Finland is the shiz

Do you remeber education? It's that problem everyone complains about, but nobody wants to fix.

First, America's educational system is not regulated on a national level. This is bad. Because each state and local community have almost total control over how much education, and in what subjects, kids are going to get, you can have mixed results. New York's educational system is, thankfully, much better when compared with other states. But many others, Arizona, Florida, etc. have very low standards for children to reach. I'm sorry, Utah, I wish I could trust you with your children, but I can't. Preaching the Bible in science class just isn't right.

But let's talk about how other countries seemingly get this education thing right. Finland, for example, gets the highest average scores in science and reading in the developed world. finnish children also spend the lowest amount of hours in a classroom in all of the developed world. Having two or more teachers per classroom is the norm. And children don't even start going to school until they are seven years old. Furthermore, students are taught in a very relaxed environment, and competition, in contrast with the US education system, is very minimal, Talk about a paradox. They seem to get less education and yet they get higher scores; how can this be? Simply put, they get less hours of classroom time, but the hours that they get are much higher quality than those of other countries, especially America.

I don't see why this shouldn't become the norm for American classrooms a well. It seems so much simpler. The first thing that we should do is hold our teachers to a higher standard. After all, we have so many high school graduates who are going to colleges and universities to become teachers, so we should always be picking from the very best of them. And of course, we should have more teachers. It isn't any secret that there is a correlation between smaller class sizes and student performance, so even if we didn't want to have multiple teachers per classroom, we could still get better results. And, if at all possible, we really need to have a well-rounded system, but with a more relaxed atmosphere. I'm sure that many students will happily tell you that a relaxed classroom atmosphere makes learning much more easier, sometimes even fun. And while this may be unrelated, school sessions should probably be pushed back an hour. Teenagers naturally stay up and wake up later due to hormonal changes, and yet we tell them to get up an hour earlier than they did in elementary school (logic at it's best).

But as long as we're dreaming, we should make more art, music and language programs mandated. Seriously, those Finnish 11 year olds are speaking three languages like pros. Not to mention that European countries in general, most of which have better education systems that the US, include more of those programs. But according to the superintendent, football is more important, and music and art must be cut first. Whatever.

Sources: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/86012107.stm

http://www.npr.org/2010/12/07/131884477/Study-Confirms-U-S-Falling-Behind-In-Education

http://articles.cnn.com/2009-08-13/living/howard.education.monopoly_1_government-run-education-zero-tolerance-education-system?_s=PM:LIVING