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If one wants to have a conversation about privilege and childhood education it is useful to look beyond labels for how one teaches and actually look at how scho

by avs733 5y ago

If one wants to have a conversation about privilege and childhood education it is useful to look beyond labels for how one teaches and actually look at how schools change with social class. Jean Anyon's work is really the baseline[0] and describes just how fundamentally different the schooling process experienced by the privileged and less privileged is. She looked entirely at public schools. >In the two working-class schools, work is following the steps of a procedure. The procedure is usually mechanical, involving rote behavior and very little decision making or choice. The teachers rarely explain why the work is being assigned, how it might connect to other assignments, or what the idea is that lies behind the procedure or gives it coherence and perhaps meaning or significance. ...Work is often evaluated not according to whether it is right or wrong but according to whether the children followed the right steps. >In the executive elite school, work is developing one's analytical intellectual powers. Children are continually asked to reason through a problem, to produce intellectual products that are both logically sound and of top academic quality. A primary goal of thought is to conceptualize rules by which elements may fit together in systems and then to apply these rules in solving a problem. [0]https://www1.udel.edu/educ/whitson/897s05/files/hiddencurriculum.htm https://www1.udel.edu/educ/whitson/897s05/files/hiddencurric...

estaseuropano 5y ago
Just to highlight this book is 40(?) years old. If you want to see how an egalitarian education system reaches the best education system results in the world - Estonia and Finland are the countries to look at. Their education indeed follows the second model here. But rote learning is also included - the point is to challenge and support the child in manifold ways and keep in mind that they should enjoy themselves. My point is though while in some countries this might be a class difference, really it comes down to a quality difference. Good quality does not actually need to be very expensive/rare, you can reach it at system level as do Estonia and Finland.
- avs733 5y ago
  Absolutely true and fair. Pardon the assumption of us contexts. And I was about to argue with 40 years old by saying i think it was written in the 1980s! And I caught myself
- 1123581321 5y ago
  Finland is an excellent model but it required weeding out bad teachers who couldn’t do better in the classroom or who couldn’t handle more difficult education and certification. This will never broadly happen in the US.
  - psalminen 5y ago
    I always thought this is the most critical idea for America to incorporate.
  - lmm 5y ago
    Finland has stronger employment protections than the US, so it seems unlikely this kind of "weeding out" (at least in the way its advocates usually mean it) is what they're doing better.
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      Genuinely only speaking theoretically: the US's combination of teachers' unions, state, and national programmes could all conspire to deliver stronger protections to bad teachers than Finland does.
    - 1123581321 5y ago
      It does sound unlikely, but increasing the seriousness and prestige of the teaching profession was core to Finland’s improvement in global education rankings. This short article will introduce you to their system. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jun/17/highly-trained-respected-and-free-why-finlands-teachers-are-different https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jun/17/highly-tra...
  - estaseuropano 5y ago
    Indeed, both made masters level pedagogical degrees and regular upskilling mandatory. The salaries are also decent but not actually extravagant in comparison to other jobs. They do of course have six weeks summer vacation, which certainly helps to make it attractive :-)
  - avs733 5y ago
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
  Finland's population is about the same as Melbourne's, Estonia about the same as Adelaide. I'd suspect it's likely that in countries with much larger populations, socio-cultural-economo class-like variance is probably higher, and inertia greater, so change is more difficult. I live in Tasmania, half the adult population is functionally illiterate, and voting is compulsory, so we have a situation where the pool of talent to select from for society wide decision making is more limited, perhaps, and the decisions being made have to be somewhat tolerated by the population. Agree in the general sense though, we should be looking to model our systems more on places like Finland and Estonia, rather than US / UK.
  - estaseuropano 5y ago
    True, they are smaller, but the key is they managed this shift. Their education was not always top notch - it changed by careful and wise policy design over ~2 decades. And while Estonia is small (1.4Mio), that still means we are talking about 600+ schools spread over an entire country (land area of the average US state), with a very low budget and vast differences by region, e.g. an impoverished east with Russian speakers, some very rural areas, and Tallinn and Tartu as major university towns with startup scenes. Finland is a bit bigger in population but even more population diversity, from a significant Swedish and Russian minority in the cities and east to finns spread out over rural and city areas, up to nomadic reindeer herders with their own unique language in the far north. So definitely an entire education system with its own challenges, which was not always good. > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Estonia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Estonia
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    The comparison with Australia is quite ironic. I would argue implementing drastic changes in a school system in a place like Australia would be much easier than Finland. These things work much better with the economies of scales afforded by large cities. The population density of Melbourne is orders of magnitude higher than that of Finland and let's not forget, more than half the OZ population lives in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. I found that Australians (in terms of politicians) are particularly probe to make these arguments how things can't be done here. The irony is that they go often both ways, either it can't be done because Australia is too big, or because its too small. High speed rail is another example, supposedly it's not feasible because of the low population density, completely ignoring the fact that the density is actually very concentrated, which is ideal for high speed rail. Just a connection Melbourne-Sydney would be perfect, that's (one of?) the busiest air routes in the world. This is all about political will, not feasibility.
antishatter 5y ago

