7 ms·

I've worked as a teacher in both the UK and in Papua New Guinea, and from my perspective, the largest performance indicator of a child's success is the value th

I've worked as a teacher in both the UK and in Papua New Guinea, and from my perspective, the largest performance indicator of a child's success is the value their parents place on education. Maybe this is one of the reasons the Finnish education system works so well. If teaching is an occupation that is culturally considered in high esteem, then it probably follows that schools are considered an important aspect of a child's life. Children are therefore encouraged to do well in schools. In PNG, students had to pay to go to school. Often a single child was supported through their education by their extended family. Some villages could only afford to send a few students to school. Those students worked exceptionally hard, knowing that it was incumbent upon them to achieve, and eventually payback their family from the proceeds of their future careers. When working in rural schools in the UK I have encountered many students whose parents, and therefore their children, place little value on education. Often the attitude comes down to the single phrase "I've managed and I did badly at school". Regardless of whether the parent's are rich or poor, the children of these parents often struggle, and achieve below expected results in national examinations. If we want to raise standards in our schools (both in the UK and in the USA) I think the key is in changing cultural attitudes towards education. This means that we need to stop heaping blame on teachers, administrators, schools and local authorities for perceived inadequacies. We need to make sure that our children value the free education they are receiving. edit - for clarity of country name

