ကမၻာ့နံပါတ္တစ္ ဖင္လန္ႏိုင္ငံပညာေရးစနစ္ (How Does Finland's Education Become The Best In The World?)

ဖင္လန္မွာ ဥေရာပတိုက္ ေျမာက္ပိုင္း၊ ေဘာလ္တစ္ပင္လယ္အနီးရွိ ႏိုင္ငံတစ္ႏိုင္ငံျဖစ္သည္။ ဖင္းနစ္ရွ္ႏွင့္ ဆီြးဒစ္ရွ္ဘာသာစကားမ်ား ေျပာဆိုၾကည္သည္။ ေငြေၾကးအားျဖင့္ ယူရိုေငြကို သုံးစြဲၾကသည္။ ၿမိဳ႔ေတာ္မွာ ဟယ္လ္ဆင္ကီ ျဖစ္သည္။ လူဦးေရ (၅) သန္းေက်ာ္ရွိသည္။ တရားဝင္သုံးစြဲသည့္ႏိုင္ငံအမည္မွာ ဖင္လန္သမၼတႏိုင္ငံျဖစ္သည္။ ဧရိယာစတုရန္းမိုင္ေပါင္း ၁၃၀၅ ဒႆမ ၅၉ မိုင္ က်ယ္ဝန္းသည့္ ႏိုင္ငံျဖစ္သည္။

ဖင္လန္ႏိုင္ငံဟာ ပညာေရးမွာ ထိပ္ဆုံးအဆင့္ သတ္မွတ္ျခင္းခံရၿပီး၊ သခ်ၤာမွာေတာ့ ေတာင္ကိုရီးယားကို နည္းနည္းေလးကပ္ရႈံးျပီး ဒုတိယသခ်ၤာ အေကာင္းဆုံးႏိုင္ငံအျဖစ္ သတ္မွတ္ျခင္းခံခဲ့ရသည္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာပညာေရးဆိုင္ရာ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ (၁၀၀) ေက်ာ္လာၿပီး ဖင္လန္ႏိုင္ငံစနစ္ကို ေလ့လာၾကရသည္အထိ နာမည္ေက်ာ္ခဲ့တယ္။ ယခု ဒီေဆာင္းပါးကလည္း အဲဒီေလ့လာသူေတြထဲက အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံ ေက်ာင္းဆရာတစ္ေယာက္ရဲ ႔ သူျမင္တဲ့ ဖင္လန္ႏိုင္ငံ ပညာေရး စနစ္ကို တင္ျပသြားတာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

ဖင္လန္ႏိုင္ငံပညာေရး ေကာင္းခဲ့တာလည္း မေျပာနဲ႔ေလ၊ ကမၻာ့ပညာေရးအတြက္ ေငြေၾကးအမ်ားဆုံးသုံးတဲ့ႏိုင္ငံေလးႏိုင္ငံထဲမွာ စာရင္းဝင္တယ္။ ၂၀၁၀ ခုႏွစ္မွာဆိုရင္ ေဒသဆိုင္ရာ မူလတန္းနဲ႔ အထက္တန္းေက်ာင္းေတြ အတြက္ ပညာေရးအသုံးစရိတ္အျဖစ္ သတ္မွတ္တဲ့ေငြေၾကးပမာဏက ေဒၚလာသန္း ၃၇၀ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အစိုးရအေနနဲ႔ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ကရတဲ့ အခြန္ေငြေတြအေပၚကေန ပညာေရးအတြက္ အေကာင္းဆုံး ရင္းႏွီးျမွဳပ္မႈလို႔လည္း ဆိုႏိုင္ပါတယ္။

