, 8 min read
The Smartest Kids in the World: stories from Finland, Poland and South Korea
9 thoughts on “The Smartest Kids in the World: stories from Finland, Poland and South Korea”
, 8 min read
9 thoughts on “The Smartest Kids in the World: stories from Finland, Poland and South Korea”
Wy do you think Quebec is doing so well in math education?
Comparing countries to each other like that isn’t usually a fair comparison. Especially the US gets a lot of bad press for an education system that actually is very effective, but has a much more challenging demographic base than the higher-scoring countries.
Poland, like many other countries, have leaped forward after getting past the hangover of socialism, reverting to something like their natural state.
“Even Poland appears pleasant compared to South Korea.”
What do you mean by that? Is it like one could think there’s no worse place to have your kinds go to school in than Poland, but hey, now there’s South Korea?
@Jan
Quebec has a different approach to mathematics. I believe we push students harder on things like word problems.
But, to be honest, I have no idea why Quebec is getting such good results in mathematics.
Note that Quebec is getting poor results in other competencies.
@Åukasz
The book makes the point that Poland is a relatively poor country with a relatively high unemployment. South Korea has twice the GDP-per-capita of Poland. The gap with Finland is even higher. The book also makes a point that Poland has inherited much of its current architecture from the communist era.
@Sam
Comparing countries to each other like that isn’t usually a fair comparison. Especially the US gets a lot of bad press for an education system that actually is very effective, but has a much more challenging demographic base than the higher-scoring countries.
The US is a big country but some parts look a lot like Canada. It is not like Maine is very different from Quebec (genetically speaking at least).
So a better counterargument is that the US is too big of a country to be assessed whole. It would be better to cut it up into states and look at how individual states are doing.
Unfortunately, we only have the state-level results for a handful of states. Even so, we have data for Massachusetts. Massachusetts closely ressembles Canada genetically. Yet Canada outdoes Massachusetts.
But even the Canadian figure is hard to interpret because various Canadian provinces score very differently. Quebec is very strong at math., weaker at other things.
In any case, I am not worried about how well young Americans will do in the new economy.
I’m from Poland. So, I can write a few words about my point of view to this topic.
In first I agree with autor. It’s important to measure things but it’s only a “part of reality”. For example the educational system in Poland was changed from a “Soviet” model to “American”. In the opinion of many people level of education decreased dramatically. But it’s not true in the sense that most people do not choose an academic career (Ph.D and more). There need a completely different competencies to cope in a free country where higher education is widespread. Before, it was a relatively elite.
On the other hand now we need many people with academic degree (recovering slowly) industry. But science has for years been neglected. Cooperation with industry, in practice, there was no exist for many reasons. One of them was that the industry has been largely eliminated. Quite the opposite as in South Korea.
Now the government is trying to find a middle ground. One of the effects is increasing emphasis on the teaching math. From the point of view of the older generations what happens now is only up for the losses in this field. But in my opinion at the moment goverment really seeks to disseminating the teaching of mathematics as never before.
It’s interesting to read praises for Polish educational system, especially with regards to its mathematical curriculum. The general opinion in Poland seems to be that it is now incredibly dumbed down in comparison to older curriculum.
What Polish system lacks, is the ability to find the really important stuff people should learn. Thinking only in averages makes for a poor education system as a whole – who wants an employee who is better on average in most common skills? We need specialists, people with passion, but, sadly, we mostly have cheap labor force with a university degree of some sort.