james1071 12y ago
I am from the UK and,based on my experience of attitudes to education, will say that a lot of white people are going to be in for a shock as they and their children will be working for immigrant bosses.
- peteretep 12y ago
  I suspect what you meant is: "In my experience, children of immigrants often have a better work-ethic than the children of non-immigrants" Doubt that divides as nicely down race lines as you might think, though. I'm too lazy to run the numbers, but this[1] seems to suggest 50% of foreign-born population in the UK come from predominantly white countries... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-born_population_of_the_United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-born_population_of_the_...
ScottBurson 12y ago
"PNG"? Papua New Guinea?
- MarcScott 12y ago
  Yes, sorry.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
aikah 12y ago
> the largest performance indicator of a child's success is the value their parents place on education. +100 > This means that we need to stop heaping blame on teachers, administrators, schools and local authorities for perceived inadequacies. Well sometimes authorities are to blame. Look, in my country,being a teacher used to be like being a lawyer or a doctor. It used to be a prestigious profession. Then some politicians,influencial thinkers came in and said,"we need to focus on children,they have special needs,they are always right and if they cant learn properly it's the adults fault". 30 years forward and the education here is totally broken,teachers are despised both by students and parents who want instant gratification no matter how dumb their offspring is. But hey,they cant be wrong,they've been told all their life they are "special" and always right ... > Regardless of whether the parent's are rich or poor, the children of these parents often struggle, and achieve below expected results in national examinations. The big difference is rich people can literally buy a career for their offspring even if they perform poorly at school. At worse, they'll have a job at mom and pop's business.
- james1071 12y ago
  where are you?
  - throwaway344 12y ago
    He's French.
    - thecopy 12y ago
      Or Swedish :p
  - teddyh 12y ago
    Australia, I believe: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753907)
- javert 12y ago
  > The big difference is rich people can literally buy a career for their offspring Details? Where do I go to buy a career? I'm not being sarcastic, I actually want to know.
tw04 12y ago
> I've worked as a teacher in both the UK and in Papua New Guinea, and from my perspective, the largest performance indicator of a child's success is the value their parents place on education. So much this... my parents were both teachers. They both agree the single biggest factor in a child's success is their parents involvement. This image is 100% accurate: http://i.imgur.com/LglSapk.jpg http://i.imgur.com/LglSapk.jpg
- mattmcknight 12y ago
  Too often "parent involvement" is measured by how often you can drag them to school for useless activities. Really it comes down to parent pressure to make the kid do things that they don't really want to by convincing them it's important.
  - mschuster91 12y ago
    > Really it comes down to parent pressure to make the kid do things that they don't really want to by convincing them it's important. The problem is that a large percentage of the stuff that's taught in schools in fact IS more or less useless in later life, except for very specific career paths. Parents know this and pass on this to their kids.
    - Rapzid 12y ago
      I'm not sure I agree with this. What percentage do you reckon, and what stuff? You say useless later in "life", but then mention specific career paths. Is education useless if it isn't directly applicable to a currently occupied career? What if they change careers? It takes a lot more than career specific education to mould a good member of society.
      - mschuster91 12y ago
        (Disclaimer: I'm German (from Bavaria, other German countries have different education profiles!) and have passed the Abitur exam, which allows me to enter any university course) Classic example of what most students think as "unneeded" is chemistry, physics and mathematics - while a solid knowledge foundation is certainly required in later life, more detailed knowledge (i'm looking at you, mathematical analysis) may be entirely unneeded if one decides to pursue a career in e.g. history, social studies or other non-math/tech-oriented courses. On one side we Germans split up our students way too soon (after 4th grade in Hauptschule, Realschule and Gymnasium), but on the other side we split them up too late... it's a highly complex issue.
rokhayakebe 12y ago
I agree, to many people it appears school is somewhere you send your kids while you are at work.
ThomPete 12y ago
Yes. Parents and really not much else but parents. They care the only thing that scale. Great teachers will do a lot but great teachers don't scale. It is the parents involvement in their kids education, their insisting on them to do well and to always be on the teachers side rather than on their kids.
- fsloth 12y ago
  "Yes. Parents and really not much else but parents. They care the only thing that scale." I would claim government policies scale up to the limit within the borders of the said country. What effect they may have depends, but most good stuff in the daily lives of ordinary people in industrialized countries owes quite a lot to government policies (public schools, no child labour, etc). Great teacher don't scale but improving teachers education thus moving the average more towards "great" does.
grannyg00se 12y ago
Aside from pushing children to complete their homework and take it seriously, what does a parent's attitude toward education do to help?
- ddingus 12y ago
  There are a few things, many impacted by the current economic state in the US today: (doing any of these is a big help as a parent) 1. Being there. With both parents working --a lot, more often than not, kids are left to their own devices, and those devices are the new baby sitter. Games, media, Internet, etc... While these are not bad things, they do not replace seat time and face time. Technology can enable, but it takes people to understand people, and we are set with the task of making great people. Hold that thought... 2. Access to resources. Kids need a diverse set of experiences to self-identify well enough to understand how to learn how to learn and how they personally can thrive. This varies considerably among people. Parents who bring experiences, tools, mentors, their own time and expertise to the table very significantly augment the work of educators. 3. Learning with your kids. Learning is infectious. When parents are able to be engaged, participate with their kids, everybody bonds well and everybody gets the benefit of a shared effort to improve. This sets good norms, in terms of growth, etc... Compare and contrast Dad coming home to down a 40 after doing a 60 hour week, mom doing a 40 herself, and they are tired, checked out, managing the kids, but not investing in those kids. I'm not blaming parents here, just citing an example and it's impacts. With: Dad who worked an ordinary 40, mom working part time for "mad money", both of whom have energy sufficient to play with the kids, learn with them, explore hobbies, and pursue their own personal development, sharing that too. (On a side note here, how we value labor very seriously impacts our education burden) 4. Participation in the school Where parents can be a part of the program, there are many gains to be had. Volunteer work, kid sports, clubs, tutoring, working with educators for special needs kids, all augment the education investment. I personally did a lot of this, due to being an adoptive foster parent. The kids needed work, and they had some special needs. Teachers were hungry for help, tips, advice. They wanted to be effective, but the personal research burden for them was high. Teaming up was magic. One of many examples: I attended "computer class" at a middle school, where introductory computer literacy was being taught by the "business teacher", and the school thought, business equals computers, so there you go. The introductory material was incomplete, riddled with errors, and I could go on and on. Frankly, I rewrote a lot of that material and offered to clarify anything that educator needed. We had a few sessions and they helped a lot. Again, good educator, they just needed stuff. Stuff the school