In
South Korea and Finland, it’s not about finding the “right” school.
Fifty
years ago, both South Korea and Finland had terrible education systems. Finland
was at risk of becoming the economic stepchild of Europe. South Korea was
ravaged by civil war. Yet over the past half century, both South Korea and
Finland have turned their schools around — and now both countries are hailed
internationally for their extremely high educational outcomes. What can other countries
learn from these two successful, but diametrically opposed, educational models?
Here’s an overview of what South Korea and Finland are doing right.
The
Korean model: Grit and hard, hard, hard work.
For
millennia, in some parts of Asia, the only way to climb the socioeconomic
ladder and find secure work was to take an examination — in which the proctor
was a proxy for the emperor, says Marc Tucker, president and CEO of the
National Center on Education and the Economy. Those examinations required a thorough
command of knowledge, and taking them was a grueling rite of passage. Today,
many in the Confucian countries still respect the kind of educational
achievement that is promoted by an exam culture.
Among
these countries, South Korea stands apart as the most extreme, and arguably,
most successful. The Koreans have achieved a remarkable feat: the country is
100 percent literate, and at the forefront of international comparative tests
of achievement, including tests of critical thinking and analysis. But this
success comes with a price: Students are under enormous, unrelenting pressure
to perform. Talent is not a consideration — because the culture believes in
hard work and diligence above all, there is no excuse for failure. Children
study year-round, both in-school and with tutors. If you study hard enough, you
can be smart enough.
“Koreans
basically believe that I have to get through this really tough period to have a
great future,” says Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at
PISA and special advisor on education policy at the OECD. “It’s a question of
short-term unhappiness and long-term happiness.” It’s not just the parents
pressuring their kids. Because this culture traditionally celebrates conformity
and order, pressure from other students can also heighten performance
expectations. This community attitude expresses itself even in early-childhood
education, says Joe Tobin, professor of early childhood education at the
University of Georgia who specializes in comparative international research. In
Korea, as in other Asian countries, class sizes are very large — which would be
extremely undesirable for, say, an American parent. But in Korea, the goal is
for the teacher to lead the class as a community, and for peer relationships to
develop. In American preschools, the focus for teachers is on developing
individual relationships with students, and intervening regularly in peer
relationships.
“I
think it is clear there are better and worse way to educate our children,” says
Amanda Ripley, author of The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That
Way. “At the same time, if I had to choose between an average US education and
an average Korean education for my own kid, I would choose, very reluctantly,
the Korean model. The reality is, in the modern world the kid is going to have
to know how to learn, how to work hard and how to persist after failure. The
Korean model teaches that.”
The
Finnish model: Extracurricular choice, intrinsic motivation.
In
Finland, on the other hand, students are learning the benefits of both rigor
and flexibility. The Finnish model, say educators, is utopia.
In
Finland, school is the center of the community, notes Schleicher. School
provides not just educational services, but social services. Education is about
creating identity.
Finnish
culture values intrinsic motivation and the pursuit of personal interest. It
has a relatively short school day rich with school-sponsored extracurriculars,
because culturally, Finns believe important learning happens outside of the
classroom. (An exception? Sports, which are not sponsored by schools, but by
towns.) A third of the classes that students take in high school are electives,
and they can even choose which matriculation exams they are going to take. It’s
a low-stress culture, and it values a wide variety of learning experiences.
But
that does not except it from academic rigor, motivated by the country’s history
trapped between European superpowers, says Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish educator and
author of Finnish Lessons: What the World Can Learn From Educational Change in
Finland.
“A
key to that is education. Finns do not really exist outside of Finland,” says
Sahlberg. “This drives people to take education more seriously. For example,
nobody speaks this funny language that we do. Finland is bilingual, and every
student learns both Finnish and Swedish. And every Finn who wants to be
successful has to master at least one other language, often English, but she
also typically learns German, French, Russian and many others. Even the
smallest children understand that nobody else speaks Finnish, and if they want
to do anything else in life, they need to learn languages.”
Finns
share one thing with South Koreans: a deep respect for teachers and their
academic accomplishments. In Finland, only one in ten applicants to teaching
programs is admitted. After a mass closure of 80 percent of teacher colleges in
the 1970s, only the best university training programs remained, elevating the
status of educators in the country. Teachers in Finland teach 600 hours a year,
spending the rest of time in professional development, meeting with colleagues,
students and families. In the U.S., teachers are in the classroom 1,100 hours a
year, with little time for collaboration, feedback or professional development.
How
Americans can change education culture
As
TED speaker Sir Ken Robinson noted in his 2013 talk (How to escape education’s
death valley), when it comes to current American education woes “the dropout
crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. What it doesn’t count are all the kids
who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don’t enjoy it, who don’t
get any real benefit from it.” But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Notes
Amanda Ripley, “culture is a thing that changes. It’s more malleable than we
think. Culture is like this ether that has all kinds of things swirling around
in it, some of which are activated and some of which are latent. Given an
economic imperative or change in leadership or accident of history, those
things get activated.” The good news is, “We Americans have a lot of things in
our culture which would support a very strong education system, such as a
longstanding rhetoric about the equality of opportunity and a strong and
legitimate meritocracy,” says Ripley.
One
reason we haven’t made much progress academically over the past 50 years is
because it hasn’t been economically crucial for American kids to master
sophisticated problem-solving and critical-thinking skills in order to survive.
But that’s not true anymore. “There’s a lag for cultures to catch up with
economic realities, and right now we’re living in that lag,” says Ripley. “So
our kids aren’t growing up with the kind of skills or grit to make it in the
global economy.”
“We
are prisoners of the pictures and experiences of education that we had,” says
Tony Wagner, expert-in-residence at Harvard’s educational innovation center and
author of The Global Achievement Gap. “We want schools for our kids that mirror
our own experience, or what we thought we wanted. That severely limits our
ability to think creatively of a different kind of education. But there’s no
way that tweaking that assembly line will meet the 21st-century world. We need
a major overhaul.”
Indeed.
Today, the American culture of choice puts the onus on parents to find the
“right” schools for our kids, rather than trusting that all schools are capable
of preparing our children for adulthood. Our obsession with talent puts the
onus on students to be “smart,” rather than on adults’ ability to teach them.
And our antiquated system for funding schools makes property values the arbiter
of spending per student, not actual values.
But
what will American education culture look like tomorrow? In the most successful
education cultures in the world, it is the system that is responsible for the
success of the student, says Schleicher — not solely the parent, not solely the
student, not solely the teacher. The culture creates the system. The hope is
that Americans can find the grit and will to change their own culture — one
parent, student and teacher at a time.
想一想：我們該學習南韓模式或是效法芬蘭模式呢？
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