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I am Polish, I live in Poland, and I found the article's praise for our education system strange. My opinion of it is much lower. I regularly worry about teachi

• speeder 13y ago
  I also think the article to be terrible. The article believes making more children have more shit on their head is the way to go... No, seriously, that is not "learning to think" that is learning formulas and other random shit that you will never use on your life with few exceptions. Learning to think is when you allow kids to learn on their own, what they are curious about, when curiosity drives learning, THEN people learn to think, because they have to. When you just hammer random facts on someone head, you just fill that someone head with random facts... And the only need for that, is to hammer those random facts on someone else head.
  • zanny 13y ago
    This. I don't think a single education system in the world gets this right, because it is so diametrically opposed to being able to gauge performance or have metrics to evaluate aptitude. You basically have to sit down and have a conversation with the person whenever you want to profile their progress, but nobody wants to put that time in with children, and it isn't something you could rate on a scale or regurgitate into teachers brains on how to perform. It requires critical thinking to see critical thinking.
• anonemouscoward 13y ago
  Everything the Economist publishes is motivated purely by politics. Poland is the number one USA ally, offset against the EU, and, especially, Russia, the evil bad guy in this current cold war.
  • NickPollard 13y ago
    Poland is part of the EU.
  • V-2 13y ago
    Actually it's the USA that plays the role of a bad guy in the article, with its "grim education results". And not a word about Russia
  • mdda 13y ago
    Perhaps you should read a bit more of what The Economist actually writes before making such a claim. They do indeed have a (stated) political viewpoint : The are a Liberal paper (in its original English sense, not in the sense that the word is used in US politics) [0]. [0] http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/economist-explains-itself-0 http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/ec...
• jakub_g 13y ago
  Recent graduate, I have the same experience. On the technical university I've met people who can't add two rational numbers correctly. High school programs in maths are setting lower bars every year. Since a few years ago, derivatives are no longer being taught in the high schools even in "extended math" path. And then you come to the university and have to catch up with incredible amounts of stuff to know what the physics professor is talking about.
• hanula 13y ago
  I would say the same, it's quite a shock read such a statement. On the other side I value my education I had in Poland only because it was hard sometimes and I was looking into how to hack the system and outsmart teachers' questions/assignments (math especially). Education system I had ten years ago was focused on memorization, "soft" subjects and skills (languages, first language) while math and physics weren't valued that much. On a maturity exam in 1998 we had an option (for the first time for everyone in the country), to choose between old style exam (Polish and second subject) and new style with obligatory math, much more tests and subjects, everything you could easily pass if you just know how to think. Old style was all about evaluation of how much did you remember from past 4 years... I was the only one in the whole school to choose the new form, where everyone else picked up this dumb but safe archaic form. I could also say a lot about technical universities in Poland.. I didn't graduate actually, after spending over 8 years there, failing stupid, uninteresting subjects, fighting stubborn teachers. Had great scores in subjects that actually interested me. This education system forces you to learn unnecessary things, to remember results and less to know the thinking process. Angry and mentally ill teachers making you suffer for minor or no reason at all. I know plenty of fellow countrymen similar process made them stronger but saying our system is good is far fetched.
  • simonh 13y ago
    >I would say the same, it's quite a shock read such a statement. You might find it interesting to read and comment on the actual article then. It dates the beginning of the recent reform of Poland's education system to 1997, just one year before you graduated, so it may be that a lot has changed since your time.
    • hanula 13y ago
      Thanks for pointing that out, so I can specify more on the topic. It's exactly why I'm astounded as everything back in 1998 looked like going into worse and ever since, I only hear how the level of education goes lower and lower (exact science especially; math and physics). I cannot give you specific sources as I find it from time to time while listening to podcasts about popular-science and technology where highly skilled and respected professors complain sometimes about current education level and the lack of plan for the future.