wasn't really sourcing for them as they could have. Parents can help identify these things just as much as a school can, and everybody should. These kids will care for us in our old age. Think about that. 5. Community / peer review of student progress. What is the goal of education? When I ask this, I get all sorts of answers, ranging from making kids job ready, to "literacy", etc... I submit these are the goals: a. Building good people. Each of these kids has some potential and it's up to us to tease it out of them. We can do that with diverse experiences, collaboration between educators and parents, and by offering a wide range of possible education options for them. Some kids are going to be academic, headed for higher education. Some are going to be tactile, or mechanical, and we need those people too. Some will be empathetic, and could be care givers, or performers. Whatever it is, they need to self-identify, and we need to prod them in various ways to tease it out and help them maximize it. b. Maximize who they are People are who they are. We can influence this, but to expect everybody to fall into some cookie cutter box or other is nuts! We are much better off keeping their options open, and when they grab hold of something, help them to take for the best ride they can. c. Good citizens Our future leaders need to understand government, civics in general, and be critical thinkers. We don't do anywhere near enough here in the US, and there are lot of political reasons for that I'm not going to touch on, but being a good human, and a good citizen is part of education. d. Learn how to learn and grow to thrive. These are in no particular order. But the ability to self-learn is so damn empowering we can't afford to miss out on the benefits of it. Not every student will be able to maximize themselves in this way, but a lot of them can, and should. 6. Parents need to get real about the politics of education. Education in the US is hosed. We've got way too many people flirting with, or in poverty, forcing more labor than is appropriate for parenting, conflicting requirements, standardized tests that hobble good educators while pushing along marginal to poor ones, and we don't even talk much about the educators who just need help! Funding is at issue, public vs private, "maybe I can get MY kid into a good school, screw everybody else..." Yes, that goes on, and should it really? We all have to live under the product of our politics here. So why don't we get along and recognize the education debt we are accumulating and it's impact on our future? None of those goals are partisan things. They are all focused right on the kids and their potential. And they are appropriate for everybody, business, our future leaders, parents, home makers, etc... And it's more than attitude. Parents can't just trust the system, and the system can't just do the right thing either. If we want to maximize our young people, and we should, then it's in all our interests to get the raising of them done proper. Blaming won't cut it. The cost of failures here will accrue. We will pay them, and it won't be pretty, and we could very well have made the right investments early on to avoid the big balloon payments coming due very soon.
john_other_john 12y ago
"I've managed and I did badly at school" The sad fact is that the vast majority of individuals and families in the UK are entire reliant on the state. If you pay a marginal tax of about GBP 20,000 pa you still likely receive more than that in direct value of services. I think the value is much higher, both of services delivered to those in lower tax brackets or lower net tax payers, and the rate of earnings required to net contribute in taxes is much higher also. It's entirely possible that the only net contributors are the maligned "one percenters". The numbers are subject to wild variation, how you calculate them. But you can pick out anecdotal evidence that is significant. In much of central London, family homes are housing association (QUANGO) or local authority owned, and rents are typically below GBP 100 pwk, I hear 70 or 80 wish, commonly, and less. Whereas the market rental for equivalent homes, is approaching four times that. That's one massive distortion in housing supply. In the extreme, I know of one person who was "forcibly downsized" to a slightly smaller home, still with more bedrooms than they, a single man, needs, caused by need to structurally refurbish the building where he lived, where he was relocated around the corner into a newly refurbished and appointed home, paid GBP 5000 for inconvenience, cost and arrangement of moving all provided, an the market rental value of this man's 78 pound a week hone is over six hundred a week. It's true, also, there are some really appalling failures in social systems for housing and support, but I live and grew up in a "deprived" area, where I enormous resources are almost thrown at those eligible for public support. The problem is, that not nay in many cases, is there no viable exist from public support, because low wage earners are able to claim top ups for low or i'd argue illegally poor pay, and many can legally stay īn subsidized housing all their lives, whilst earning market salaries, but I believe the situation is so politicized as to permit no rational debate or discussion. I have been verbally threatened for the very fact I live in a private dwelling, by complete strangers, visitors to neighbors in the same building, such is the actually false politicization of "have and have not" "society". When I was at prep school, about nine, we had a support math teacher, who regaled us mainly with stories of his time n the Military Police. That was actually good education, but we were flunking any math we didn't study n our own, that year. This teacher also told us of his time in teaching for the ILEA, he Inner London Education Authority, in the mid seventies, not long before he was teaching us. We laughed in disbelief how exams or exam results were banned, for "creating hostility towards the children of the better off families", who, one might surmise, did put a value on their children's education. Like most so called socialist systems, there has been a enforcement of the lowest common denominator, not a enforcement of what the LCD should be. In result: no self respect, c.f. the quote which spurred my reply here today. That result, no self respect, is the death knell of civilization and yet the panacea to becalm nervous politicians queasy their unsupportable, inept, uneducated, policies risk challenge.
boracay 12y ago
"Maybe this is one of the reasons the Finnish education system works so well" No it's not. In fact it's pretty much the opposite. http://www.greatschools.org/improvement/international-comparisons/slideshows/3110-finnish-educational-paradox.gs?page=7 http://www.greatschools.org/improvement/international-compar...
- fsloth 12y ago
  A very good point! (A finnish father here - my son started first grade). I really need to stress one thing finnish system does differently when compared to UK or france for instance (based on a low anecdotal sample size from families moved from there to here): The kids do considerably less work and the formal stuff kicks in far more later. The learning is structured so most kids enjoy it. A quote from the article: "We believe it is important that learning should be enjoyable. And all kids should be happy to go to school." This! For us valuing education does not mean watching over homework, pushing long hours or anything like that. We expect homework gets done and trust teacher administers enough of them. Valuing education means we value the work the school does and take all school-home interactions seriously but we do not push kids beyond what they can naturally absorb.
fsloth 12y ago
"When working in rural schools in the UK I have encountered many students whose parents, and therefore their children, place little value on education. " Yeah, this would be very weird attitude in finland (where I'm at). Not unheard of but very rare. Of authorities (and just anecdotal commentary): Please correct me if I'm wrong but in the practical side one of the biggest differences in the finnish school system when compared to UK is that the formal education seems to kick in later (as I understand it) and with less work load. I.e. the kids are not expected to start doing any homework until they are 7 and the workloads are quite light. This has been the case for over 30 years. Perhaps this also affects attitudes - the workload is not overbearing and no-one gets left behind.

