I am Polish, I live in Poland, and I found the article's praise for our education system strange. My opinion of it is much lower. I regularly worry about teaching my children to think for themselves — because I believe this is something the schooling system actively discourages. I also don't think that recent reforms did much to improve education, and I don't see why anyone could think they did.
I would approach this book very, very sceptically.
Over here in Indonesia, most of the more prestigious schools follow the Singapore model. Kids do end up studying a lot, but on the whole it doesn't seem more than I did as a kid (in rural America). They tend to be pretty well-rounded, teach three languages (English, Bahasa, and Mandarin), and follow roughly the math courses I remember as a child though perhaps a year advanced by 4th grade.
In the US, schools seem to be succumming to two very serious trends. The first, and most basic, is in the school attempting to replace rather than support the family as the basic unit of education. You can't do this though. Education begins and ends at home, and what schools offer is largely a supplement for the home.
This leads directly to the second problem which is the worship of innovation. I get told by friends in the US about how math classes are teaching Fibonacci parlor tricks for multiplication (like lattice multiplication, which I know enough math to understand but only because I know a lot more math than the average parent). This joins the high tech toys in the idea that gadgets and trinkets can teach our youth but parents cannot. The innovation focus further devalues the home as the center of learning, and it leads to a highly institutional, almost assembly-line view of learning.
In the end, I don't see how American higher education can survive another generation without some major adjustments to our public school system (and probably society as a whole, to be honest).
Well, reading that as a 22 years old Polish male gives me mixed feelings. I was living in Poland and studying there for my whole life and basically I have experience basically in whole educational process here (preschool, elementary, gymnasium, high school and now pursuing BS degree at polytechnic) I can definitely say that polish educational system is not that great. Of course we have a lot of people contesting in computer science /maths /physical national Olympic which are very hard contests but it is still very small factor, those kids are often struggling with the same problems you would expect they have (harassment, bullying etc).
Polish educational system (especially nation wide maturity exams after high school and college education) are in my opinion decreasing. The maturity exam is getting easier and easier each year to allow more people just to pass. Sure, life is going to verify that somehow, but it also diminish value of this exam.
In my opinion people that are successful in polish school are only those who decide to not follow teaching process given at school but they work very hard on they own, in my opinion the main problem that is present here (and probably worldwide) is students assessment process, every student is taken to the lowest common denominator when it comes giving grades. People that (in scope of the class room) are doing fine, let's say B grade students think they are doing just fine and there are only few things to improve, similarly A students - they generally tends to think they have already reached the peak, when there is still unbelievable much things to learn.
Oh come on! It's a classic case of out-sourcing, isn't it? Workers in Poland get paid a lot less. The min wage in Poland is €384 per month (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_count...) or $525 at current rates, while the minimum wage in the US is $7.25/hr (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...) - or for a 40 hour week that'd be $1160. I don't know what taxes would do to that, but we're looking at double the rate in the US.
If on top of that Poles are better educated, that's great. Plus Europe needs jobs. But I'm sure the primary concern is the bottom line. BAMA could staff the factories in Oklahoma if they could get away with paying the workers $4/hr.
> the company is struggling to find Okies with the skills to fill even its most basic factory jobs. Such posts require workers to think critically
Perhaps those educated enough to think critically put that skill to work before accepting a factory job making mass produced biscuits. My critical thinking skills lead me to guess that is not the most fulfilling, high paying, or upwardly mobile job even for Oklahoma.
I live in Poland, went to school here, and definitely cannot confirm the claims made in the article. Half of my education happened in the reform school system that the article mentions and almost everyone agrees that it's much worse that the previous one.
High school in Poland used to be a preparation for further education at university. It ends with a nation-wide exam called matura. The reform greatly reduced the number of other types of schools. It has two effects. First, it's much harder to find a skilled worker because there are much less workers trained. Second, the general level of education at high schools dropped significantly. It had to drop because otherwise many of the new pupils wouldn't pass the matura. Notions of a logarithm, exponential, prime decomposition has become foreign to pupils. No one has heard about a derivative or an integral for more than a decade.
Of course all the above is a generalisation. There are some great schools with teachers who really want to teach their subjects instead of just formally completing stages of the government-mandated education program. Unfortunately they are in minority. I'm really concerned about quality of education that my children will get in this country. Home schooling is an option though an expensive one.
Was I the only one who found no evidence in this article about 'teaching children to think'? There was some discussion about metrics (such as PISA) but that is not, to me, any sort of evidence about the ability to think.
History proves some interesting insight to education.