OECD ႏိုင္ငံေတြမွာ PSIA ဆိုတဲ့ စာေမးပြဲကို စံတစ္ခုအေနနဲ႔ သတ္မွတ္ၿပီး က်င္းပေပးတယ္။ ႏိုင္ငံတကာအသိအမွတ္ျပဳ အထက္တန္းေက်ာင္းအဆင့္ စာေမးပြဲလည္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အေမရိကန္ပညာေရးဌာနကေန စစ္ေဆးေပးတယ္။ ဒီစစ္ေဆးမႈမွာ ဖင္လန္ႏိုင္ငံက ထိပ္တန္းစာရင္းဝင္ႏိုင္ငံျဖစ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ဖင္လန္ႏိုင္ငံမွာ မူႀကိဳအဆင့္အတန္းကို အသက္ ၆ႏွစ္မွ စတတ္ရတယ္။ မူႀကိဳမွာ စာမသင္ဘူး။ ေပ်ာ္ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္ရႊင္ျဖစ္ေအာင္ထားတယ္။ ပညာသင္ၾကားႏိုင္ဖို႔ အဆင္သင့္ျဖစ္ေအာင္ ျပင္ဆင္ေပးတယ္။ မူႀကိဳျပီးတဲ့ႏွစ္ကေန ေနာက္ ၉ ႏွစ္တိတိ အေျခခံပညာကို သင္ၾကားၾကရတယ္။ ၉တန္း ၁၀ တန္း အဆင့္ေအာင္ၿပီးရင္ အဆင့္ျမင့္တန္း (upper secondary school) ကိုဆက္တက္ခ်င္ရင္တက္၊ ဒါမွ မဟုတ္ အသက္ေမြးမႈေက်ာင္းေတြကို ၃ ႏွစ္သြားတတ္လို႔ရတယ္။

အသက္ေမြးမႈေက်ာင္းေတြကလည္း ေပါ့ပ်က္ပ်က္ေတာ့ မေအာင္ဘူး။ လုပ္ငန္းခြင္အထိ ရည္ရြယ္ထားတာေတြျဖစ္လို႔ ေက်ာင္းသင္ျပ႒ာန္းစာေရာ၊ သတ္မွတ္ထားတဲ့ ဘာသာရပ္ဆိုင္ရာျပ႒ာန္းခ်က္ေတြေရာ ေလ့လာၾကရတယ္။ အထက္တန္းနဲ႔ အဆင့္ျမင့္တန္းေတြျပီးရင္ တကၠသိုလ္ကို မာစတာဘြဲ႔အတြက္ျဖစ္ေစ၊ PhD ဘြဲ ႔ အတြက္ျဖစ္ေစ တက္ဖို႔သြားၾကသလို၊ အသက္ေမြးမႈေက်ာင္းေတြကလည္း ပိုလီတက္ကနစ္ေကာလိပ္ေတြကို သြားတတ္ၾကတာမ်ားတယ္။ အနည္းဆုံးေတာ့ ဘက္ခ်လာဘြဲ ႔ တစ္ခုခု သို႔မဟုတ္ မာစတာဘြဲ႔ ေတြအတြက္ သြားတက္ၾကတယ္။

ဖင္လန္ႏိုင္ငံမွာ အသက္၂၅ ႏွစ္ေလာက္ေရာက္မွ ဘြဲ ႔ရၾကတာမ်ားတယ္။ တခ်ိဳ ႔ႏိုင္ငံေတြမွာက ဘဝတစ္သက္တာပညာေရးေတြဆိုၿပီး ေျပာေနေပမယ့္ ဖင္လန္ႏိုင္ငံသားေတြကေတာ့ ပညာသင္ၾကားေရးဟာ ႏိုင္ငံသူႏိုင္ငံသားေတြရဲ ႔ အခြင့္အေရးတစ္ခုအေနနဲ႔သတ္မွတ္ထားတာေၾကာင့္ အရြယ္ေရာက္လာရင္ပညာတတ္ေတြ ျဖစ္သြားၾကတယ္။ လုပ္ငန္းခြင္အတြက္ အသင့္အေနအထားမွာ ရပ္တည္ႏိုင္သူေတြခ်ည္းျဖစ္ၿပီး ပညာတတ္ေပါမ်ားတဲ့ႏိုင္ငံျဖစ္ေနတယ္။ သူတို႔ ရထားတဲ့ဘြဲ ႔ေတြဟာ သူတို႔ဘဝအတြက္ သူတို႔အသက္ေမြးမႈလုပ္ငန္းေတြအတြက္ အသင့္ျဖစ္ေနၾကတယ္။