james1071 12y ago

I am from the UK and,based on my experience of attitudes to education, will say that a lot of white people are going to be in for a shock as they and their children will be working for immigrant bosses.

peteretep 12y ago
I suspect what you meant is: "In my experience, children of immigrants often have a better work-ethic than the children of non-immigrants" Doubt that divides as nicely down race lines as you might think, though. I'm too lazy to run the numbers, but this[1] seems to suggest 50% of foreign-born population in the UK come from predominantly white countries... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-born_population_of_the_United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-born_population_of_the_...

ScottBurson 12y ago

"PNG"? Papua New Guinea?

MarcScott 12y ago
Yes, sorry.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

aikah 12y ago

> the largest performance indicator of a child's success is the value their parents place on education. +100 > This means that we need to stop heaping blame on teachers, administrators, schools and local authorities for perceived inadequacies. Well sometimes authorities are to blame. Look, in my country,being a teacher used to be like being a lawyer or a doctor. It used to be a prestigious profession. Then some politicians,influencial thinkers came in and said,"we need to focus on children,they have special needs,they are always right and if they cant learn properly it's the adults fault". 30 years forward and the education here is totally broken,teachers are despised both by students and parents who want instant gratification no matter how dumb their offspring is. But hey,they cant be wrong,they've been told all their life they are "special" and always right ... > Regardless of whether the parent's are rich or poor, the children of these parents often struggle, and achieve below expected results in national examinations. The big difference is rich people can literally buy a career for their offspring even if they perform poorly at school. At worse, they'll have a job at mom and pop's business.

