Blog 12: Finland's educational success story: Less testing, more trusting

In forty years Finland has reformed their whole education system. It used to be considered a homogeneous with mediocre schools now it has one of the best education systems in the whole world. In 2000, Finland surprised countries around the world when their 15-year-olds scored at the top of an important international exam called the PISA (the Program for International Student Assessment) and they have stayed near the top ever since then while the United States only scores around the middle. An official from Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture, Pasi Sahlberg, came to Seattle this week to talk about Finland’s success.  Pasi Sahlberg’s advice was stop testing so much, trust teachers more, give less homework and shorten the school day. Finland has improved their education so because they are doing things totally different from the United States. Although every country cannot be like Finland Spielberg believes that they could inspire other countries to consider new ways to achieve their educational goals. Finland relied on the cooperation among the teachers and schools instead of testing the schools and having them compete against each other. In Finland teachers come up with their own curriculum and design their own test there are no national tests expect one that is required at the end of high school. They really put faith and trust into their teachers and principals to do their job. Another major difference is that Finland students don’t start school until their 7 while we start at 5 in the U.S. Teaching a much respected job in Finland just as much as doctors and lawyers and their teachers don’t earn much more than U.S teachers but it still attracts the nation’s top graduates. Finland succeeded by taking ideas from the U.S and other countries so we should be able to learn from Finland too.

I think the U.S should look at other countries education systems and take some ideas from them. Our education is far from perfect so we could always use some extra help to further improve our education because this will be beneficial to the whole country. We can’t expect our country to continue running smoothly if our citizens aren’t on the same educational level as other countries around the world. Finland really stood out because they did the opposite of what most countries are doing and they were successful. Most countries would rather do what the others are doing than to be different and try out something new. They don’t want to be considered failures if the new ideas don’t work so they just go with the traditional systems which could be preventing them from doing better.

 http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2019676789_finland14m.html