the future of education.

I posted a thread a while ago entitled Wouldn't it be better if we learned things like medicine, mechanics, electrics, civil-construction, i.e. USEFUL things in school rather than all the other stuff?, where i raised questions about the practical value/usefulness of some of our currently taught disciplines and offered some examples of other set of knowledges that perhaps would be of more value/relevance in today's reality.

Unfortunately, people seem to have missed my point entirely, and what was supposed to be just an idea to be bounced and maybe food for thought ended up with them trying to find flaws in my thinking. Which i wasn't expecting, at all, giving the simplicity of what i was trying to say.

Fortunately, a user posted this article:

No, Finland isn’t ditching traditional school subjects. Here’s what’s really happening.

Some quotes;

Finland’s plans to replace the teaching of classic school subjects such as history or English with broader, cross-cutting “topics” as part of a major education reform have been getting global attention, thanks to an article in The Independent, one of the United Kingdom’s trusted newspapers. Stay calm: despite the reforms, Finnish schools will continue to teach mathematics, history, arts, music and other subjects in the future.

Sahlberg, one of the world’s leading experts on school reform and educational practices, is a visiting professor of practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is the author of the best-selling “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?” — originally published in 2011 and recently republished in an updated edition. The former director general of Finland’s Center for International Mobility and Cooperation, Sahlberg has written a number of important posts for this blog, including “What if Finland’s great teachers taught in U.S. schools,” and “What the U.S. can’t learn from Finland about ed reform.”

You may wonder why Finland’s education authorities now insist that all schools must spend time on integration and phenomenon-based teaching when Finnish students’ test scores have been declining in the most recent international tests. The answer is that educators in Finland think, quite correctly, that schools should teach what young people need in their lives rather than try to bring national test scores back to where they were.

What Finnish youth need more than before are more integrated knowledge and skills about real world issues, many argue. An integrated approach, based on lessons from some schools with longer experience of that, enhances teacher collaboration in schools and makes learning more meaningful to students.

Well, you should read the full article to better understand what is "phenomenon-based" teaching means. But basically it means they can manage to customize school programs at municipal level, and when it comes to global subjects, they deal with what's happening in the world right now.

Well, this article got me interested because it touches some points i've though of myself, now i'm curious to hear your thoughts on it.

Submitted April 20, 2017 at 01:50PM by bustedphoenix http://ift.tt/2ovAxPe