james1071 12y ago
where are you?
- throwaway344 12y ago
  He's French.
  - thecopy 12y ago
    Or Swedish :p
- teddyh 12y ago
  Australia, I believe: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753907)
javert 12y ago
> The big difference is rich people can literally buy a career for their offspring Details? Where do I go to buy a career? I'm not being sarcastic, I actually want to know.

tw04 12y ago

> I've worked as a teacher in both the UK and in Papua New Guinea, and from my perspective, the largest performance indicator of a child's success is the value their parents place on education. So much this... my parents were both teachers. They both agree the single biggest factor in a child's success is their parents involvement. This image is 100% accurate: http://i.imgur.com/LglSapk.jpg http://i.imgur.com/LglSapk.jpg

mattmcknight 12y ago
Too often "parent involvement" is measured by how often you can drag them to school for useless activities. Really it comes down to parent pressure to make the kid do things that they don't really want to by convincing them it's important.
- mschuster91 12y ago
  > Really it comes down to parent pressure to make the kid do things that they don't really want to by convincing them it's important. The problem is that a large percentage of the stuff that's taught in schools in fact IS more or less useless in later life, except for very specific career paths. Parents know this and pass on this to their kids.
  - Rapzid 12y ago
    I'm not sure I agree with this. What percentage do you reckon, and what stuff? You say useless later in "life", but then mention specific career paths. Is education useless if it isn't directly applicable to a currently occupied career? What if they change careers? It takes a lot more than career specific education to mould a good member of society.
    - mschuster91 12y ago
      (Disclaimer: I'm German (from Bavaria, other German countries have different education profiles!) and have passed the Abitur exam, which allows me to enter any university course) Classic example of what most students think as "unneeded" is chemistry, physics and mathematics - while a solid knowledge foundation is certainly required in later life, more detailed knowledge (i'm looking at you, mathematical analysis) may be entirely unneeded if one decides to pursue a career in e.g. history, social studies or other non-math/tech-oriented courses. On one side we Germans split up our students way too soon (after 4th grade in Hauptschule, Realschule and Gymnasium), but on the other side we split them up too late... it's a highly complex issue.

rokhayakebe 12y ago

I agree, to many people it appears school is somewhere you send your kids while you are at work.

ThomPete 12y ago

Yes. Parents and really not much else but parents. They care the only thing that scale. Great teachers will do a lot but great teachers don't scale. It is the parents involvement in their kids education, their insisting on them to do well and to always be on the teachers side rather than on their kids.

fsloth 12y ago
"Yes. Parents and really not much else but parents. They care the only thing that scale." I would claim government policies scale up to the limit within the borders of the said country. What effect they may have depends, but most good stuff in the daily lives of ordinary people in industrialized countries owes quite a lot to government policies (public schools, no child labour, etc). Great teacher don't scale but improving teachers education thus moving the average more towards "great" does.

grannyg00se 12y ago

Aside from pushing children to complete their homework and take it seriously, what does a parent's attitude toward education do to help?