Take for example literacy. There are Finnish/Swedish parochial records/church examination registries dating back to 17th century down to a level of individual families. This is important due to Charles XI's Swedish Church Law of 1686 stating that everyone had to be able to read bible. So you can follow how that emergent Lutheran essence actually turned into literacy. From an individual perspective it was necessary to learn because you weren't allowed to take holy communion, be confirmed and later wed without reading ability. By 1750 some parishes started to have 90% reading ability. What is surprising is the writing ability. It achieved same levels only around 1900 (1920 in Finland). So that is clearly connected to industrial reform rather than spirit of protestantism. At least my initial assumption that reading/writing go hand in hand was proven wrong. In light of this long history of literacy in Nordic countries I tend to value the South Korean jump in literacy from previous generation more highly, even if it was achieved through “culture of educational masochism”.
Book about this: Understanding Literacy in Its Historical Contexts: Socio-cultural History and the Legacy of Egil Johansson.
Take a look at pg. 47 at Google Books and see how incredibly detailed those church examination registries in 1688-91 could be (pg. 56 has a nice graph differentiating the development of reading and writing ability): http://books.google.fi/books?id=WBLOVq4ocLEC&printsec=frontc...
My opinion and anecdotal experience is that the first priority in teaching children should be foreign languages. The younger you start, the easier it is to learn to speak and think in a foreign language. Almost everything else of any relevance can be taught basically as a side effect of language immersion.
I'm Finnish and went to a French-speaking school. I didn't understand any French going in, but at the age of 6, you pick it up quickly as long as it's a friendly environment. Later during the standard 12-year education, I had English as a third language, then Swedish (it's obligatory in Finland) and also German.
All the other stuff taught in school is such that a reasonably smart kid can learn it on her own as needed. But foreign languages are not like that. Thanks to computer games, I was somewhat fluent in reading English even before the classes started in school, but I couldn't speak a word -- you just don't learn pronounciation and conversation from games and TV shows, you need to have a real teacher.
As a Pole, I find it unbelivable. The system is incredibly strict, there is absolutely no place for free-thinking, I have never seen their archaic methods applied to real-world usage in a classroom, and all universities have very low funding,which means that most experiments are ran on ancient machines. There is no budget for buying tools or documentation. My girlfriend was told in front of the class by the professor that she should not be studying engineering because it's not an industry for women. It would be completely unacceptable at a university in the UK or in the States. In Poland she went to see the head of the university and was told that "she probably misunderstood what the professor meant". Obviously every one knows that that these two people are good friends so it's impossible to do anything about the situation.
If the Polish education system taught me anything, it is that free thinking is a bad thing,and you are punished for it on every step of your education.
Having grown in Poland, I have to say I was very lucky to be born in 1985 which was the cut-off year for the reformed educational system. I managed to escape it. It is widely agreed that the system brought nothing but deterioration in the level of education students receive pre-univeristy, esp. in maths/physics/chemistry. So much so that when I was still studying in Poland, I often heard that "new" students are at a level comparable to "old" part-time students.
> He decided to keep all Polish children in the same schools until they were 16, delaying the moment when some would have entered vocational tracks.
This is misleading. First of all, education is obligatory until one is 18 years old in Poland. There is no such thing as dropping out of school before that age. The previous educational system was two-tier, with primary school lasting until 15 years old, and high school lasting the remainder 4 years (5 years for vocational high school, AFAIR). There were no electives in primary school, so the first real sorting of students based on ability was taking place at entrance exams to high schools (which had no obligation to accept a student based on their geographical location). What the reform implemented is it created a third tier in between primary (shortened by 2 years) and high schools (shortened by 1 year), the gymnasium. Gymnasiums do not have the sorting ability of high schools. With the end result being that what high schools were previously struggling to teach in 4 years now they have to condense into 3 years. So a lot of things are left out now. Plus the students they get at entry are also of lower quality -- I remember browsing through the first set of chemistry textbooks for gymnasium and being shocked that what the "old" system primary school students had to cover in two years was supposed to be covered in a lesser form in 3 years of gymnasium. So yes, the reform postponed the division of students into university/vocational tracks by one year, but at the cost of overall quality of education.
This article is really funny for somebody living in Poland. It is totally opposite to what you hear in Poland about our educational system. I am really worried about other countries if Poland works as an example in education. The reform mentioned in the article has a very bad reputation here and most experts, citizens and politicians would like to take back the changes. Education standards declined rapidly as it become more egalitarian. I am laughing at the level of mathematics when I compare it to what I learned at school (in late 80s) and back than it was already a joke comparing to 70s. The most often repeated argument is that our schools do not teach pupils how to think. I don't really want to go further as it is somehow nice that The Economist, being so wrong, is giving us so much undeserved credit.