ဖင္လန္ႏိုင္ငံက ဆရာေတြဟာ စက္မႈဖြံ ႔ၿဖိဳးတိုးတတ္တဲ့ႏိုင္ငံႀကီးေတြက မ်ားတယ္။ ပညာေပးမယ့္ ဆရာေတြဟာ ပညာေရးမွာ ေလးစားစရာေကာင္းေလာက္ေအာင္ ဘြဲ ႔ထူး ဂုဏ္ထူးေတြနဲ႔ ျပည့္စုံၾကတယ္။ ဆရာေတြဟာ ဆရာအတတ္ပညာနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ၿပီးေတာ့လည္း သင္တန္းေတြတက္ေရာက္ခဲ့သူေတြျဖစ္ရတယ္။ ေက်ာင္းဂုဏ္နဲ႔လိုက္ေအာင္ ဆရာေတြကလည္း ကိုယ့္ဂုဏ္သိကၡာကို အရည္အခ်င္းအစြမ္းျပၿပီး လိုက္ၿပိဳင္ျပရတယ္။ ဖင္လန္ႏိုင္ငံမွာ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ကေန ဂုဏ္ျပဳသတ္မွတ္ခံရတဲ့ဆရာေတြျဖစ္ေအာင္ ႀကိဳးစားျပၾကရတယ္။

ဖင္လန္ႏိုင္ငံပညာေရးစနစ္မွာ ဘြဲ ႔ရၿပီး မာစတာ ဆက္တတ္ခြင့္ရတဲ့ေက်ာင္းသားေတြဟာ ေစတနာ့ဝန္ထမ္းျပန္ၿပီးဆရာလုပ္ခြင့္ရတယ္။ သူတို႔ဘာသာရပ္နယ္ပယ္မွာ သင္ၾကားရင္း ေလ့လာျပန္ျပီး ပညာရွာၾကရတယ္။ မာစတာတန္းဆက္တတ္ဖို႔ မမီတဲ့သူေတြကေတာ့ အထက္တန္း၊ မူႀကိဳတန္းေတြမွာ ျပန္ၿပီးဆရာလုပ္ႏိုင္တယ္။

ဖင္လန္ႏိုင္ငံက မိဘေတြဟာ ပညာေရးသည္သာ သူတို႔သားသမီးေတြအတြက္ အေရးအပါဆုံးလို႔လက္ခံထားၾကတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္လည္း ဆရာေတြကို အေလးထားၾကတယ္။ မိဘနဲ႔ဆရာေတြရဲ ႔စိတ္ထဲမွာ ကိုယ့္သားမီးက ေက်ာင္းမွာ ညံ့လာရင္ သူတို႔မွာပဲ တာဝန္ရွိတယ္လို႔ လက္ခံထားၾကတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ညံ့တဲ့ကေလးေတြအတြက္ အျပစ္ကို ခံယူစရာရွိရင္ မိဘနဲ႔ဆရာေတြကသာ ခံယူၾကမယ္လို႔ သေဘာတူထားၾကတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ဆရာေတြက ေက်ာင္းမွာ ကိုယ့္ကိုအပ္ႏွံထားတဲ့ ေက်ာင္းသားေတြကို ေကာင္းေကာင္းသင္၊ လမ္းမွန္ညႊန္ျပ ဂရုစိုက္ၾကရတယ္။

မိဘေတြကိုယ္တုိင္ကလည္း ကိုယ့္သားသမီးက သခ်ၤာရမွတ္ေကာင္းေကာင္းနဲ႔ အိမ္ျပန္လာမွ ဆရာေတြကို အသိအမွတ္ျပဳၾကတယ္။ သူတို႔ႏိုင္ငံမွာက သူတို႔သားသမီးေတြရဲ့ အနာဂတ္ကို ဆရာေတြ အေပၚ လုံးဝပုံအပ္ထားၾကသလို၊ ဆရာေတြကလည္း ယုံမွတ္ျပီး ပုံအပ္ခ်င္စရာ စိတ္ဓာတ္ ပညာအေျခခံေတြ ေကာင္းၾကတယ္။ မိဘေတြအေနနဲ႔ သူတို႔သားသမီးေတြရဲ့ ပညာေရးလိုအပ္ခ်က္ေတြကို ဆရာေတြကသာ ျဖည့္ဆည္ေပးႏိုင္လိမ့္မယ္လို႔လည္း မွတ္ယူထားၾကတယ္။

