated them from the rest of the class to engage in self-directed learning. There were three of us chosen. I achieved grade 5 level proficiency in a number of subjects, while the smartest kid reached grade 7 in almost all of them. The following year, I changed schools, and spent the next 3 years re-doing the same boring shit over and over. My protestations were countered with "Well, if you've already done it, then it should be easy to do it again!" I learned my lesson, and my grades from that point on slipped from straight As to the minimum required to pass. I'd only apply myself when doing my own projects (mostly programming). Like in anything else, if you want to see success, you need to hire teachers who can recognize and focus potential, and then give them the leeway to do so based on their good judgment.
- netjiro 6y ago
  I've seen test numbers where the top 5% group learn around 5-10x faster than the 50% group. The numbers hold for short term recall, long term recall, problem solving, critical and creative thinking, etc. There is no way "school" can equalise this. There is no reason to keep stuffing everyone in one box.
  - danenania 6y ago
    I believe that in Japan, they deal with this disparity by asking the top students to help teach others in the class. It seems like an interesting approach in that teaching something well requires a much higher bar of understanding than doing well on a test, and it’s an excellent way to reinforce knowledge for the one doing the teaching. So the top students get a more difficult challenge than just coasting along, and the other students benefit as well. And, of course, it promotes teamwork and solidarity. I’m sure there are downsides too. Perhaps it could create tension between the “teacher’s pets” and the others?
    - kstenerud 6y ago
zerr 6y ago
Off-topic: can you please share where the materials (curriculum, books/ref, etc..) of coding classes at Finnish schools can be found?
em-bee 6y ago
but that's not the students fault. self directed learning had to be practiced with guidance. it doesn't emerge by itself. the montessori method comes to mind as an approach that potentially enables self directed learning.
mordae 6y ago
Digital equipment was never designed with teaching in mind. Take a typical Android installation for an example. - There is no tutorial mode for a true newcomer. - There is no central naming scheme - every application is an island. - Most of the applications are hostile and present you with ads. - Most of the applications won't let you study them. It resembles a street market more than a safe learning environment.
ivan_ah 6y ago
Thanks for sharing that article. Would you happen to have other recent articles that describe the results after 3 years of the new approach? [Even if you google search for me in Finnish and share the top-five relevant results, this would be super helpful for me. I can use google translate after that.] I agree with you that primary and middle school students are too young to be self-directed, but that doesn't necessarily contradict the no-subjects approach. The phenomenon-based learning can still be led by a teacher. Also as far as technology being distracting, that doesn't surprise me much. I think some very careful selection of the apps and tools is needed, but it can totally be done (e.g. offline or local installation of web apps and tools specific to learning and not open access to the internet or game-like apps).
vmception 6y ago
There are grade-flexible schools systems with mixed classrooms. I wonder if Finland evaluated that. I saw one school system where the students vote on everything. It wasn't Montessori but something else I can't remember the name of.

wirrbel 6y ago

We have that in Germany with regards to Science subjects in grade 5-7 (depending on the state / region). So roughly speaking there is a class about science topics where children would learn about things that would normally be taught in biology, geography, chemistry, physics. From what I hear no one is really happy with it (except principals who are more flexible assigning their staff to classes). So parents and teachers alike aren't very happy. A fixed and subject based curriculum is easier to teach and and easier to pick up. The things you learn are presented in a proper order, that gives orientation. If you present them more interspersed its disorienting, and at times appears random. And its beyond me how the "interconnectedness" of subjects cannot be taught within a classical subject-based model.

maltelandwehr 6y ago
In which Bundesländer is that done and when was it introduced? I am German but never heard of it.
- wirrbel 6y ago
  BaWü, definitely in Unterstufe at Realschule. Don't know if they have remodelled it in the meantime but I haven't heard so.
TsiCClawOfLight 6y ago
I had something like that in elementary school in Belgium and it was amazing. I have never been taught so well since then, except for 1 case in University! Many topics are much easier to understand (and generalise from, and memorise!) if they are tackled from multiple angles, without regard for "subjects". We would approach them with some math, some history, physics, biology, ecology - whatever helped. And since everything was well organized, lessons built upon the previous ones and all prerequisites were introduced at the correct time. This even had the advantage that we would remember more abstract math and formulae well, because we knew where we had used it to learn interesting things! :) Of course, that probably took a lot of work and dedication (1 teacher did all of it for each school year), even more so for high school I suppose. But it was worth it, and the lack of integration/connection is one of the biggest problems I see with the current school system in Germany/Austria.

