Pasi Sahlberg: lessons from Finnish education

[Celerity]

Social Europe

https://socialeurope.eu/

Around the world, education 'reforms' have made schooling more market-mimicking and competitive, rendering education a 'club good' for the better off. Finland shows how treating education as a public good and teachers as autonomous professionals brings better student performance overall, without intrusive and expensive inspection.

https://pasisahlberg.com/

https://twitter.com/pasi_sahlberg


Essay

By design

New foundations for teaching and learning

by Pasi Sahlberg

https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/by-design/

I WAS TREMBLING. Not because I was about to do something risky or scary – quite the opposite. This was a situation I had been in many times before, but I was nervous about what was going to happen next.

I was on the Concert Hall stage at the Sydney Opera House looking at an audience of about 2,000 people. Not to perform music, thankfully: I’d been invited to speak about why Australia should abolish its private schools. Typical symptoms of performance anxiety include dry mouth, sweaty hands, trembling knees and racing heartbeat – I experienced all these and more. Even my vision had changed thanks to the bright spotlights turned towards me.

Standing alone, I caught sight of the beautiful white birch panelling of the Concert Hall’s interior. It reminded me of my home country. For the Finns, the birch is a sacred tree. Birch trees play an important part in the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic.

Suddenly I felt more comfortable.

It was time to do what I’d come to do – to tell the audience why Finnish parents don’t ever need to worry about finding a good school or paying for their children’s education, and why Australians wouldn’t need to do so either if they didn’t want to.

Imagine that.

This episode happened in September 2012 during my second visit to Australia. I’d enjoyed many conversations and debates with Australians over the years, but that day at the Opera House became my most memorable public talk to that point. It still is the highlight of my working life.

snip

[DFW]

1. If you can master the grammar of the Finnish language

I think you already qualify for genius status.

[Igel]

4. A standard assumption in linguistics is

that every language is about equally hard to learn if you're raised around it.

Even languages with what appear to us to have absurd phonologies or declension systems. Or tones.

(Another one is that race/ethnicity of the parents doesn't matter--this was a big deal in the 1910s and 1920s, when the claim was made that anybody of any race raised in an environment with Mandarin, Zulu, English, etc., spoken would be equally fluent and adept, on average, as anybody of any other race. Human is human is human.)

I have trouble with tonal languages, but I don't speak one natively. Don't even talkabout agglutinative languages. As for the Finnish sound changes (or are those Estonian? or both? Dang, I'm getting old ...) I find it amusing to compare them with Welsh lenition and fortition.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. American education is filling a pail. Education in some other places more like lighting a fire. nt

[TomWilm]

3. Finland's schools are known for giving one of the best educations in the world

They also tests their pupils a lot, and since our Danish governments wanted a better school here, they also started to test a lot. It did not help though - since the main magic behind the Finnish teachers is another factor: Their teachers are required to have a master's degree from a university. No plans to copy that for Denmark, silly tests are way cheaper...