Quote: Original post by Krokhin
Cell phones,computers and other hi-tech machinery kills education faster than absence of money.Under information waterfall boys and girls stop to think and solve problems independently,so-called "Bologna process" just hide decreasing of teachers and pupils level.
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">exam 50 years ago:)

I think the purpose of the Bologna Process is to make the different educations systems comparable so that, for instance, a Masters degree awarded in Finland is recognised elsewhere in Europe (like in France) and vice versa. It is somewhat problematic to hire people from abroad if you don't know what their educational credentials mean.

As for education, for me it has meant that the way of giving "credit units" for different study modules changed, but the contents remained. There are common instructions on hours used for lectures, homework and exams that an average student should consume to be credited a certain grade. I'm not sure if the course contents were affected elsewhere (or should be adjusted), not here at least.

On the topic of computers. At least here it's not allowed to use calculators or notes in basic mathematics courses, for instance. Computer exercises on engineering couses are mandatory in the sense that we were taught to use engineering software like Matlab and Maple. In addition to the normal homework anyone would expect that is. In exams: no calculators. Integrals, differential equations, discrete stuff etc. needs to be done without. Exception being classes on numerical computations and statistics, for instance. Then on the more advanced classes it's occassionally allowed to bring any book one wants (though unlikely helpful). :-) They are using computers in elementary education more, but for what I know, just as a tool to make children learn better.

The basic couses given in the first few years are like numerical analysis 1 (incidentally, in this exam it is allowed to use a calculator). See the "old examples" at the bottom of the page if your are interested.


Finally, the educational system is publicly funded. It doesn't mean the staff wouldn't have their responsibility or that they wouldn't visit other countries. Finland gets frequently visitors from elsewhere (UK, China, Russia, Germany, Sweden Japan etc.) and our people visit other countries. New systems are introduced and tried in a varying scale in different parts of the country. Seems to be working all right to me. I'm not saying I wouldn't change it if this proved to be problematic. Surely adjustments needs to be made all the time.

Quote: Original post by trzy
As to your second question, Finland sprung immediately to mind for some reason. I recall seeing an article somewhere about the Finnish education system. They seem to do everything wrong over there: less homework, less discipline, etc, etc., yet they perform much, much better than Americans. Why? Well, one starting point is cultural factors and the relative homogeneity of the comparably small Finnish population.

True to some extent. For on thing, it's a fact the children are lured into other activities besides studies also. Burying them into massive amounts of difficult homework makes those not coping it just school dropouts.

One factor is that the class size is still usually less than twenty pupils. The teacher has more time to help those struggling. The teaching methods encourage peer learning and teaching also, which could have something to with the fact, I gather, Finnish children feel somewhat good about learning and teaching (perhaps it has something to do with culture). It still has some glamour to be a teacher, there are more willing to enter teacher's education than are places (creating competition). Finland isn't an exception in that among other Nordic Countries. Homogeneity plays a role if we are to believe the news that, e.g., elsewhere in Europe there are problems with immigrants. For the time being they are given more resources to handle those groups (like teaching one of the official languages, customs etc.).

Quote: Original post by trzy
Here's the crux of the problem: you're an avowed statist and an elitist. Don't feel too bad about it, it's not your fault.






I'm not smart enough to design an education system for one of the world's largest and most diverse nations. Neither are you. Neither is anyone working for the government. But I do believe that unleashing the creative force of countless educators, entrepreneurs, parents, philanthropists, and people with a passion for learning and education will result in a dynamic and ultimately self-optimizing educational landscape, guided by the needs of society and the economy.

The simplest plan would be to ignore all of the derisive drivel and presumptuous characterizations from someone who admits to having zero idea of what works and who thinks flinging poo is part of an actual solution.



P.S. If you weren't so busy ranting from atop your heap of unrealistic idealism and trying to proselytize those "evil statists," perhaps you would have figured out that the biggest influence on education isn't in the schools.