• morkbot 13y ago
  Apparently this is about PISA rating and Poland's "swift rise" in it - so: 1) it's verifiable 2) it's probably more about having good average than having some students be super-smart 3) it says more about PISA than Poland
• polskibus 13y ago
  On one hand I'd agree with you, on the other Poles whine a lot and need a lot of appreciation from others to believe in themselves. I have worked with many people educated in other countries in similar age as mine. We compared our educational experience - many admitted that in terms of scope, PL education seemed much better - more in-depth courses, more interesting problems solved during studies, etc. I'd say that you have to look at particular education levels and types of studies to get a good understanding on what's good and bad in PL education system.
  • jwr 13y ago
    I can't compare recent advances in educational systems, but I do have pretty good knowledge of at least what used to happen in high schools in the US and of schools and a technical university in France. The conclusions I'd draw (and mind you, this is knowledge from ~15-20 years ago, and it is my knowledge and my opinions): * Polish high school students indeed know more and are better at problem solving than most US high school students, * that said, there are high schools (public!) in the US that offer university-level courses and are excellent, * and university-level education seems to be much better in the US, * the US approach of "if the answer has one too many significant digit, it is wrong and you get zero points" is virtually unknown in Poland and comes as a shock to Polish students, who are often taught that "it is the approach that counts". I find the US approach much more realistic: it doesn't matter how you "approached" the design of a bridge, if the bridge collapsed. * French schools are quite similar to Polish ones, but: * mathematics taught at French technical universities (the best ones) is WAY WAY WAY above what a Polish high-school graduate would expect, My main point is that it is very difficult to compare educational systems and draw meaningful conclusions. Dealing with society-wide aggregates doesn't tell you much about the outliers: best schools, best students, specific curriculums, or specific sciences. My secondary point is that based on my experience I wouldn't say the Polish system is better than any other. And I don't see any sweeping changes that would improve the situation in recent years (the reshuffling of schools and age groups doesn't do much in my opinion).
    • Jtsummers 13y ago
      the US approach of "if the answer has one too many significant digit, it is wrong and you get zero points" is virtually unknown in Poland and comes as a shock to Polish students, who are often taught that "it is the approach that counts". I find the US approach much more realistic: it doesn't matter how you "approached" the design of a bridge, if the bridge collapsed. My problem with this all-or-nothing approach to grading, you aren't designing a bridge in a 2 hour exam with a graphing calculator and pencil and 3 sheets of scratch paper. These aren't representative of real world situations, engineering rarely operates under that sort of time crunch. Apollo 13 is an exception, but by that point it isn't novices but experts doing the work, experts who'd studied the physics and math for years, if not decades. This approach is used to weed out students from programs that admit too many to their freshman classes. They should reduce their class size if this is so important. Many upper-level undergraduate courses, and a lot of graduate courses, don't even expect the sort of time-crunched, mental feats expected from freshman level calculus and physics students.
• collyw 13y ago
  I have a number of good friends who are teachers, including maths, and they talk about it a lot. While you may not think your system is good, it sounds like the UK system is encouraging mediocrity. For example, when I was at school 20 years ago, we had to memorise formulas for common thing ( speed = distance over time, and similar). Apparently the kids are given the formulas in exams now. There doesn't appear to be such a thing as a "fail" these days, just a "foundation level pass". As such, I can see where the UK is failing, and see positive things mentioned about Poland in the article.
  • peteretep 13y ago
    I have also memorised the formulas for d/s/t and f/a/p but struggle to see how these translate in to academic excellence of any type, or even why giving them to someone is encouraging mediocrity. There is (imho) nothing of value in memorizing simple formulas, and everything in the value of knowing how and when to apply those formulas, or where to Google for them.