ဖင္လန္ႏိုင္ငံမွာ ေက်ာင္းသားေတြကိုယ္တိုင္က ဆရာေတြအေပၚ အလြန္ေလးစားရိုေသၾကတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ဆရာေတြကိုေတာ့ နာမည္ကိုပဲေခၚျပီး ဆက္ဆံၾကတယ္။ ဆရာနဲ႔ေက်ာင္းသား ေန႔လည္စာအတူစားၾကတယ္။ ကေလးေတြအတြက္ ေန႔လည္စာကို ေက်ာင္းေတြက အခမဲ့ေကၽြးၾကတယ္။

သူတို႔ႏိုင္ငံမွာ ၅ တန္း မေရာက္မခ်င္း ကေလးေတြကို အဆင့္ေပးၿပီး သတ္မွတ္တာမရွိဘူး။ ၄တန္းအထိ ကေလးေတြရဲ့ ပညာရည္တိုးတက္မႈကို ဆရာေတြကပဲ ပိုင္းျဖတ္သြားရတယ္။ ေက်ာင္းစာသင္ႏွစ္ ေနာက္ဆုံးမွာ စာေမးပြဲတစ္ခုစစ္ေပမယ့္ အဲဒီ စာေမးပြဲကရလဒ္ကို ေက်ာင္းသားေတြ လည္းမသိရဘူး၊ မိဘေတြလည္း မသိရဘူး။ ဒီစနစ္က ကေလးေတြကို ကိုယ့္ကိုယ္ကို ယုံၾကည္မႈပိုၿပီးရွိလာေစဖို႔နဲ႔ အထင္ႀကီးလာေစႏိုင္တယ္လို႔ ယူဆထားၾကတယ္။

တကယ္လို႔ ေက်ာင္းသားတစ္ေယာက္ဟာ ပညာေရးမွာထူးခၽြန္လာရင္ ပညာသင္ဆုေတြေပးတယ္။ ဆရာေတြက သားသမီးအေပၚ ဘယ္လိုပဲပိုင္းျဖတ္သည္ျဖစ္ေစ အရည္အခ်င္း ျပည့္ဝသူေတြလို႔ လက္ခံထားၾကတဲ့အတြက္ သူတို႔မွာ မိဘေတြနဲ႔ ျပႆနာျဖစ္စရာလည္း မလိုၾကဘူး။ ဆရာေတြက တစ္ပတ္တစ္ခါ စုေဝးၿပီး ေက်ာင္းသားေတြအေရး ေဆြးေႏြးေလ့ရွိၾကတယ္။ ကေလးေတြရဲ့ အားနည္းခ်က္၊ အားသာခ်က္ေတြကို ဒီအစည္းအေဝးမွာ ေျပာၾကတယ္။ အထူးသျဖင့္ ပုဂၢလိကေက်ာင္းေတြမွာ ဒီစနစ္ကို အစုိးရေက်ာင္းေတြထက္ပိုၿပီး ဂရုစိုက္လုပ္ေလ့ရွိၾကတယ္။

ဖင္လန္ႏိုင္ငံရဲ့ ပညာေရးမူဝါဒမွာ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္က တာဝန္ေပးရတဲ့ စာေမးပြဲစနစ္ရွိတယ္။ ကိုယ့္က်င့္တရားနဲ႔ ျပည္သူ႔နီတိကို သင္ရိုးညႊန္းတမ္းထဲမွာ ထည့္ေပးထားတယ္။ ဆရာက ကိုယ့္အတန္းကို ဘယ္လိုပုံစံနဲ႔ ဒီႏွစ္မွာ သြားမယ္ဆိုတာ ကိုယ္ပိုင္းဆုံးျဖတ္ခြင့္ရွိတယ္။ ဘယ္လို သင္ေထာက္ကူပစၥည္းေတြထားမယ္၊ ဘယ္လိုစာအုပ္ေတြထားမယ္ဆိုတာ ကိုယ္ပိုင္ဆုံးျဖတ္ႏိုင္တယ္။ ဖင္လန္မွာ ဖင္းနစ္ရွ္စကားနဲ႔ ဆီြးဒစ္ရွ္စကားေတြကို ရုံးသုံးအျဖစ္သတ္မွတ္တယ္။ ပုံမွန္ကေတာ့ ဖင္းနစ္ရွ္စကားပဲ ေျပာေလ့ရွိေပမယ့္ အဂၤလိပ္၊ ဂ်ာမန္၊ ျပင္သစ္၊ ရွရွား စကားေတြလည္း ေျပာၾကတယ္။