aaron695 6y ago

Finland is top of the world (But slowly dropping), famous for their teaching. So they are abandoning it. Classic 21st century. You have a top heavy organisations with working systems, but managers have ladders to climb and salaries to justify. "Finland’s schools were once the envy of the world. Now, they’re slipping" https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/finlands-schools-were-once-the-envy-of-the-world-now-theyre-slipping/2016/12/08/dcfd0f56-bd60-11e6-91ee-1adddfe36cbe_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/finlands-scho...

jacobush 6y ago
Before Finland, there was Sweden. You’d think they should glean at us and reconsider... Edit: I can fault Sweden for not reverting back to a traditional curriculum and back to a state controlled school. But I can't really fault it that much for trying. Someone's gotta try new stuff! But Finland is probably the one country most similar to Sweden in the world, and so they should be able to draw take some valuable inputs from both our successes and failures. Our school experiment went pretty badly.

FpUser 6y ago

Darwin award in education area?

2rsf 6y ago

Some high schools in the Stockholm area, where I live, are having somewhat similar approach, although there are still official subject based exams done by the ministry of education. My feeling is that this can work great for great and curious students, and not so much otherwise.

Razengan 6y ago

School should be like onboarding tutorials for a game. You've just signed into the greatest MMORPG ever. This is planet Earth. You chose the Human species. You were randomly spawned in this country, which is here. You share this world with these other players and critters. Here's some of the common technology we use, and the basics of how it works, made possible by the players working in these professions. There are limited resources, for now, but there are other worlds out there. What would you like to do?

deleted 6y ago
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op03 6y ago
If its done well people would never leave school :)
- satysin 6y ago
  One of the issues I have with todays world is this attitude most have to stopping education once you hit ~21 for the majority of people. I genuinely believe the world would be a better place if we had as much support for people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, to go back into education as we do for 18-21 year olds going to university. I didn't have the opportunity to go to university at 18 for a number of reasons (some fault of my own and some not) and would love to go now but it just isn't realistic without negatively impacting my life (mostly financially) for a few years. Sure you can argue "if you really wanted to do it you would" and that is a fair point but I don't feel the struggle should be so high. Why can't we make it easier for someone in their 30s or 40s, for example, to get a degree and change the direction of their life? So many people are where they are now and cannot change that because the start of their life was disadvantaged through no fault of their own. Now they are adults, give them the chance to be more. I know I know I am being idealistic but I just hate seeing people with so much potential going to waste because they lost some geographic/privilege lottery at birth. While I have questions regarding things like UBI I do hope that with automation changing how we work that we invest more in education for older people as well.

m4r35n357 6y ago

We used to understand how to educate. The hippies broke all that. Education is about learning skills, not "having fun".

emilfihlman 6y ago
Agreed. While having fun can increase learning it's not a direct requirement nor is having fun all the time beneficial to learning. It's much more important that people feel like they have learned instead that they feel like they are having fun learning.
- falcor84 6y ago
  I would strongly disagree with that. From my experience, someone who feels like they have learned would be proud of themselves for a while and then usually go on and forget the learning while happy with their "success"; someone who is having fun learning will go on learning.
  - emilfihlman 6y ago
    In my experience, having fun while learning really takes away from learning. It slows down and hinders progress and becomes obnoxious after a while. The target of comprehensive school and upper secondary is to teach people as much about different things as possible, have them learn social interaction and a small amount of how to learn and how to adapt information. They will likely not learn as much and as varied information ever again. The target of a university education is to have people learn how to learn, do research and apply that information, and drill into a single field and learn about that field and make progress in that field. Mixing "fun" into this is counter productive for the most part.
  - mymythisisthis 6y ago
    I think that intrinsic motivation is almost important. If a child shows an interest in something that they should be encouraged to pursue it. For example if a student in grade 8 says that they are interested in scuba diving, they should be giving the opportunity to take a 2-3 week intensive 16hr a day boot camp. A motivated kid can easily do 16hrs days. Such programs should be ready to implement the moment a kid shows interests. Strike while the metal is hot. I've seen bored kids in class, not understanding a lesson, and not caring. They're doodling away, and interested in graffiti. If I could, I'd put such a kid in a calligraphy boot-camp, 16hrs a day. Not only would they learn something that they are interested in but, all learn to learn - and be better in all subjects. In Toronto some kids that are on verge of dropping out are transferred to a special school that focuses on skate-board building, and the business around selling skate-boards. http://oasisskateboardfactory.blogspot.com/ http://oasisskateboardfactory.blogspot.com/ Its had some success.