I was born in Poland and lived there until I turned 24 (I am 35 now). Now living in Australia and having previously lived in other countries, mainly US , contrary to others who comment on the quality of Polish education, I can confirm that thanks to the fact I received it in Poland I am much better off compared to my peers in AU or US. I work in IT now but previously got a teaching degree here in AU and worked in education (high schools) for 3 years. To put it in a nutshell, AU education (probably along with other westernized countries) is an utter joke compared to Polish. What AU kids do at school, irrespective of the level they are in is 3-4 years behind Europe. AU is going strong thanks to its migrants coming mainly from Asia who are slowly replacing typical Australians in high paying white collar jobs. Any kid educated in Asia can run circles around top students here and that is particularly evident during students exchange programs where newcomers cannot believe that learning about fractions and watching cartoons to write compositions or essays is a standard curricular approach. The reason I do not work in education anymore is precisely because I could not stand myself to watch how AU curriculum with a plethora of mickey mouse subjects is dumbbing this generations down (and probably others before it). I am not saying that Polish education was the highlight of my youth and that as a student I didn't hate every day of my life while at school, spent cramming Math and English and many other, seemingly useless subjects. However, seeing what I see now, in hindsight I am so grateful for the fact that it was so bloody hard to be even average student at my school and now that I have 2 kids on my own I feel sorry for the fact that unless I pay premium from the start for a private school, they will never have the same opportunity as I did.
A must read corollary to this is PG's "why are nerds unpopular"
I am from Czech Republic, which has educational system similar to celebrated Poland. "The holly cow" of reforms is to increase number of university graduates, if possible without spending extra money. On technical universities it means rationalizing and streamlining (for example before reforms to study IT I would also have to learn technical drawing). Also three years bachelor degree was practically non-existent.
In reality this eroded university degrees by one level down. Also unemployment rate among university graduates is rising. On other side unemployment rate among younger people is lower, since most of them are studying until 25.
There is shortage of qualified workers such as plumbers, electricians and welders. Those professions can easily make more money than software developers.
For a more detailed understanding of the PISA system, there was a recent Econtalk podcast - http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/08/hanushek_on_edu_3.h...
Supplemental reading: Linus Torvalds's (from Finland) opinion of American schools: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/J1NCgKQi55X
>>Yet international rankings now put the country’s students well ahead of America’s in science and maths (the strongest predictor of future earnings), even as the country spends far less per pupil.<<
This sentence is exemplary of most, if not all, of the discussion about education reform. Another cue are the explicit goals of the Common Core standards, expressly designed to further economic competitiveness of America's youth.
But what about our children's ability to make informed decisions using qualified evidence?
This is different from so-called 'critical thinking', which is so vaguely defined whenever it comes up, or 'creativity', which lacks a rigorous method to appreciate its application.
These informed decisions I'm talking about not only affect our youth's ability to make decisions about their own lives (because no matter your education system, practical experience is other than doing well in school), but also their ability to make decisions about the state we live in collectively. There's little out there teaching people how to make informed decisions about areas they have no expertise in, and yet, must make a decision.
Politicians are voted in for dubious populism rather than the sensibility of their policy programme. Most responses to social issues continue to spiral around ideology and prejudice. America needs a lot more than just an effective STEM education regime.
This year, I've engaged schools at length to discuss computer based systems. There are a few recurring threads that I have seen that would support this article.
* Real-world examples are not favoured. I'd go as far to say they are unpopular. There is an over emphasis on theory and rote learning, without providing context. This may be a result of "stove piping" mathematics to be "pure math only", rather than having "real-world applications".
* Children are shoe-horned and given little opportunity to pace themselves and their learning. The theory may be that kids that progress quickly may become bored.
* Technology is praised/shunned in the wrong ways. Tablets are generally praised, and in my view, offer limited opportunity and creativity. PCs are shunned, or treated as "toys".
* Over emphasis on rewards. There seems to be a common thread that kids continually need to be bribed. Avatars/humourous or cute animations/etc. There may be a good reason for this, but I find that it actually distracts students rather than helps.
I could list other things that have concerned me, but these are the first ones that come to mind.
Edited to add comments about "rewards".
In this article the journalist associates critical thinking with economic abilities. In other words, the local factory can't find laborers because children in the area lack reading and math skills. The author then goes on to argue that standardized testing is partially to blame for this phenomenon.