by avs733 5y ago

estaseuropano 5y ago

Just to highlight this book is 40(?) years old. If you want to see how an egalitarian education system reaches the best education system results in the world - Estonia and Finland are the countries to look at. Their education indeed follows the second model here. But rote learning is also included - the point is to challenge and support the child in manifold ways and keep in mind that they should enjoy themselves. My point is though while in some countries this might be a class difference, really it comes down to a quality difference. Good quality does not actually need to be very expensive/rare, you can reach it at system level as do Estonia and Finland.

avs733 5y ago
Absolutely true and fair. Pardon the assumption of us contexts. And I was about to argue with 40 years old by saying i think it was written in the 1980s! And I caught myself
1123581321 5y ago
Finland is an excellent model but it required weeding out bad teachers who couldn’t do better in the classroom or who couldn’t handle more difficult education and certification. This will never broadly happen in the US.
- psalminen 5y ago
  I always thought this is the most critical idea for America to incorporate.
- lmm 5y ago
  Finland has stronger employment protections than the US, so it seems unlikely this kind of "weeding out" (at least in the way its advocates usually mean it) is what they're doing better.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    Genuinely only speaking theoretically: the US's combination of teachers' unions, state, and national programmes could all conspire to deliver stronger protections to bad teachers than Finland does.
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    It does sound unlikely, but increasing the seriousness and prestige of the teaching profession was core to Finland’s improvement in global education rankings. This short article will introduce you to their system. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jun/17/highly-trained-respected-and-free-why-finlands-teachers-are-different https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jun/17/highly-tra...
- estaseuropano 5y ago
  Indeed, both made masters level pedagogical degrees and regular upskilling mandatory. The salaries are also decent but not actually extravagant in comparison to other jobs. They do of course have six weeks summer vacation, which certainly helps to make it attractive :-)
- avs733 5y ago
TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
Finland's population is about the same as Melbourne's, Estonia about the same as Adelaide. I'd suspect it's likely that in countries with much larger populations, socio-cultural-economo class-like variance is probably higher, and inertia greater, so change is more difficult. I live in Tasmania, half the adult population is functionally illiterate, and voting is compulsory, so we have a situation where the pool of talent to select from for society wide decision making is more limited, perhaps, and the decisions being made have to be somewhat tolerated by the population. Agree in the general sense though, we should be looking to model our systems more on places like Finland and Estonia, rather than US / UK.
- estaseuropano 5y ago
  True, they are smaller, but the key is they managed this shift. Their education was not always top notch - it changed by careful and wise policy design over ~2 decades. And while Estonia is small (1.4Mio), that still means we are talking about 600+ schools spread over an entire country (land area of the average US state), with a very low budget and vast differences by region, e.g. an impoverished east with Russian speakers, some very rural areas, and Tallinn and Tartu as major university towns with startup scenes. Finland is a bit bigger in population but even more population diversity, from a significant Swedish and Russian minority in the cities and east to finns spread out over rural and city areas, up to nomadic reindeer herders with their own unique language in the far north. So definitely an entire education system with its own challenges, which was not always good. > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Estonia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Estonia
- cycomanic 5y ago
  The comparison with Australia is quite ironic. I would argue implementing drastic changes in a school system in a place like Australia would be much easier than Finland. These things work much better with the economies of scales afforded by large cities. The population density of Melbourne is orders of magnitude higher than that of Finland and let's not forget, more than half the OZ population lives in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. I found that Australians (in terms of politicians) are particularly probe to make these arguments how things can't be done here. The irony is that they go often both ways, either it can't be done because Australia is too big, or because its too small. High speed rail is another example, supposedly it's not feasible because of the low population density, completely ignoring the fact that the density is actually very concentrated, which is ideal for high speed rail. Just a connection Melbourne-Sydney would be perfect, that's (one of?) the busiest air routes in the world. This is all about political will, not feasibility.

antishatter 5y ago