ddingus 12y ago
There are a few things, many impacted by the current economic state in the US today: (doing any of these is a big help as a parent) 1. Being there. With both parents working --a lot, more often than not, kids are left to their own devices, and those devices are the new baby sitter. Games, media, Internet, etc... While these are not bad things, they do not replace seat time and face time. Technology can enable, but it takes people to understand people, and we are set with the task of making great people. Hold that thought... 2. Access to resources. Kids need a diverse set of experiences to self-identify well enough to understand how to learn how to learn and how they personally can thrive. This varies considerably among people. Parents who bring experiences, tools, mentors, their own time and expertise to the table very significantly augment the work of educators. 3. Learning with your kids. Learning is infectious. When parents are able to be engaged, participate with their kids, everybody bonds well and everybody gets the benefit of a shared effort to improve. This sets good norms, in terms of growth, etc... Compare and contrast Dad coming home to down a 40 after doing a 60 hour week, mom doing a 40 herself, and they are tired, checked out, managing the kids, but not investing in those kids. I'm not blaming parents here, just citing an example and it's impacts. With: Dad who worked an ordinary 40, mom working part time for "mad money", both of whom have energy sufficient to play with the kids, learn with them, explore hobbies, and pursue their own personal development, sharing that too. (On a side note here, how we value labor very seriously impacts our education burden) 4. Participation in the school Where parents can be a part of the program, there are many gains to be had. Volunteer work, kid sports, clubs, tutoring, working with educators for special needs kids, all augment the education investment. I personally did a lot of this, due to being an adoptive foster parent. The kids needed work, and they had some special needs. Teachers were hungry for help, tips, advice. They wanted to be effective, but the personal research burden for them was high. Teaming up was magic. One of many examples: I attended "computer class" at a middle school, where introductory computer literacy was being taught by the "business teacher", and the school thought, business equals computers, so there you go. The introductory material was incomplete, riddled with errors, and I could go on and on. Frankly, I rewrote a lot of that material and offered to clarify anything that educator needed. We had a few sessions and they helped a lot. Again, good educator, they just needed stuff. Stuff the school wasn't really sourcing for them as they could have. Parents can help identify these things just as much as a school can, and everybody should. These kids will care for us in our old age. Think about that. 5. Community / peer review of student progress. What is the goal of education? When I ask this, I get all sorts of answers, ranging from making kids job ready, to "literacy", etc... I submit these are the goals: a. Building good people. Each of these kids has some potential and it's up to us to tease it out of them. We can do that with diverse experiences, collaboration between educators and parents, and by offering a wide range of possible education options for them. Some kids are going to be academic, headed for higher education. Some are going to be tactile, or mechanical, and we need those people too. Some will be empathetic, and could be care givers, or performers. Whatever it is, they need to self-identify, and we need to prod them in various ways to tease it out and help them maximize it. b. Maximize who they are People are who they are. We can influence this, but to expect everybody to fall into some cookie cutter box or other is nuts! We are much better off keeping their options open, and when they grab hold of something, help them to take for the best ride they can. c. Good citizens Our future leaders need to understand government, civics in general, and be critical thinkers. We don't do anywhere near enough here in the US, and there are lot of political reasons for that I'm not going to touch on, but being a good human, and a good citizen is part of education. d. Learn how to learn and grow to thrive. These are in no particular order. But the ability to self-learn is so damn empowering we can't afford to miss out on the benefits of it. Not every student will be able to maximize themselves in this way, but a lot of them can, and should. 6. Parents need to get real about the politics of education. Education in the US is hosed. We've got way too many people flirting with, or in poverty, forcing more labor than is appropriate for parenting, conflicting requirements, standardized tests that hobble good educators while pushing along marginal to poor ones, and we don't even talk much about the educators who just need help! Funding is at issue, public vs private, "maybe I can get MY kid into a good school, screw everybody else..." Yes, that goes on, and should it really? We all have to live under the product of our politics here. So why don't we get along and recognize the education debt we are accumulating and it's impact on our future? None of those goals are partisan things. They are all focused right on the kids and their potential. And they are appropriate for everybody, business, our future leaders, parents, home makers, etc... And it's more than attitude. Parents can't just trust the system, and the system can't just do the right thing either. If we want to maximize our young people, and we should, then it's in all our interests to get the raising of them done proper. Blaming won't cut it. The cost of failures here will accrue. We will pay them, and it won't be pretty, and we could very well have made the right investments early on to avoid the big balloon payments coming due very soon.

