Saya selalu teringat cerita guide kami ketika Marlene dan saya pergi berpakansi
beberapa tahun yang lalu ke Lapland, nun dilingkaran kutub utara Finlandia.
Saya ulang menceritakan.
Guide kami punya dua orang anak yang kudu pergi sekolah ke kota yang terdekat
yang jaraknya 40 km - ya, ini dilingkaran kutub, jarak antara kampugn yang
satu dan kampung yang lain atau kekota yagn terdekat itu jauh sekali -
Mereka kudu pergi dan pulang sekolah pake taksi, karena nggak ada kereta api
dan juga nggak ada bus.
Dan sewa taksi di Finlandia itu mahal nian.
Lalu siapa yang bayar taksinya.
Negara.
Sekali lagi, orang Indonesia, oang Islam Indonesia yang dungu-dungu kayak
anjing itu mestinya belajar dari negeri-negeri Skandinavia ini dan berhenti
berguru ke orang Arab.
---
May 1st, 2012
05:00 PM ET
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What Finland can teach China about education
Editor's Note: Jiang Xueqin is a deputy principal at Peking University High
School and the director of its International Division. The following post was
originally published in The Diplomat, a stellar international current-affairs
magazine for the Asia-Pacific region.
By Jiang Xueqin, The Diplomat
I've just finished a week visiting Finnish schools, and on my last day, while
touring Finland's best high school, I ran into China's vice minister of
education, who was spending the day in Helsinki looking at what China can learn
from the world's best K-12 school system.
If the vice minister were to ask me what parts of Finland's education system I
thought China could and should emulate (he didn't) I'd tell him there were two
things.
First is Finland's pre-kindergarten system, in which children as young as nine
months-old can attend until they are six. In each class, four
university-educated teachers supervise about twenty children as they play
sports, eat meals, and sleep together. This voluntary and pay-as-you-can
daycare may seem costly, but it's the best investment a society can make if it
wants to ensure equality of opportunity for its children.
That's because this daycare system helps close the achievement gap between rich
and poor kids. Researchers at the University of Kansas have reported that by
the time they are four, children raised in poor families have heard 32 million
fewer words than children raised in well-educated families, and this is as true
in China as it is in the United States. Because Finnish children spend their
day talking with and playing with university-educated professionals, it
empowers them with such a large vocabulary that when they do start school they
learn more quickly than their Western peers.
More important, this daycare system takes children who might be from violent
and volatile homes, and puts them in a safe and predictable learning space.
Research has found that children whose parents can't be trusted to put food on
the table (or to even just be present) will develop long-term issues with
self-esteem and self-control, leading to poor test scores and relationship
issues.
Don't Forget the Children in Burma
The second thing that I think China can emulate is Finnish education's emphasis
on empathy, which starts at daycare. From the moment they enter school,
Finnish children are taught to help each other, and to appreciate difference
and diversity. Students as young as 14 years-old can define for me that
empathy is "putting yourself in someone else's shoes, and knowing how he or she
thinks and feels" because they're taught that by their parents and teachers,
and given the space to develop it by playing with their friends, dating, and
working part-time. Cultural sensitivity is as much a national pride as
self-reliance and Nokia, and English textbooks emphasize tolerance as much as
syntax.
Empathy is an education imperative because Finns want first and foremost a
polite and orderly society. But empathy can also lead to an innovation economy.
It permits Finns to work together, and to understand and access foreign
markets. Emotional intelligence also often leads to creativity, something that
China is desperately searching for now.
Unfortunately, China's vice minister of education didn't see Finland's focus on
equity and empathy while he was in Helsinki.
The school where I ran into the vice minister's delegation is considered the
top school in Finland, producing many of the nation's doctors, lawyers, and
professors. It lets in only the nation's best students, focuses on preparing
them for the college entrance exams, wins more international science and math
competitions than any other school in Finland, and offers the elite
International Baccalaureate program.
Australian Education goes Global
In a chemistry classroom, a teacher told the vice minister that her students
did at least two hours of homework a day (most Finnish high school students
I've spoken with don't do any), and the vice minister paid the students the
highest compliment: "I only wish that Chinese students could work as hard as
you!" The students laughed proudly.
The student council president joined us during the tour, and asked me what I
thought of the school, and I said that the school seemed too academic and too
conservative. He replied that the problem is that Finland's college entrance
exam rewarded rote memorization. Once he and his classmates graduated from
high school, they had half a year to memorize five thick textbooks. There was
so much new information to memorize that everyone in the school had to pay good
money to learn test-taking strategies from cram courses. (An alternative to all
this is to do what most Finnish students actually do, and just not care.)
Can You Teach Democracy?
Then and there, it dawned on me the irony of the situation: The Chinese vice
minister had traveled nine hours by plane to find himself in a Finnish school
that most resembles a school he could have just walked to from his office.
There was one major difference, however. The vice minister asked the principal
if the school had an entrance examination, and the principal replied that the
180 students were admitted each year based on their grade point average in
junior high school and that's it.
And that's it? For any one who's worked in Chinese education, this answer can
only raise more questions: What do you do about guanxi (network of
relationships)? How do you know their GPAs are real? What if 10,000 kids apply
with perfect school records?
The Sad Truth of China's Education
What the vice minister didn't understand is that most Finnish parents would
rather have their child drop out of school than have him or her attend an
institution that motivates students to chase high test scores. When a junior
high principal heard I was about to visit Finland's best school, she blurted
out, "That school has five suicides a year!" That, of course, wasn't true, but
during my visit when I asked a teacher if the school was as truly stressful and
competitive as people say, she replied, "Well, not so much as ten years ago."
After the vice minister and his delegation left, I had a roundtable discussion
with students, and they told me they were concerned that Helsinki was cutting
back funding to high schools, including theirs. That means that, during high
school, they will no longer take courses at the University of Helsinki, and
advanced level physics and math. They told me that Finland's success on
international tests like the PISA was making the country complacent.
What US Fiscal Woes Teach China
I didn't tell them this, but I think that Finns care about the problems of
elite students even less than they care about PISA. What the Finns
fundamentally believe is that the best students have so many advantages that
they don't need any more, and that's why Finns are cutting back funding to
their elite schools, but not to their daycare system.
This is an attitude that China's vice premier would have benefited from
hearing. Unfortunately, because of the school he visited, he could only come
away all the more convinced of the deep-rooted Chinese belief that national
school systems are secretly like China's if they're any good, or secretly want
to be like China's if they're not.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of Jiang Xueqin.
Post by: Jiang Xueqin
Topics: China Education
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