Ensorceled 6y ago

The biggest problem preteen me faced as a curious and voracious reader was not knowing what I didn't know. With limited experience and limited knowledge of the world, I didn't know what phenomenon were actually interesting to me. So, I became an limited expert in medieval weaponry, which didn't even serve me well in later D&D sessions because a "long sword is a sidearm damn it". Other kids became experts in dinosaurs. How many kids would actually pursue learning about the phenomenon of "cafeteria services" and would that actually be something that was taught, that just seems ludicrous on the face of it. Also, I have ADHD, the idea of pre-diagnosis me being dropped into this environment makes me wonder; would I have done better or far, far worse.

phalangion 6y ago
I agree that kids might have a hard time deciding what they want to learn, but it sounds like this approach is less "learn whatever is interesting to you" and more "let's pick some topics together and go from there." And I disagree that "cafeteria services" is ludicrous. Think of how many things go into planning and preparing meals in the cafeteria. There's the cooking, serving, staffing, ordering, combining, purchasing, and planning. Math goes into estimating how much of each thing to buy, food safety and biological processes can be taught in the context of how long food can be kept safely. Communication goes into creating the menu, and also in the ordering processes. A persuasive essay on cafeteria food selection could be part of the work.
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  Right, but what high school student is dreaming of a job in cafeteria services? Why are they developing curriculum for this? What poor kid gets to become an expert in how long drums of fry oil can safely be stored before they turn 18? Would not general management or general nutrition be a far more interesting, useful and universally applicable skill set?
  - xpaqui 6y ago
    Speaking from experience, none of the high school skills apply to my current job or day to day. Why would this utilitarian argument that doesn't apply to the current curriculum have to apply to the new one?

bjarneh 6y ago

Thought the reason the Finnish were so successful was that they had opted out of all the new modern ways of teaching in the past 50 years...

emilfihlman 6y ago
100%
jeltz 6y ago
Yeah, they seem to use a slightly modernized version of how schools used to teach here in Sweden and are hugely successful unlike us. So if they implement this it is more likely that they will make things worse rather than better.
- netjiro 6y ago
  From what I've seen, the decline in Swedish education started with moving primary education from centralised state control and funding to municipal control and (significantly less) funding. Then accelerated with removing national testing, removal of grading of younger kids, removal of the centralised bell curve grading, the "friskola" reform. Each change is visible in general statistics from the early exams in the university programs if you look at statistics going back to the 60s.
organicfigs 6y ago
As someone who used to live in Finland, their "success" is mostly driven by an excellent student:teacher ratio and a phenomenal social services system. Any adult who is struggling through a crisis will be helped by a system that 1) doesn't stigmatize 2) is able to retain talent (because they probably only make 10% less than a software engineer so you have many more capable people interested in it). Conversely, education in America fails for people in low socio-economic conditions primarily because of a lack of these two, not because Finland's found a magical/effective way of teaching an average 10-year-old kid.

ptero 6y ago

I wish Finland best of luck in this (no irony), but personally I am very skeptical. While a fraction of time spent this (and/or for some kids) this way may be great, I personally learned basics best in a more traditional approach of class time, a list of problems to solve and a book that I could read alone at my own pace. I will be very interested in what comes out after a few years, thanks for posting.

