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Nearly 30 percent of Finland’s children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school.

more than half of its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia and Ethiopia, among other nations

“We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test,”

There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions.

Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators.

The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union.

“If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”

Compulsory schooling does not begin until age 7. “We have no hurry,” said Louhivuori. “Children learn better when they are ready. Why stress them out?”

Ninety-seven percent of 6-year-olds attend public preschoo

Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Stu­dent health care is free.

The only time Rintola’s children are pulled out is for Finnish as a Second Language classes, taught by a teacher with 30 years’ experience and graduate school training.

English begins in third grade, Swedish in fourth.

Not until sixth grade will kids have the option to sit for a district-wide exam, and then only if the classroom teacher agrees to participate

Most do, out of curiosity. Results are not publicized. Finnish educators have a hard time understanding the United States’ fascination with standardized tests. “Americans like all these bars and graphs and colored charts,”

“Looks like we did better than average two years ago,” he said after he found the reports. “It’s nonsense. We know much more about the children than these tests can tell us.”

A class of first graders scampered among nearby pine and birch trees, each holding a stack of the teacher’s homemade laminated “outdoor math” cards. “Find a stick as big as your foot,” one read. “Gather 50 rocks and acorns and lay them out in groups of ten,” read another. Working in teams, the 7- and 8-year-olds raced to see how quickly they could carry out their tasks.

“We help situate them in the right high school,” said then deputy principal Anne Roselius. “We are interested in what will become of them in life.”

“It was simply the idea that every child would have a very good public school. If we want to be competitive, we need to educate everybody. It all came out of a need to survive.”

Teachers from all over the nation contributed to a national curriculum that provided guidelines, not prescriptions.

The second critical decision came in 1979, when reformers required that every teacher earn a fifth-year master’s degree in theory and practice at one of eight state universities—at state expense. From then on, teachers were effectively granted equal status with doctors and lawyers.

Applicants began flooding teaching programs, not because the salaries were so high but because autonomy and respect made the job attractive

All children—clever or less so—were to be taught in the same classrooms, with lots of special teacher help available to make sure no child really would be left behind

The inspectorate closed its doors in the early ’90s, turning accountability and inspection over to teachers and principals. “We have our own motivation to succeed because we love the work,” said Louhivuori. “Our incentives come from inside.”

A recent report by the Academy of Finland warned that some schools in the country’s large cities were becoming more skewed by race and class as affluent, white Finns choose schools with fewer poor, immigrant populations.

SEAMLESS CONNECTIONS BETWEEN PRE-SERVICE EDUCATION AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT.

LEARNING AND LEADING IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT.

a national policy exists that requires schools to avoid ability grouping of students in what was described as preventing a “dead-end education for students.”

Teachers generally teach approximately 19 hours per week. The balance of their time is focused on working with their colleagues, reaching out to families and other duties

96% of teachers are unionized

High levels of teacher education and preparation allow them to be more independent in the classroom.

Broad commitment to the vision of a knowledge-based society.

Educational equality

Education is free of charge to all, including books, meals, transportation and health care

“Our secret is investing in early intervention so that students don’t need it later.”

Sweden and Norway spend less on the front end and more later in remediation.

The principal works as a pedagogical director.

A culture of trust in which no school inspectors or national exams exist.

Memory is the representation of the things that we ‘know’ as a culture

The worker was the original goal of the public education system.

The soldier

Learning for a worker is about compliance.

Our education system currently does a very good job of creating workers.

The worker needs to remember things without understanding them.

They are the defenders of memory.

It is what Wynton Marsalis calls ‘being the thing itself’

They decide which parts of the past will be valued

soldiers really can decide what they want to have valued.

Soldiers defend the status quo

The nomad is trying to do what I call ‘learning’.

Learning for the nomad is the point where the steps in a process go away.

They are the ones who establish what things we currently know that the worker should remember, and then establish the system by which we will measure that knowing.

In order to create an educational system that allows for nomads we can’t measure for a prescribed outcome.

Rhizomatic learning

It is designed for a world where there aren’t ‘things people should know’ but rather ‘new connections to be made’.

If we want a society of innovators, of creatives, we can’t think of success as an act of compliance