Surviving Capitalism (Not) : What Washington can learn from Finland’s success in K-12 education

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, December 6, 2012

What Washington can learn from Finland’s success in K-12 education

Click here to access article by Aaron Keating from Washington Policy Watch.

Finnish students are among the best in the world. Their success has come through a system that would seem unorthodox here in the United States: no standardized testing, no private schools, fewer hours in school, teacher autonomy, full national funding, and equality in education, among other things.

The trends in education and school policies in the US appear to be on trend directly opposite of what is found in Finland. Here in the US we have seen an ominous trend known as "schools-to-prison pipeline" where schools seem to be treating students as criminals. See this, this, this, and this.

However, to put public education on the right path would not be a simple matter of transferring the Finnish system to the US. Public education is only one segment of US society that is undergoing all kinds of assaults from the One Percent. Societies are social systems and this means that they are composed of inter-connected subsystems. The entire US society is becoming dysfunctional for the 99 Percent. The One Percent who rule our society see the 99 Percent as merely another resource to be used to further their pursuit of profit. As such, they view us as a burden because we don't offer slave wages and tolerate slave working conditions. Romney's recent expression of contempt for ordinary Americans is very representative of this class view:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. .... These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. .... And so my job is not to worry about those people—I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

Another expression of their contempt was seen by workers in 2009 as they commuted to work on a billboard along Highway 101 near Silicon Valley:

1,000,000 people overseas can do your job. What makes you so special?