alexheikel 6y ago

It’s about time to change the game

mymythisisthis 6y ago

Another approach would be to teach a child only one subject and base all lesson around that subject till college. For example, biology; all math examples would deal with biology, all fiction books would have something to do with bio, the classroom would be filled with biographies of people in biology, art would be based around drawings in biology. You can do the same thing for car-mechanics, etc. A series of small, extremely focused schools. Run these schools parallel to the mainstream, normal schools.

falcor84 6y ago
This sounds to me like the fastest possible way to increase social stratification
- mymythisisthis 6y ago
  I base the idea on this - ""The experiment began in 1970 "with a simple premise: that any child has the innate capacity to become a genius in any chosen field, as long as education starts before their third birthday and they begin to specialise at six."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r The idea is not for every family.
  - sitkack 6y ago
    Rather than some weird society based off of specialized geniuses, why not just make metageniuses that are good at general learning? Isn't that what the education system should be doing? Most things in life really aren't that hard and with <80 hrs of hands on training people are able are often able to self teach and know when to ask questions and where to ask them. What if we got that down to 20 or 10?

emilfihlman 6y ago

As a Finn, this is really, really bad. Our performance in PISA and other metrics have been slipping and slipping from 2k. We used to lead in education, with these changes we no longer do.

LatteLazy 6y ago

I'm a brit, so I'm both cynical by nature and I've watched the defunding of our public education system and (imho) it's conversion into a babysitting service. A major tool in that process has been "reforms" where new approaches are selected for being cheaper and then sold as a "graet new way to build young minds". That was the case when this same approach was introduced 15 years ago to my schooling: the school couldn't find a physics teacher for less than most supermarket workers earn, they had to have a physics teacher (with a degree) to teach physics, but if they taught geography, sciences and physical education as a combined subject and called it "cross curriculum", a geographer and a football coach could manage the whole thing for half the price. It took two years for the failure to become apparent and another 2 to fix it. The school closed its funding gap. And only the kids suffered. I really hope this isn't that.

tzs 6y ago

It was unclear to me if this means that you only learn the minimum about each subject necessary for the phenomena you are studying, or if it is more that the phenomena are used to make the subjects interesting to the students but you still learn the subject to the same breadth that you would under the traditional system. Note that the "minimum necessary" approach could still teach the same breadth as the traditional approach if enough different phenomena were covered. Even if you have enough phenomena to get full coverage of some underlying subject I would worry that it would lack cohesion. If you learn a subject piecemeal as it comes up as part of the various phenomena you are studying, it might be harder to get the big picture for that subject and see it as anything more than a bag of tricks. This could possibly be avoided by careful selection and sequencing of phenomena.

sitkack 6y ago
On the second pass of subject, one could definitely go deeper or now compare it to all past exposures. I see this as a constructivist technique that could be great at framing context. Without context ideas cannot adhere to the mind, so getting students to breakdown a system into all the pieces starts them on a metacognitive feedback loop. Done right it could be amazing, done poorly and its like an elementary school play.

Geee 6y ago

People who are in sports and music are an order of magnitude better when they start at a very young age and keep practicing methodically their whole life. If they didn't start at young age, no amount of practice will be enough to catch up. There's some part of the brain that is able to specialize before certain age. I've been wondering if this would apply to other fields as well. What if someone starts programming at 5 years old and keeps practicing for 5 hours a day? Maybe that's what's required to get the real genius out of people. I might be wrong but I think there used to be more extraordinary talent before the modern school system.

finder83 6y ago
This is completely anecdotal, but my brother first taught me to program when I was 5. I definitely didn't practice for 5 hours a day, but kept programming over the years and am a programmer now. I'm a senior programmer but am pretty average in my estimation. I maybe QA test things better than the average programmer but I am not what I'd consider a 10x programmer or anything. I've met programmers who started later in life and are better than I am. Maybe the only benefit I have is that I'm usually decent at architecting systems. With that said, there are plenty of kids who start piano early and never really become virtuosos. It may help to become a genius if you start earlier, but it still seems to be rare.