P.P.S. In one line you rant about people's reliance on some perceived "omniscience" in some system, and then go on to spout on about the omniscient system that you put your faith in, preaching to us your belief that "unleashing the creative force...will result in a dynamic and ultimately self-optimizing educational landscape, guided by the needs of society and the economy." More amusing is that you say this as if these creative forces are locked in a dungeon somewhere by those evil bureaucrats. If anything, private education systems have a HUGE advantage on perceived quality (whether it exists in actuality or not); those creative forces likely have all the good P.R. that they need so that they can ALREADY be doing whatever optimal work you insist would be occuring.


P.P.P.S. If I were an "avowed" statist, you would be able to point to where I had bluntly declared being so, and moreover, I obviously wouldn't feel very bad about something I supposedly avowed to being. Perhaps you're attempting to provide your own poor use of English as further evidence of the "failures" of the educational system you want to dismantle.

[Edited by - HostileExpanse on July 19, 2009 4:14:37 PM]

Quote: Original post by trzy
And pray tell, what's your brilliant idea?

Right now, my idea is to at least give you a clue.
http://news.illinois.edu/NEWS/08/0523schools.html
Chew on that for a while.



In particular, while you're decrying the "failures" of the public school system (as opposed to a private system, I suppose), you could take notice of the line that notes, "while all of the variables in our model together explained 62 percent of the achievement differences between schools, school type alone accounted for less than 5 percent of these differences."


If you want to fix education, then it starts with getting parents more involved.

Quote: Original post by Eelco

Quote: Original post by LessBread
That's absurd. The idea that the system prevents talented competition from entering the teaching labor pool is false on it's face. That an argument is always made does not make the argument invalid. California used to have the best schools in the nation. Then it cut property taxes and funding and the expected happened and the quality of it's schools fell to the bottom. Attacks on teacher's unions are part and parcel of the general attack on unions that conservatives have made for 150 years, but they're also part of the war on science of recent years. People that want to destroy teachers unions also want to put an end to the teaching of evolution, to the separation of church and state, to sex education, and the history of the civil right movement, they want to restore prayer in school and establish that the Constitution is crafted on biblical principles. The idea that abolishing public schools would result in better educated kids and a more skilled labor force is utterly ridiculous and anyone who thinks that ought to made a laughingstock. That's a sure fire prescription for a massively unskilled labor force and an end to any semblance of a middle class.

Nice smear. Religious nonsense and economic issues are however entirely orthogonal matters.

Thank you, I try my best. Religious nonsense and economic issues are not orthogonal, they are the motivations driving the mess in the first place.

Quote: Original post by Eelco
Either way, these conservatives of lore, didnt they hold the presidential office and congress not too long ago? Have they not done so fairly often, often the past 150 years?

How about we skip the thumbnail sketch of the labor history of the United States and cut right to the chase with education over here. Complaints with education began in the 1970's when racial integration began to be implemented. This played right into the Republican's "Southern Strategy". This scared many upper class white parents into pulling their children out of public schools and sending them to private schools. Now having to pay for what they previously got for free, these parents began to resent paying property and other taxes to support educating other people's kids, especially now that more of those kids came with a darker complexion. This reaction was coupled with a reaction to the social excesses of the 1960's (sex, drugs, rock and roll). As the counter culture of the 1960's was co-opted by corporations in the 1970's, as it became mainstream culture, more traditionally minded parents turned to religion as a counter to the counter culture. This is the background to the nostalgia for the 1950's that marked the 1980's. These resentments fed the backlash that put Ronald Reagan into office and pushed the US to the right for the next 25 years. The "dead enders" of this "coalition of resentment" are today pushing the program that I decried above.

State education board shouldn't rewrite history (July 18, 2009)

Quote:
...
Lowe and McLeroy are both social conservatives and creationists who voted recently to approve new science standards that include creationist critiques in the state's textbooks – despite pleas from many scholars and business people not do so.

Now the conservative group appears to be turning its attention toward history. The founder of a conservative Christian advocacy group, whom Lowe appointed to a social studies curriculum panel, has suggested eliminating Marshall and Chávez from social studies books.
...

