every mom wants to be an all-powerful wizard
In an earlier post, I talked about how in Excellent Sheep, the Miseducation of the American Elite & The Way to a Meaningful Life, William Deresiewicz says “The purpose of life [has become] the accumulation of gold stars.” (Excellent Sheep, page 16) How does he relate that to education? How does it relate to high school? Can AP failure teach kids how to fail?…
In my last post, I talked in Excellent Sheep, the Miseducation of the American Elite & The Way to a Meaningful Life, William Deresiewicz says “The purpose of life [has become] the accumulation of gold stars.” (Excellent Sheep, page 16) How does he relate that to education? How does it relate to college admissions?…
In my previous post, I talked about how William Deresiewicz starts out Excellent Sheep, the Miseducation of the American Elite & The Way to a Meaningful Life, with the assertion that mental health problems are on the rise among college students. Deresiewicz thinks the problem lies with education, especially elite universities.
Excellent Sheep talks a lot about how the desperate race to collect accolades for acceptance to an elite college affects students.
How it doesn’t stop after high school.
It continues on through college with the accumulation of multiple majors.
“The purpose of life becomes the accumulation of gold stars.” (Excellent Sheep, page 16)
As evidence…
You’ve read about them. Those super-start students who’re valedictorian, took 7 AP classes and tested out of 3 more AP credits, played in the school marching band, got accepted to Harvard, and started up their own non-profit on the side. All while making it look easy. But was it easy? William Deresiewicz starts out Excellent Sheep, the Miseducation of the American Elite & The Way to a Meaningful Life, by pointing out that the easy super-star student is a myth.
He goes into all sorts of statistics to show that while it appears students are effortlessly over-achieving, when you look at the numbers, what we have — according to one college President — is “an epidemic of depression among younger people.”
Of course, it’s just numbers, and just because it’s written in a book, doesn’t mean it’s true. But when what I’m reading matches my own experiences, I start to take notice….
Finland’s education system ranks at the top of the world by almost every measure, in all sorts of rankings. How do they do it? How is the US education system compared to Finland? To get more information, I watched The Finland Phenomenon:Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System, from the Robert Compton Documentary series on Global Education, directed by Sean T. Faust. In my first post, I looked at the differences between Finland’s school system and our school system and then at how the Finnish educational system structured.
How else do Finnish schools differ?
In Finland, they actively try not to punish students for mistakes and there’s very little testing….
The Finland education system is the best in the world by almost every measure, in all sorts of rankings. How do they do it? To get more information, I watched The Finland Phenomenon:Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System, from the Robert Compton Documentary series on Global Education, directed by Sean T. Faust. In my last post, I looked at the differences between Finland’s school system and our school system.
Regardless of whether or not we could completely copy the Finnish school system, what can be learn from it? How is the Finnish educational system structured? In addition to some small new pieces of information, I found that if I listened between the lines and looked at what was I saw in the video, I picked up on a few more nuances.
There are high entrance requirements to even start teacher training, much less get your certification, which is a masters degree. …
Finland is the highest ranked country in education by many measures. To further understand and compare U.S. education vs. Finland, I watched The Finland Phenomenon:Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System, from the Robert Compton Documentary series on Global Education, directed by Sean T. Faust. At first, I was thinking that I wasn’t really learning anything new or surprising. I’m not sure where I’d already heard most of the information. It may have been The Smartest Kids in the World or World Class Learners.
In any case, if you don’t have time to read two complete books, the documentary is a quick way to get a good overview of the Finland school system if you can get your hands on a copy. It isn’t readily available.
So why is the Finland school system so important? Several quick facts at the start of the film summarize it well….
If you’ve read my previous posts about a liberal arts education at a small liberal arts college, starting with Consider a Liberal Arts College, you probably didn’t expect the title of this post. But sometimes you consider an idea and then find it to not be the best fit. In my last post I covered some reservations I had about a liberal arts degree. But our biggest issue was that we were looking for a college with a computer science degree, a liberal arts college engineering degree. And yes, that turns out to be a contradiction.
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I started down the path of considering a liberal arts education at a liberal arts college for our son, because I was questioning the value of chasing the grades of top 10%, and was worried about my kids’ chances of getting into a “competitive” (read “good” or “well-ranked”) college if they didn’t join that race. (This turned out not to be true. You can get into a good college without a high class ranking.) One alternative is to attend a small liberal arts college instead of a large research university….
It might seem like the easiest way to figure out which colleges and universities are good, or the best, is to just look at the college rankings.
The short answer is that is not a good idea.
In fact, it’s a TERRIBLE idea.
If you want to know why, read on….