သူတို႔ေက်ာင္းေတြမွာ လွပေအာင္ျပင္ဆင္မြန္းမံထားၾကတယ္။ ေအးတဲ့ႏိုင္ငံျဖစ္လို႔ ထမင္းစားခန္းနဲ႔ ဧည့္ခန္းေတြမွာ မီးဖိုၾကီးေတြထားေပးထားတယ္။ ေက်ာင္းဆိုတာ ကေလးေတြအတြက္ ေနခ်င္စရာ ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္တဲ့ကမၻာေလးတစ္ခုျဖစ္ေအာင္ ဖန္တီးေပးထားတယ္။ ေက်ာင္းပတ္ဝန္းက်င္မွာ ရိုင္းျပတဲ့ အျပဳအမူအေျပာအဆို က်င့္ႀကံေနထိုင္မႈေတြလည္း မရွိၾကဘူး။ ေက်ာင္းမွာျပႆနာတစ္ခုခုျဖစ္တာ မိဘေတြကိုပါ ဂယက္ရိုက္သြားႏိုင္တာေၾကာင့္ အရမ္းကို ဂရုစိုက္ေလ့ရွိတယ္။

အိမ္စာဆိုတာ မဆိုစေလာက္ေတြပဲ လုပ္ၾကရတယ္။ ေက်ာင္းလာတယ္ဆိုတာ ေပ်ာ္ေပ်ာ္ပါးပါး၊ ရင္းရင္းႏွီးႏွီးနဲ႔ ပညာလာရွာၾကတာလို႔ သေဘာထားၾကတယ္။ ေက်ာင္းမွ သင္ၾကားခ်ိန္ကလည္း နည္းတယ္။ အေမရိကန္လိုႏိုင္ငံေတြထက္ ဆရာေတြက ၄၀ ရာခိုင္ႏႈန္းေလာက္ အလုပ္သက္သာတယ္လို႔ ေတာင္ေျပာၾကတယ္။

ေက်ာင္းအုပ္ႀကီးဆိုတာကိုလည္း ပညာအေျခခံေကာင္းသူေတြကိုပဲ ခန္႔ေလ့ရွိတယ္။ ေက်ာင္းအုပ္ဆိုတာထက္ general manager လို႔ သေဘာထားၾကတယ္။ တစ္ေက်ာင္းလုံး က်န္းမာေရး၊ ပညာေရး၊ စားေသာက္ေရး၊ သင္ၾကားေရးအားလုံးကို လိုက္ၿပီးတာဝန္ယူ ေဆာင္ရြက္ရတယ္။ ကေလးတစ္ေယာက္ညံ့ရင္ ဆရာအားလုံးတာဝန္ယူရတယ္။ သူတို႔တစ္ပတ္တစ္ႀကိမ္ျပဳလုပ္တဲ့ အစည္းအေဝးမွာ အဲဒီကေလးနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ၿပီး တင္ျပေဆြးေႏြးၾကတယ္။ ပိုၿပီးေတာ္တဲ့ ေကာင္းတဲ့ အတန္းကိုျဖစ္ေစ၊ ေက်ာင္းကိုျဖစ္ေစ ေျပာင္းေပးၾကတယ္။ အဲဒီမွာသင္တဲ့ဆရာေတြကလည္း တကယ့္အေတာ္ဆုံးဆရာေတြ ျဖစ္ေနတတ္တယ္။ ေက်ာင္းသား၊ ဆရာ၊ ေက်ာင္းအုပ္ႀကီးေတြရဲ့ ဆက္ဆံေရးဟာ ဘာမွအဟန္႔အတား အဆီးအတားေတြမရွိဘူး။ ပြင့္လင္းစြာဆက္ဆံေျပာဆိုၾကတယ္။

