Enjoyed this Grauniad article on modern methods of education. The article has a high opinion of Estonia (see excerpt and link). Sounds very impressive, probably is, but sometimes this sort of thing is hype, not nuance. Still, Estonia is doing something right with its high math scores, lauded cybersecurity and innovative start-ups. Anyone with real knowledge, opinions or comments on this?
Excerpt:
Schools were built for a world before the vast library of human knowledge became instantly accessible at our fingertips, through the computers on our desks and smartphones in our pockets.
Paradoxical as it may seem, plagiarism might be the answer. Plagiarism is how Estonia went from being a country where only half of households had access to a telephone in 1991 to one whose students top the western world in the OECD’s tables in mathematics, reading and science, beating the rest of Europe, the US, UK, Canada and Australia. It also has the highest number of $1bn startups per capita in the world [i.e, four of them with a tiny population]. It has achieved this while spending far less per student than the OECD average.
How? Estonia’s education system operates a form of radical decentralisation. Municipalities and schools have autonomy, but are encouraged to collaborate, sharing best practices, and scouring the world for ideas to bring back and adapt. Teachers are given opportunities to travel and learn from education systems elsewhere. In a rapidly changing world, a startup-like ecosystem such as this, with institutions innovating, copying and recombining the best methods, is much more likely to succeed.
In a radical rethink of education for the 21st century, dozens of Estonian schools have swapped homework with schoolwork. Knowledge and delivery of material happens at home, on the bus, or on a family holiday, through recorded lectures and interactive material from the best educators in the country and the world.
No particular knowledge but an opinion: I think that article author, an LSE researcher in economic psychology, probably has no salient experience in elementary education and is basically just hyping current buzz about Estonian schooling as an opportunity to promote his own book.
Mind you, I don’t disagree that education in Estonia, as in its geographically and linguistically close neighbor Finland, seems to be doing remarkably well. But AFAICT they are not applying any “magic bullets” to make it happen, just leveraging some tried-and-true beneficial social policies:
Carefully crafted national educational curriculum and standards (which Muthukrishna apparently ignores in favor of lauding the Estonian system’s alleged “radical decentralisation”) with a lot of stakeholder input
Centralized national educational funding adjusted to provide equitable access
Active support for teacher development and training, including making salaries more competitive with those of other professionals
Socialized support for student needs, including universal health care, generous parental leave policies, parenting/childcare support, and special education and counseling resources, as well as universal provision of school lunches, textbooks and other resources
Options for student choice of school to enroll in, limited by logistical and other criteria as necessary
Individual annual development assessments involving students, teachers and parents, to identify and address learning issues
Estonia is definitely to be commended for doing all these things conscientiously and well, but IMHO there’s no mystery or miracle about it. It’s not an approach likely to gain much traction in “pro-freedom” US culture with widespread distrust of education and government, though.
Thanks for that interesting link. It sounds like most Estonian teachers study either teaching (class teacher) or a specific subject (subject teacher) for five years at university. That seems to be more than in many places.
I wonder how different Estonian and Russian languages are.
Test scores are not everything. But in addition to beating much wealthier countries, it is impressive many high achievers come from challenging backgrounds, and also there are apparently half the number of low achievers compared to many contemporaries.
Estonian isn’t like Russian very much at all. It’s not even Indo-European. It’s closer to Finnish and it’s written with the Latin alphabet not the Cyrillic.
I’ll add that it’s impossible to learn. It has more than a dozen noun cases.
It’s not even Scandinavian. It’s related to Finnish and Hungarian (a bit more distantly than Finnish, but they’re both Finno-Ugric/Uralic. Or is there a new classification these days? Anyway, Finnish and Estonian are both part of the Finnic branch, and Hungarian is part of the Ugric branch.) It has little to do with Russian or the Scandinavian languages. (I’m using the definition of Scandinavian that excludes Finland.)
I was talking about the social philosophy as much as the language. Though I don’t know much about either, it sounds (as opposed to being strictly defined as) Scandinavianesque.
A whole lot of Europe is governed according to social philosophy that we in the US may think of as “Scandinavianesque”: universal healthcare, centralized national education funding and curriculum design, etc.
