Kim's Friday assignment!

Shopping for Education

Researching for this blog I came across an AD that summed up a popular theory of what “Americans look for” when shopping for educational opportunities for their children.  

Competition and entrepreneurship have made this country great!!  We are the leaders in inventions, new business leaders and creative arts. We are proud of our consumerism when comparing our economic success with other countries.

Doesn’t every parent want the best for their child?  What is best for my child may be very different than what is best for yours.  We can’t simulate the education systems of Finland, Singapore and Korea when we are focused on nurturing the individuality of each child, not the equal success of a nation.  The grass is always greener… heck, today, I bought flowers for my front porch, why? So the neighbors would think I’ve got it all together.  I could care less about flowers on my front porch!!

In an article from the online magazine The Atlantic, one of the leading Finnish authorities on education reform, Pasi Sahlberg, spoke with educators and students in New York  about the differences in our two countries philosophies and was reported by Anu Partanen.

Sahlberg stated that while Americans love to talk about competition, nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable.  He quotes a line from a Finnish writer named Samuli Paronen: "Real winners do not compete." It's hard to think of a more un-American idea, but when it comes to education, Finland's success shows that the Finnish attitude might have merits. There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation (Partanen,2012)

Can we commit to that?  Do we, as educators, have the ability to remove our competitiveness from our profession.  And more importantly, will Americans send their children to schools that promote this cooperative philosophy versus the “choice” mentality. I think not.

Sahlberg continues, "When President Kennedy was making his appeal for advancing American science and technology by putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960's, many said it couldn't be done. But he had a dream. Just like Martin Luther King a few years later had a dream. Those dreams came true. Finland's dream was that we want to have a good public education for every child regardless of where they go to school or what kind of families they come from, and many even in Finland said it couldn't be done." Clearly, many were wrong. It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.

The Atlantic   http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/

My take on all of this:  We can’t change the subsystem of education unless we look at the larger system and make efforts to change that. Or, do we revise our subsystem of education to reflect and blend together with our existing and somewhat successful system of society?