The Culture Wars' New Front: U.S. History Classes in Texas (July 14, 2009)

Quote:
...
The conservative reviewers say they believe that children must learn that America's founding principles are biblical. For instance, they say the separation of powers set forth in the Constitution stems from a scriptural understanding of man's fall and inherent sinfulness, or "radical depravity," which means he can be governed only by an intricate system of checks and balances.
...
While the battle in Texas is just heating up, the tug-of-war over how to present history dates back nearly 150 years, said Jonathan Zimmerman, a New York University professor of education. A single paragraph in a third-grade text might seem insignificant. But it is a powerful symbol, he said, "because schools remain the most important venue for teaching our kids who we are."
...

Quote: Original post by Eelco
It seems to me all that ever happened was further centralization of education. And it is silly to expect any different from a central government.

Sometimes centralization is necessary, sometimes decentralization is necessary.

Quote: Original post by HostileExpanse

Quote: Original post by trzy
And pray tell, what's your brilliant idea?

Right now, my idea is to at least give you a clue.
http://news.illinois.edu/NEWS/08/0523schools.html
Chew on that for a while.

Note that I had suggested dismantling post-elementary level government education camps but this study focuses on elementary education. The study you cite is interesting food for thought but its methodology has been criticized. This paper reveals that different choices of statistical models tip the advantage in favor of private schools. Studies examining voucher programs do not find the public sector advantage claimed in your study. Nor does this study. A recent study on voucher programs came out to a wash. Private schools were certainly not under-serving children and in some cases, were performing better and at lower cost. Give people educational freedom and let's see what happens.

Middle and upper class households are unlikely to face problems in a private system: they will send their children to good private schools and demand a return on their investment. The most at-risk students are from low income and underachieving minority households. Their parents could conceivably be unable to foot the bill for a private education or would not be interested in education in the first place. Barring an effective private solution, government involvement (especially in early education) makes sense here.

Quote:
If you want to fix education, then it starts with getting parents more involved.

No shit. Isn't that what I've been saying all along? Stop worrying about pouring money into crappy government services. The best study you could muster shows that the type of school hardly matters, hardly conclusive evidence that the government is doing a good job and that alternative education proposals would destroy the country. Ultimately, it's up to the parents to raise their kids right. At the very least, let the smart kids escape the oppression of government education camps. Provide better alternatives or exempt them from bureaucratized government education requirements and norms.

Quote: Original post by HostileExpanse
The simplest plan would be to ignore all of the derisive drivel and presumptuous characterizations from someone who admits to having zero idea of what works and who thinks flinging poo is part of an actual solution.

Flinging poo? I think I understand clearly what is going on here: you have succumbed to an eerie fire of the brain resulting in an inability to think outside of the box that the statists have confined you in.

Quote:
P.S. If you weren't so busy ranting from atop your heap of unrealistic idealism and trying to proselytize those "evil statists," perhaps you would have figured out that the biggest influence on education isn't in the schools.

Heavens! We may already be too late! The government education camps are failing even at basic literacy! Our friend here cannot even read my posts!

Quote:
P.P.S. In one line you rant about people's reliance on some perceived "omniscience" in some system, and then go on to spout on about the omniscient system that you put your faith in, preaching to us your belief that "unleashing the creative force...will result in a dynamic and ultimately self-optimizing educational landscape, guided by the needs of society and the economy." More amusing is that you say this as if these creative forces are locked in a dungeon somewhere by those evil bureaucrats. If anything, private education systems have a HUGE advantage on perceived quality (whether it exists in actuality or not); those creative forces likely have all the good P.R. that they need so that they can ALREADY be doing whatever optimal work you insist would be occuring.

Phew! It appears he is able to read after all.

Quote:
P.P.P.S. If I were an "avowed" statist, you would be able to point to where I had bluntly declared being so, and moreover, I obviously wouldn't feel very bad about something I supposedly avowed to being. Perhaps you're attempting to provide your own poor use of English as further evidence of the "failures" of the educational system you want to dismantle.

At the very least, I think we ought to dismantle the education system that taught you to structure your writing as a single sentence followed by no less than three post-scripts!

Quote: Original post by trzy
At the very least, I think we ought to dismantle the education system that taught you to structure your writing as a single sentence followed by no less than three post-scripts!

Call me an avowed post-scripter!