While journalists commonly make this leap, it's not necessarily an accurate one. In other words, standardized testing is not always at odds with critical thinking.
For example, South Korea, a nation with a very strong emphasis on standardized testing, consistently ranks in the world's top 5 universities, according to Pearson. Its students have strong reading and math skills, which prepare them to meet the challenges of many jobs.
We should question the myth that standardized testing always harms critical thinking. In some cases, I think, this argument is used as an excuse to justify American children's increasingly awful test scores.
2 anecdotes:
We had a guy from Poland living with us in Germany for 6 months. I think it was around 2003/2004 when I was still in school. His math skills were absolutely impressive but he still had to study a lot to keep up (he was living in Germany due to some excellency initiative, so this is a slightly skewed sample). When he showed me some of their lessons it was way beyond what we had to do in school.
In 9th grade I took part in an exchange program with the UK. As they lacked exchange partners , I got matched up with a guy from 10th or 11th grade (can't remember). The school was supposedly one of the better ones. I wasn't very good in math (usually hovered around grade 3 [1 - 6 with 1 being the best grade and 4.0 the worst passing grade]) but I was pretty much the best in their class. Wasn't very impressed by them.
Worse yet, the standard education indirectly discourages independent thought. It is difficult to reconcile the standardization of education with the wide diversity of students. There is simply no way everyone's intellect can flourish under a one-size-fits-all system.
I'm an American so I'm probably biased.. but what I've found is that in most school districts you can get as good of an education as you want. I grew up in South Carolina and went to high/secondary school in Florida.. two states with relatively poor education records.
However, by staying on the "right" path I was able to get in advanced programs, programs for students with high IQs that taught critical thinking skills.. I graduated high school with over 30 college credit hours and had completed Physics 1, Calc 1, 2, and 3, and a hand full of other electives... all in high school.
Other students in the same exact schools I attended had equal and opposite educational experiences/success.
>Students forego calculators, having learned how to manipulate numbers in their heads.
Not true in Finland.
> The argument about knowing how and when to apply formulas misses the fact that practice in applying those formulas is essential to competence.
>
I am coming late to this topic, and I wanted to make exactly this point that @kaitai made in a thread, in one of the many threads about memorisation vs. critical understanding.... This is the (moot) point that people seem to be missing here, which is surprising, because most of us here do seem to think highly about "code katas" or the "10,000 hour rule" or "immersion into code/algorithms" which is all about the above.
The review of Amanda Ripley's new book Smartest Kids in the World by Annie Murphy Paul in the New York Times[1] is a good reality check on the review from The Economist kindly posted here. The book is in hot demand in my county library system, so my request for the book hasn't been filled yet. The other excerpts from the book I have seen online have been very good.
I have lived overseas and observed the effect of another school system, and indeed education reform is the issue that drew me to participate here on Hacker News,[2] so I am always interested in discussing education policy here. Based on the different country I have observed, I think the book's account is largely correct. Americans underestimate how much young people can learn. School programs in the United States, according to federal sample surveys, are so underchallenging that many school pupils, not just the "gifted" pupils, find school too easy and boring.[3] Mathematics lessons in the United States are especially notorious for emphasizing the mechanical aspects of calculation--thus expecting students to bring electronic calculators to class--and underemphasizing the thinking involved in mathematical problem-solving.[4]
Let's discuss what makes sense in education policy on the basis of facts from more than one place. It's significant that we are discussing education policy around the world here in English, as very few Americans could discuss education policy in Korean, Polish, or Finnish, the languages of the countries profiled in the new book. (I could discuss education policy in Chinese, the language I learned as a second language, but that is not the usual experience of Americans.) The new book's encouragement to do that is a good contribution to better education policy.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/books/review/amanda-ripley...
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123
[3] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2012-07-...
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/NEWS/z_Personal/G...
[4] http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/articles.php?pa...
From the outside, the state of education in the US seems really worrying. Hard to see the wage gap closing any time soon with the way it sounds like their kids are being educated.
I disagree the norm that we don't teach kids to think or our American education sucks. I want to stop comparing education with other countries if possible, but we do this every day anyway. We do teach kids think. I am a Chinese immigrant. I came to US when I was 12 and I am 22 now. I have to say that the American education is quite liberal and most classes I take do ask students to think more critically.
The thing about American classroom is that overall classroom interaction is more decentralized than the Chinese's. In China (specifically HK), you sit in the same classroom with 30-40 people for many years. For example, I can sit with 80% of the people for 6 years during my elementary school (in China, elementary school is 6 years, age 6 to age 12). So you build a strong friendship with a lot of people. You work like a team and solve things like a team for many years. Usually with team effort and strong friendship, students are more likely to produce something interesting - everyone can be honest to each other. You are not shy to tell others your opinion.