john_other_john 12y ago

"I've managed and I did badly at school" The sad fact is that the vast majority of individuals and families in the UK are entire reliant on the state. If you pay a marginal tax of about GBP 20,000 pa you still likely receive more than that in direct value of services. I think the value is much higher, both of services delivered to those in lower tax brackets or lower net tax payers, and the rate of earnings required to net contribute in taxes is much higher also. It's entirely possible that the only net contributors are the maligned "one percenters". The numbers are subject to wild variation, how you calculate them. But you can pick out anecdotal evidence that is significant. In much of central London, family homes are housing association (QUANGO) or local authority owned, and rents are typically below GBP 100 pwk, I hear 70 or 80 wish, commonly, and less. Whereas the market rental for equivalent homes, is approaching four times that. That's one massive distortion in housing supply. In the extreme, I know of one person who was "forcibly downsized" to a slightly smaller home, still with more bedrooms than they, a single man, needs, caused by need to structurally refurbish the building where he lived, where he was relocated around the corner into a newly refurbished and appointed home, paid GBP 5000 for inconvenience, cost and arrangement of moving all provided, an the market rental value of this man's 78 pound a week hone is over six hundred a week. It's true, also, there are some really appalling failures in social systems for housing and support, but I live and grew up in a "deprived" area, where I enormous resources are almost thrown at those eligible for public support. The problem is, that not nay in many cases, is there no viable exist from public support, because low wage earners are able to claim top ups for low or i'd argue illegally poor pay, and many can legally stay īn subsidized housing all their lives, whilst earning market salaries, but I believe the situation is so politicized as to permit no rational debate or discussion. I have been verbally threatened for the very fact I live in a private dwelling, by complete strangers, visitors to neighbors in the same building, such is the actually false politicization of "have and have not" "society". When I was at prep school, about nine, we had a support math teacher, who regaled us mainly with stories of his time n the Military Police. That was actually good education, but we were flunking any math we didn't study n our own, that year. This teacher also told us of his time in teaching for the ILEA, he Inner London Education Authority, in the mid seventies, not long before he was teaching us. We laughed in disbelief how exams or exam results were banned, for "creating hostility towards the children of the better off families", who, one might surmise, did put a value on their children's education. Like most so called socialist systems, there has been a enforcement of the lowest common denominator, not a enforcement of what the LCD should be. In result: no self respect, c.f. the quote which spurred my reply here today. That result, no self respect, is the death knell of civilization and yet the panacea to becalm nervous politicians queasy their unsupportable, inept, uneducated, policies risk challenge.

boracay 12y ago

"Maybe this is one of the reasons the Finnish education system works so well" No it's not. In fact it's pretty much the opposite. http://www.greatschools.org/improvement/international-comparisons/slideshows/3110-finnish-educational-paradox.gs?page=7 http://www.greatschools.org/improvement/international-compar...

fsloth 12y ago
A very good point! (A finnish father here - my son started first grade). I really need to stress one thing finnish system does differently when compared to UK or france for instance (based on a low anecdotal sample size from families moved from there to here): The kids do considerably less work and the formal stuff kicks in far more later. The learning is structured so most kids enjoy it. A quote from the article: "We believe it is important that learning should be enjoyable. And all kids should be happy to go to school." This! For us valuing education does not mean watching over homework, pushing long hours or anything like that. We expect homework gets done and trust teacher administers enough of them. Valuing education means we value the work the school does and take all school-home interactions seriously but we do not push kids beyond what they can naturally absorb.

fsloth 12y ago

"When working in rural schools in the UK I have encountered many students whose parents, and therefore their children, place little value on education. " Yeah, this would be very weird attitude in finland (where I'm at). Not unheard of but very rare. Of authorities (and just anecdotal commentary): Please correct me if I'm wrong but in the practical side one of the biggest differences in the finnish school system when compared to UK is that the formal education seems to kick in later (as I understand it) and with less work load. I.e. the kids are not expected to start doing any homework until they are 7 and the workloads are quite light. This has been the case for over 30 years. Perhaps this also affects attitudes - the workload is not overbearing and no-one gets left behind.