ဖင္လန္မွာ ဆရာေတြလစာေကာင္းတယ္။ အေျခခံပညာေက်ာင္းေတြမွာ ဆရာတစ္ေယာက္ရဲ့ တစ္နာရီဝင္ေငြဟာ ေဒၚလာ ၄၅ နဲ႔ ၅၀ ရွိတယ္။ အထက္တန္းျပဆရာေတြဆိုရင္ တစ္နာရီကို ေဒၚလာ ၇၅ ကေန ၈၀ အထိရၾကတယ္။ စာသင္ခန္းတစ္ခန္းကို ေက်ာင္းသား ၁၈ ေယာက္ကေန ၂၀ အထိပဲ သင္ၾကားရတယ္။

သူတို႔ႏိုင္ငံက လူေနမႈအဆင့္အတန္းျမင့္မားတာေၾကာင့္ ပညာသင္စရိတ္ဟာ သူတို႔အတြက္ အလြန္သက္သာတယ္လို႔ေျပာႏိုင္တယ္။ ပုဂၢလိကေက်ာင္းေတြဟာ ေဒသဆိုင္ရာ အာဏာပိုင္ေတြရဲ့ ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္မႈကေန လြတ္ကင္းၾကတယ္။ ေက်ာင္းေတြကို အေကာင္းဆုံးမြမ္းမံျပင္ဆင္ ထူေထာင္ထားၾကၿပီး သင္ၾကားတဲ့သင္ရိုးညႊန္းတမ္းေတြၚ ဘ႑ာေရးဆိုင္ရာကိစၥေတြမွာလည္း ကိုယ္ပိုင္ဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္နဲ႔ လုပ္ပိုင္ခြင့္အျပည့္ေပးထားတယ္။

ဖင္လန္ႏိုင္ငံ ပညာေရးဝန္ႀကီး ဟန္နာ ဗတ္ကူနန္ကေတာ့ သူတို႔ႏိုင္ငံက လူေတာ္ေတြထြက္တာကို ဘယ္လိုဂဏ္ယူျပီး ေျပာသြားသလဲဆိုရင္….

“ကၽြန္မတို႔ဖင္လန္ႏိုင္ငံပညာေရးစနစ္က တကယ္ေတာ္တဲ့သူေတြကို တကယ္ခ်ီးေျမွာက္တယ္။ ခုဆိုရင္ ဘာသာရပ္အလိုက္ ထူးခၽြန္သူေတြကို ဘယ္လို အေထာက္အကူေပးရမလဲဆိုတဲ့ ေရွ႕ ေျပး စီမံခ်က္ေတြကို စတင္အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္ေနျပီ” လို႔ ေျပာဝံ့တဲ့အေနအထားကို ေရာက္ေနျပီ။

Ref:Tin Nyunt: Sunday, 13 November 2011 and

How Does Finland's Education Become The Best In The World?

Posted by Vic Spencer on May 2, 2009 at 5:17pm in School Board

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I am sure that many of you noticed that many of today’s kids cannot do the math without a calculator like many of us older people. Many also can’t read, talk or write as well either. Not all, but a lot more than before. I get comments every day about this problem. We used to be among the best in high school education four decades ago. We are now 34th in math in the world. Our children have been dumbed down for decades by an antiquated education system, that tracks neither the money spent per school, nor the educational results that they accomplish for our tax money, per month or quarter.

We as a country are among the four HIGHEST SPENDERS on education, delivering the 34th in education results. Wouldn’t it make sense to study Finland, who has the best education results? With our annual county primary and secondary school budget of $370 million this year, spend a couple of thousand on each, and have a team of principals evaluate what we could use. Why are we not learning from the best, who by the way are doing the job less expensively than we do? Wouldn’t it make better sense to spend a few thousand dollars there than spending two or three times the normal amount of millions in high schools that are going nowhere with ACT scores in ten years?
Finland is the top country in the OECD-PISA tests which is the international authority for high school level testing according to the US Department of Education. It happens to be a beautiful place also.