This is quite true for school up to junior high in America as one spends every day with students in their homeroom. When you enter HS, you usually don't have that kind of classroom model anymore. You usually see different people in different classes; it's like a college experience to me. For a school with 3000 students, 20/30 people will not appear in my next class.
Now you can still do teamwork, except, team work is with different group of people each time. This has an advantage though: you hear more different opinions. Except people can be shy and skeptical so it's harder to work with.
To me, education is not about score. Sure Russian and Chinese are scoring 98% and Americans are scoring 50%. So what? I don't go to MIT and people around me are genius in their own way. I can't make a good joke and people I know can. Every one has their own strength and own creativity. Teaching children how to think is like making everyone to do the same thing: get 100 on your next math competition.
That's stupid. If you make fewer exams and more on spreading knowledge, let students have more time to rest and play, eventually students will happier and will have more time to think.
When you put emphasis on testing knowledge, you stress students out. I am not saying you don't stress them from time to time - you know, because stress can produce new ideas (think agile and get shit done), but we need to put less on scores. This is why group activity is important. Students in group competitions like sports and robotics (FIRST) are happier. This is why we should go back to HS and help students to organize clubs and events. Or mentor people to do things.
Eventually, kids will figure out. Each of us can come up with some crazy ideas for the next biggest startup. It is just a matter of time.
Inventions don't come in a day. It takes idea, time, dedication, group effort and knowledge.
Smarter kids where good education and good relations and good social communicate but it not fifth element and it is insufficient. Kids everywhere are smart but env may stop evolution. Lets kids thinking. Kids needs in protect always.
Most people don't need to think. Thinking isn't necessary to live in today's world.
Does smart child earns a lot of money and stupid one does not?
Slightly ominous headline, perhaps?
I was born in Poland and lived there until I turned 24 (I am 35 now). Now living in Australia and having previously lived in other countries, mainly US , contrary to others who comment on the quality of Polish education, I can confirm that thanks to the fact I received it in Poland I am much better off compared to my peers in AU or US. I work in IT now but previously got a teaching degree here in AU and worked in education (high schools) for 3 years. To put it in a nutshell, AU education (probably along with other westernized countries) is an utter joke compared to Polish. What AU kids do at school, irrespective of the level they are in is 3-4 years behind Europe. AU is going strong thanks to its migrants coming mainly from Asia who are slowly replacing typical Australians in high paying white collar jobs. Any kid educated in Asia can run circles around top students here and that is particularly evident during students exchange programs where newcomers cannot believe that learning about fractions and watching cartoons to write compositions or essays is a standard curricular approach. The reason I do not work in education anymore is precisely because I could not stand myself to watch how AU curriculum with a plethora of mickey mouse subjects is dumbbing this generations down (and probably others before it). I am not saying that Polish education was the highlight of my youth and that as a student I didn't hate every day of my life while at school, spent cramming Math and English and many other, seemingly useless subjects. However, seeing what I see now, in hindsight I am so grateful for the fact that it was so bloody hard to be even average student at my school and now that I have 2 kids on my own I feel sorry for the fact that unless I pay premium from the start for a private school, they will never have the same opportunity as I did.
Some MNC's and NGO can play important role in it.
Growing up, I declined to participate in the educational system (primarily to avoid harassment at school) and instead spent all of my time learning to program video games at home. So I would sleep through class, go home, and try to write Pong. My academic performance was nonexistent, but I came out of it with a career. I was wondering, was anyone else's childhood experience similar?
Highschool felt at best a dungeon, and at worst a torture chamber. That was primarily due to my mindset. I didn't really know how the world worked, and it seemed to me like the system had been designed for the purpose of dragging me down to the level of the brutes around me. But unfortunately the experience killed my interest in wanting to strive to attend a good (or any) university, which I now deeply regret. Not due to loss of credentials, but rather due to missing out on the social experience of uni.
If it were explained to me that the reason I was in school was because an industrialized society needs a place to put children for 8 hours each day so their parents can work, it would've made so much more sense than trying to believe the lie that we were there to learn. It felt so obvious that we weren't there to learn anything substantial. By learning to program video games I'd gotten a taste of the amount of effort real learning took, and memorizing historical dates or doing trivial math problems definitely wasn't any effort. So maybe one solution to "How do we cultivate the desire to learn?" is to relax on the idea that school is even supposed to be a place for kids to learn.