organicfigs 6y ago

After seeing so many posts on Finland recently, I feel an obligation to emphasize something (as someone who used to live in Finland): While it's safe, affordable, and definitely one of the best places to raise a family, it's nothing to romanticize. If you're not Finnish/Swedish, there's a lot of implicit racism and it's an upward climb for many aspects of life. I was speaking with someone pretty high up in the DNC: if you're an ambitious refugee, America is still the best place for you. You can drive taxis, pay for your education, and become a software engineer without anyone questioning you. I literally know a handful of refugees who got free education in Finland but were denied most job opportunities because of systematic racism.

golf3 6y ago
The audacity for a Finnish refugee to think he's more important than a Finnish child.
originalvichy 6y ago
While I can’t disagree since I am not a refugee: As a child of african immigrants I’ve been pretty fortunate to pursue what I want thanks to good school success (not amazing, but enough to make me a smart young adult). The this country has too a very high bar for employment because of ubiquitous education. It’s probably very hard for a refugee from a country which doesn’t have schools that are known to be ”good”. Could it be racism? Yes, I can’t deny that. But my family members and friends have not had trouble finding employment that matches their education level. I think a place like Finland suffers from at the same time taking in refugees and immigrants as potential workers, but at the same time requiring too much skills/degrees for fairly simple work that shouldn’t require degrees, but goes to someone with a degree.
- organicfigs 6y ago
  Moikka, I'm happy you've found a stable life. The thing is that subtle/implicit racism is quite difficult to pick up on. It involves not being: * given the benefit of the doubt in difficult situations * realizing how easy it is to socialize normally * given a fair shake in a candidate pool I, unfortunately, was a witness to many minorities not being given these benefits easily (not being one of them). Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" explains the mechanisms of these implicit biases well, and unfortunately, they're much more evident in Finland than most American metropolitan cities. It's difficult to pick up on them and unless you realize the hurdles in front of you, you're just built to jump higher without giving it a second thought.

netjiro 6y ago

I'm curious. Is there anyone here that have their children in special schools for gifted children? Or were themselves placed in specific schools? Not just accelerated, skipping grades, extra activities, etc. Which schools? Good/bad? Most notable effects?

jkmcf 6y ago

There are quite a few schools in America already doing this. A friend’s kids attended all the way to 18yo. They seem to have turned out ok, but I haven’t checked in recently. IIRC, they found jobs doing things they love. They are given pretty much total freedom. At the end of the year they have to justify their time and what they accomplished. Like another said, I don’t know if ADD me would have thrived here, but we’ll never know. People say boredom is essential for a variety of reasons, so maybe this works in the small but for a country.

keenmaster 6y ago

Lecture-style, didactic teaching is significantly better than conversational/Socratic teaching in most circumstances. I assume Finland’s new approach will perform similarly to the conversational style, which is to say poorly. Students can get the best of both worlds if: 1. Students get the best didactic instruction for any given subject (supplementing your Calculus class with videos from the best online Calculus class can help achieve “best” here, in lieu of a really good teacher - hybrid online+in-person teaching can also be formalized as the default approach). 2. Students can be fast tracked to higher level classes if they are fast learners (with no formal limit on how high they can go) 3. There is no limit on the number of classes students can take and get credit for. Simultaneous with in-person instruction, they can take federally funded online classes that they get grades and credit for. Ideally, enrollment for the online classes should be on a rolling basis. If a student wants to start a new class at the beginning of November and spend each holiday break bashing out an online Intro to Python class that they’ve been itching to take, let them, and give them the resources they need between those breaks to solidify their learning.

jariel 6y ago

"Finland has decided to change this in their educational system and introduce something which is suitable for the 21st century." - evidence? "In Phenomenon Based Learning (PhenoBL) and teaching, holistic real-world phenomena provide the starting point for learning." - this sounds like the corporate market babble. " choose from phenomena from their real surroundings and the world, such as Media and Technology, or the European Union." - and so Greek Literature fits into this how exactly? Finland it seems has maybe the best education system in the world, and like a programmer never satisfied, has to do a ground-up re-factor? "you are now thinking the PhenoBL way!" - this feels like a cult. This all sounds interesting, maybe it's something they should try in district or two for a few years, before doing this across the country? Why on earth would someone completely refactor an essential and integral aspect of social function in such a risky way without concrete evidence?