Education in Finland starts with preschool at age 6. The preschool emphasis is on fun and THE IMPORTANCE OF LEARNING. Preschool is followed by nine years of compulsory basic education. From 9th or 10th grade one can go to the Upper Secondary school (like senior high school) or a 3 -year vocational school, but the curriculum is so heavy in either of these that one can cross from one to the other, or finish one and then go to the other for emphasis on trade skills. Either branch can lead to a university for a masters or PhD degree or to a Polytechnic College that focuses on trade skills with the possibility of a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree.

Although the great majority of Finns finish their education by age 25, later than most other nations, education is looked upon as a life-long process in any job. People are generally much more educated in any trade or professional jobs than they are in other countries. They do an excellent job in having the highest work force readiness of any nation.

Please review at least the top URL I am presenting from Finland in English. For more details, go to:

http://www.edu.fi/english/SubPage.asp?path=500,4699

National testing, school ranking lists and inspection systems do not exist in Finland.

http://finland.fi/netcomm/news/showarticle.asp?intNWSAID=41557

http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120425355065601997.html

Being a teacher in Finland, as in most industrialized countries, is the most highly respected position. Medical doctors come second. I do not think that this is a cultural difference. The education system is set up such that they earn people’s respect every day by the way they are centrally managed in the country to the highest standard in the world and by the level of authority that is given to the teachers. Teachers are also very well trained. Keeping both teacher competence and school quality the best is a national mandate in Finland.

Could we get there? Of course we could, if we had an educational plan driving it on the same level as the top five countries do in the world. Unfortunately the Knox County Board of Education has tougher tasks to do. Like approving payment of bills for anything you can think of. Or arguing for many 2-3 hour sessions about what the school calendar should be. I was there, I saw it and could not believe it. Stuff that is more important to them than the quality of education we deliver for $370 million of our hard-earned tax money.

The Finnish education system has the top university graduate students with a master’s degree volunteering for becoming a teacher, and to teach in the field in which they earned their degree. There are assistant teachers of course with lesser qualification under lower grades and in pre-school.

Could we get there? Absolutely, if there was a large enough incentive plan for teachers to get a masters degree and beyond.

All parents understand that education is very important for their children and would never second-guess a teacher’s decision in Finland. If the child did something bad in school, you can bet that both the teacher and the parent would be in total agreement for the punishment. Therefore it rarely happens, because parents and teachers are always in agreement, and the teachers have a very good relationship with the students.

Could we get there? Absolutely, if the kids came home with better math results, and if all of us parents realized how vital it is to back the teachers in front of our kids. Like it or not, their future depends on the teachers. We parents cannot teach our children all the courses they need.

In Finland, the children have enormous respect for teachers, but call them by their first names. Teachers and the children eat lunch together, which is free to all children. How about that? I think that this is also the result of parents and teachers working totally in harmony to educate the child.

In Finland the children are not graded before the fifth grade. The teachers decide how they are progressing. They are later tested, but their grades are not told the parents or the child during the following few years of education. This method appears to build high confidence and self esteem. The kids have a high graduation rate, scholastically achieving more than we do. So parents have no worries about how well the children will be taken care of by the teachers. There is no reason for it. Remember again that the teacher is a university graduate with a master’s degree. Only the teachers know how the child is doing. The teachers meet weekly to discuss what problems any of the children have and make decisions on the spot about what type of class and teacher could be the best for their advancement toward a high school diploma. This could be a specific special education class. This is a very interesting approach that obviously works very well. We could try it. Charter schools, here we go if public schools cannot do it.

Finland has a national education policy and national testing. Morals and ethics are in the curriculum. This is a big difference between their system and ours. The teachers make all decisions about how their class will be run, how the education material will be presented and what books are to be used. They keep up with the best worldwide. There are two official languages in Finland: Finnish and Swedish. People typically speak four languages in Finland. One is Finnish, then English, Swedish, and one of German, French or Russian at minimum. They have some ethnic problems with immigrants, gypsies and some northern Lapp tribes; but they keep those cultures and languages alive as well.

Could we delegate more authority to teachers? Absolutely, depending how their continuing education is progressing.

