I enjoy the simplicity in Finnish Culture,and I incorporate this into my teaching and tutoring pedagogical practices. I wish my kids could go to school in Finland. I have been teaching in public schools(College, Community College, High School, etc.) of all types for the last 12 years, and have repeatedly witnesses a sad but steady decline due to the elements listed in the article below. Our US educational system's failure to progress, or to research, learn and apply the practices of successful educational systems like Finland, is one of the many reasons our current educational system is failing, along with all the politics, bureaucracy, and just plain disrespect of professional educators (pay, teaching responsibilities, administrators enabling students to disregard instructor's rules concerning respect, student cell phones usage,etc.)
My concern with the results of the stress, competition, socioeconomic status, and other dividing factors that are such a huge part of US schools, lies in the people it affects the most: the students. The students attending schools in our country that are not meeting the educational needs of progressive students in a very, very, fast moving, progressive, technologically fueled egotistical, and ever-changing place known as america . I don't want to mislead others that I am a total cynic, but one thing I see in the great schools in our country is progression , and the modeling and teaching of adaptability. Educational progression is responsible for the
success of students in our country, and I will continue to learn and teach based on practices learned during my multicultural educational research:
"Americans give lip service to the notion that "all men are created equal,” but our appetite for competition creates an intense focus on ranking low and high performers — whether they're schools or students.
Finland downplays educational competition in a number of ways. Schools aren't ranked against each other, and teachers aren't threatened with formal reviews. At many schools, teachers don’t grade students until the fifth grade, and they aren’t forced to organize curriculum around standardized testing. Gifted students aren’t tracked into special programs, invited into honor societies, or chosen to be valedictorians. Instead, struggling students receive free extra tutoring. After ninth grade, students attend either an academic program (53%) or vocational one (47%) — this flexibility results in a 96% graduation rate, dwarfing the United States' measly 75%. Finally, since there are no private schools to speak of, there’s no sense that the best students are being skimmed off the top.
Overall, such attitudes go hand in hand with Finland’s socialist-style egalitarian society, which focuses on meting out fees and services according to need rather than merit. Even parking ticket penalties are determined according to income: A wealthy sausage factory heir was fined $204,000 for going 50 miles per hour in a 25-mph zone!