Quote: Original post by code4fun
On the other hand, I do think that getting rid of public schools on the whole would be a very bad idea. You may have been inspired enough to take it upon yourself to learn outside of the classroom, and your classmates may not have been smart enough to do this and instead learned some shaky information from bad teachers, but what if they have no teachers at all? Would they have learned anything?

I don't mean to convey the false impression that I was a particularly gifted, studious, or tenacious teenager, locked up in his room with a math book while everyone else was playing spin the bottle. I read and played around on the computer (programming) in my spare time, but learned actual mathematics and science at school. Had compulsory public education at the high school level not existed, my parents would certainly have forced me to learn or go to school. I believe this will be the case with virtually all middle and upper class households who realize the importance of education.

As I said in another recent post, there are valid concerns about the very poor and those whose cultures do not emphasize education and intellectual activities as much as others'. It's certainly possible that one local equilibrium state is a society full of uneducated, unskilled, dirt-poor, starving laborers. That's not what we want.

Quote:
There has to be some system in place (I am perfectly in agreement that local scale is better than national scale) to give them the chance to learn, or they won't. So many of these kids do not have the encouragement or the resources outside of the public education system to learn anything at all without it. And then where do they end up? I don't think I'm arguing with you, I guess I'm trying to get to a question: if not public school, then where? What system should be in place instead? Apprenticeships from grade 6 (11 years old) up?

I don't know what the solution should be. I think at the very least, we should begin making smart choices about teachers unions, private alternatives, and alternative educational paths for smart children as well as the extremely problematic cases. What do you think of this series of three articles on education by Charles Murray?

I'm not an educator, so I really don't know. All I know is that the public system is really messed up in some places, to the point where it seems that if it were to disappear altogether, the impact would minimal, sadly. I also know that for those of us who are curious and eager to learn, being forced to learn what the school system wanted us to learn, in the manner they wanted to teach us, was wasteful. Who honestly likes to learn history in a linear fashion by time-period rather than by exploring the history of concrete topics? Who feels it is normal to have to ask for permission to go to the freaking bathroom? Or to be hassled by a school cop for coming on campus in the middle of the day because they had an off-period earlier? Or for being threatened with expulsion for saving a QuickBASIC program to the hard drive in the computer lab?

Quote: Have you ever looked much in to the Montessori method? http://www.montessori.edu/index.html

It's an interesting concept if you haven't. I have worked at one montessori school and it was one of the more interesting things I've seen. Not perfect, but a lot more creative and practical than any other method I've had shoved down my throat over the last few years. Anything would be better than the "teach to the test or you're doomed" philosophy we've been living on.

No, I haven't looked into this, but thanks for sharing. I'll take a look!

Quote: Original post by trzy
Note that I had suggested dismantling post-elementary level government education camps but this study focuses on elementary education.

Oh. You mean the one that studied eighth-graders, too?

What were you saying about.....

Quote: Original post by trzy
The government education camps are failing even at basic literacy!

Quote: Original post by trzy

Quote: Original post by HostileExpanse
If you want to fix education, then it starts with getting parents more involved.

No shit. Isn't that what I've been saying all along?

lol .... no. You're not going to fool anyone into thinking that you've said anything of the sort. Your clueless drivel has centered around stuff like:

Quote: Original post by trzy
Give people educational freedom and let's see what happens.

and

Quote: Original post by trzy
blahblah STATIST! blahblahblah STATIST!

Anyways, the funny thing is ..... PEOPLE ALREADY HAVE "EDUCATIONAL FREEDOM." This is yet another brilliant attempt by you to pretend as if the private system is magically imprisoned by those statist meanies!

That's almost as brilliant as the idea that we should go back to some primitive ~5 year elementary-only system that advanced societies had worked to improve upon long ago. It's amazing how you can bleat about how you ostensibly believe in "dynamic and ultimately self-optimizing" capabilities of social systems, but then try to sweep it under the rug when advanced societies WORLDWIDE have already rejected the misguided "solutions" you're proposing. I guess you trust the creative influences of societies across the globe only when they happen to produce solutions that align with your anti-governmental position.

[Edited by - HostileExpanse on July 19, 2009 6:55:53 PM]