It often surprises me that we dont seek to learn from the best in the world but rather that we slavishly copy the worst in the world. It is quite clear by many measures that Finland has one of the worlds best education systems. It produces outcomes well beyond our own which seems to be based upon a somewhat dysfunctional US model.
If we are going to be a country that does more than dig dirt out of the ground then we need to start paying attention to what others are doing.
You can also find a bullet point version of the doco here
In my experience the best teachers I ever had were old and weren’t career teachers. So they may have been a mechanic or a banker for 10 or 15 years then they went to college and became teachers.
Too many teachers went to school, then Uni then they were teachers. They were barely older than many of the students (some interesting student teacher relationships too) and had NEVER been out of school. What the hell could they teach except dry facts?
They had no world experience and no ‘Bigger picture’ They were boring and had very little natural authority or control
In my opinion, We need to break our education model in Australia and re make it.
A good review of top performing education systems around the world and what separates them from low performing systems is:
http://www.smhc-cpre.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/how-the-worlds-best-performing-school-systems-come-out-on-top-sept-072.pdf
It is long, but in summary they found 3 things matter most:
1) getting the right people to become teachers
2) developing them into effective instructors
3) ensuring that the system is able to deliver the best possible instruction for every child.