All areas in the school are decorated. There may be a fireplace where they eat or wait for classes to start. The focus is on what the students would like, to make the school a very pleasant place to be, for students as well as for teachers. Disrespectful or property damaging behavior is unimaginable in this environment. If it happens, I imagine it is dealt with lightning fast with repercussions at home as well, but I heard that teachers do not tell on the students to parents.

Children are actually given very little homework to do. Teachers work about 40% less class hours than US teachers do. Both of these surprised me, but it stands to reason that a happier, friendlier and more effective school environment that does the job well, with less teaching hours and less homework, makes for happier teachers and children. It is the principal that makes this happen.

The principal is more like a general manager although he/she comes from an educational background. He/she makes sure that his/her school is operating at its optimum, including all teachers and supporting services including medical, dental and special ed-related functions. It is noteworthy that special ed kids are diagnosed by any teacher, the case is discussed immediately in their weekly meeting, diagnosis is confirmed and the child is placed into the right classroom possibly not in the same school, with the most qualified teacher for his/her problem. The communication environment is completely open among students, teachers and principals. This area is very different from the US model, and more than 50 countries are studying how they accomplish the results they accomplish.

Could studying them help us? Absolutely. It would do us a lot of good I believe.
Very important: The Finns realize that when their teachers excel and are satisfied, and so are their students. Teachers in Finland are well paid. An elementary school teacher makes $45-50/hour. A high school teacher makes $75-80/hour. The typical per class load is 18-20 students.

The biggest difference I found between the USA and Finland is the average teaching hours spent per year per teacher. This figure is a little more than 1,100 hours for US teachers, and it is 570 hours for teachers in Finland, and just as a second example it is about the same for Japanese teachers as it is for Finnish teachers.

The USA teacher works the longest hours in the world (http://www.mels.gouv.qc.ca/stat/bulletin/bulletin_29an.pdf), yet we are the 34th in the world in math and Finland is on top. We are clearly not using our teachers as smartly as the top-performing countries. Wouldn’t it make sense for the Knox County school system to send a couple of principals on a fact finding mission to Finland and other top performers when our performance is so low?

Finland’s cost of education per student is about 12% less than the Knox County average, and a lot less than our lowest performing high schools, or Oak Ridge or Maryville. Clearly there is something very important we could learn from these people if we sent a couple of principals there for a few weeks.

I don’t understand why I have to be the one bringing this to the attention of the Knox County school system. If they tell you that they knew about this all along, like they told me when I discovered that we sunk to 34th place in math, just ask them two questions: How long they have known this, and What have they done about it? We deserve a much better school system than what we have. That is certain. And so is the reason why we do not have it: our board of education and school system shows no interest in learning from the best and have continued a poor performance record to date with our children.

I think that we could certainly take one or more beneficial ideas away from the Finnish method for much better results in our schools. Their per-student expenses are a little lower than ours, yet the cost of living is higher. Charter schools would be best equipped to adopt some Finnish methods because they would be independent of KCS Central. Charter Schools determine their own curriculum and budget, producing better results. The principal calls the shots. Not a central school district organization.

Knox County Board of Education and Jim McIntyre, I hope that you read this article, and will look at the Finnish Education system for some ideas that could make our education results much better. We may not be able to use all ideas, but we could use some almost immediately and we could use others later that may require some changes first. After all, they are the best performing country in the world, TN is the 40th in the USA which is a low 34th in the world. If we cannot learn from them, we will not learn from anyone.
I hope that you all will find this article interesting and useful. As to my comments about our school system management, the Board of Education and KCS Central, I am telling you what I found to be the truth. They enforced this situation that our children are in. Where does the buck stop? Who is really responsible? Is it Joe's Pizza Parlor? I don't think so. Is it the Knox County Board of Education? BINGO!!! They knew that the academic results were “heading south” for a long time by their own admission when I published my findings. Did they tell the public? No they did not. Did they do something to reverse it? No they did not. Did they instead approve more and more hundred’s of millions of our tax dollars to be spent without good academic results? Yes, every year.
I hope that Jim McIntyre, our new superintendent of schools will change all this, without asking for more tax money first.