    • jacques_chester 13y ago
      The presumption that students have memorised the formulae allows you to build more complex tests with confidence that they will tease out understanding and not just computation. In my highschool physics exam, about 2/3rds was of questions based on memorised formulae. For example, the bouncing ball problem, with a series of questions to tease out our application of calculus, memorisation of compression rules and so on. Then comes the final question. I remember it well because at first, I did not know which formula to apply. Water wells into a pool at rate X per hour, falls over a waterfall into a second pool below, which drains at rate Y per hour. When it falls over the edge of the waterfall, the water is at temperature A; at the start of the problem the temperature in the bottom pool is C. After an hour, what will the temperature in the second pool be? To solve this problem you actually need to consider the thermic effect of water falling. You need to build a single equation to accounts for acceleration due to gravity and the beginning temperatures of each pool. Then you need some calculus to transform it into an equation that will spit out the final numerical answer. The only reason I was able to attempt and solve this problem was because I had memorised the equations. There simply would not have been enough time to try to reverse-engineer a bunch of anonymous letters in-flight. Similarly, when I studied law, all exams were open-book. This is because, as a law professor told me, "it lets us ask harder questions". There's simply no way to synthesise thousands of pages of material in an exam setting. Either you learnt it beforehand, including a whole bunch of flat out memorisation of details of cases, or you didn't. Having your casebooks for reference is useful, but only to check a detail or reuse a quote.
• mathattack 13y ago
  My 2 cents... Being able to question your education system is a sign that you're doing something right. I hated my (good public) high school. I could write pages and pages of things they did wrong. Then I went to college. Most of the people praised their high schools. I really felt that my school must have been at the bottom of the heap. As soon as the first set of grades started coming out, I realized how much better prepared I was than everyone else. The people pushed through "Rah Rah, aren't we great!" factories lacked critical thinking. But their schools did have great basketball teams and marching bands. When someone pitches how awesome their educational was, I wonder where their critical thinking is.
  • JackFr 13y ago
    Critical thinking is important, but only in so far as you know something. Its extraordinarily disappointing to be engaging someone in a discussion and while their logic and rhetoric are solid, he doesn't know that (1) Japan is an island; (2) the US and the Soviet Union were allies in WWII; [Note -- those were two different people in two different conversations.]
    • mathattack 13y ago
      I once had to deal with someone working in the test prep industry that had two ivy league degrees and couldn't get the population of the US within 200 million. It was striking that this was someone who represented the pinnacle of our education system, training the next generation to get into the elite. E.D. Hirsch [1] has written a lot about needing to know content in order to properly reason. Some of this goes by classical education, elsewhere it's cultural literacy [2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._D._Hirsch,_Jr http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._D._Hirsch,_Jr. [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_literacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_literacy
• ye 13y ago
  I think you are confusing "how to think" with "what to think". "How to think" shouldn't interfere with thinking for themselves.
• zeidrich 13y ago
  It's a poor article, I'd be skeptical about the book too. It talked very little about teaching critical thinking skills, and instead talked about different resource distribution between a few different country's schools. I think that thinking is not something that can be taught, more that it's something that can be encouraged to be learned. In fact, I think overbearing instruction can encourage kids that they don't need to think for themselves. They will be provided the answer, and if they come to a different conclusion, the person with more authority is right. I remember having a math test graded incorrectly. I knew I was right, I challenged the teacher. I was told that it was still wrong, but the teacher couldn't explain why, the teacher didn't really understand what they were teaching. I brought it home to my parents who also agreed that I was right, but the test wasn't worth enough to get into a fight over. That experience was one that, if it were repeated, would have hurt my willingness to think critically.
• IsTom 13y ago
  Perhaps this is about how nobody here (in Poland) actually expects that school will teach you important things. Everyone who actually wanted to learn something did it on their own, sometimes with help of the teachers outside of educational system. The only positive experience I had was cooperation of my liceum with local university.
• oppositelock 13y ago
  Agreed. I went to some school in Poland before the reforms mentioned in the article, but have much family who went afterward. I don't think it's the school that teaches critical thought, it's society. Poland has been through a lot of BS. There was constant government propaganda for generations and you never knew who you could trust, so people learned to use their brains to keep themselves safe. Until communism fell, it was a poor country with shortages of pretty much everything, so people had to learn to fix and tinker with things, because they couldn't go out to buy new ones. Kids played differently than they do in the US, with little in the way of toys and lots of imagination and in mixed age groups. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the differences are cultural, and maybe that hardship breeds more critical thought than plenty. I'm not advocating hardship by any means, but I think it's very important to teach kids to play creatively and hopefully, this will carry on through school. It's disingenuous to say that school reform and funding are responsible for critical thought.
  • herge 13y ago
    By that measure, Africa must be a hot-bed of critical thought!