Looking for a Holy Grail, silver bullet, panacea, what have you is a trait shared among the Nordic nations, I'm sad to say.
From the flannellograph to the film projector to the overhead to the computer, whenver a new technology appeared, the theoreticians controlling teacher's ed. and dep. of education have jumped on it as fix-all cure-all.
Because their predeccors in the 1950s adopted whole-hog the ideas of Ellen Key, Maria Montessori, Olga Dysthe, Jean Piaget and Reggio Emilia and... well, the list never ends, does it?
Order, discpline, practice - then it matters little what the medium is.
Pass/fail-exams in order to advance a course. No "75% correct answers is enough". Crafts & trades-schools available for kids from age 15 (make it three years training including driving lessons and a license upon graduation + two years apprenticeship with wages and at age twenty you have a fully trained, epxerienced and well-adjusted [insert name here]).
Anonymous applications for universities - grades, testresults and exams only. Set number of slots for each course, said number decided by the university in question.
And a complete overhaul of the student loan-system.
I'm with you on the issues that appear to be (the minimum) reforms we need.
Re the pass/fail exams: best would be (hand)written exams followed by individual oral exams to check if the student actually understood anything, as opposed to merely crammed-to-pass.
And don't get me started on the student-loan system needing an overhaul *rants indiscriminately*
Absolutely, that's the form I meant - old school in both senses of the phrase.
My father remarked once that the swedish military never uses anything but pass/fail: "You either build a bridge right, or you don't. There's no "75% correct" when it comes to real things."
In northern Sweden the lack of teachers with real diplomas/degrees is so severe, some municipalities have tried offering to pay off the loan entire, after five years of full-time employment, just to get someone with a PhD in the relevant subject to move there in the first place.
This was deemed "illegal" by the taxation court.
Of course, after the reforms of 2008 when a new "teacher's authorisation" was implemented, fewer and fewer teachers here approaches even Magister or Lektor levels of university education.
Instead, they have all passed through the state's teachers' college programs where they learn what's in the pupils' textbooks, teaching to the test, and DEI (under its swedish name "värdegrund" which predates DEI by more than a decade).
In the 2010s, the bar for entry into the program at Malmö teacher's college was below 0.1 on the College entrance exam (Högskoleprovet). That's below the random statistical average...
Looking for a Holy Grail, silver bullet, panacea, what have you is a trait shared among the Nordic nations, I'm sad to say.
From the flannellograph to the film projector to the overhead to the computer, whenver a new technology appeared, the theoreticians controlling teacher's ed. and dep. of education have jumped on it as fix-all cure-all.
Because their predeccors in the 1950s adopted whole-hog the ideas of Ellen Key, Maria Montessori, Olga Dysthe, Jean Piaget and Reggio Emilia and... well, the list never ends, does it?
Order, discpline, practice - then it matters little what the medium is.
Pass/fail-exams in order to advance a course. No "75% correct answers is enough". Crafts & trades-schools available for kids from age 15 (make it three years training including driving lessons and a license upon graduation + two years apprenticeship with wages and at age twenty you have a fully trained, epxerienced and well-adjusted [insert name here]).
Anonymous applications for universities - grades, testresults and exams only. Set number of slots for each course, said number decided by the university in question.
And a complete overhaul of the student loan-system.
I'm with you on the issues that appear to be (the minimum) reforms we need.
Re the pass/fail exams: best would be (hand)written exams followed by individual oral exams to check if the student actually understood anything, as opposed to merely crammed-to-pass.
And don't get me started on the student-loan system needing an overhaul *rants indiscriminately*
Absolutely, that's the form I meant - old school in both senses of the phrase.
My father remarked once that the swedish military never uses anything but pass/fail: "You either build a bridge right, or you don't. There's no "75% correct" when it comes to real things."
In northern Sweden the lack of teachers with real diplomas/degrees is so severe, some municipalities have tried offering to pay off the loan entire, after five years of full-time employment, just to get someone with a PhD in the relevant subject to move there in the first place.
This was deemed "illegal" by the taxation court.
Of course, after the reforms of 2008 when a new "teacher's authorisation" was implemented, fewer and fewer teachers here approaches even Magister or Lektor levels of university education.
Instead, they have all passed through the state's teachers' college programs where they learn what's in the pupils' textbooks, teaching to the test, and DEI (under its swedish name "värdegrund" which predates DEI by more than a decade).
In the 2010s, the bar for entry into the program at Malmö teacher's college was below 0.1 on the College entrance exam (Högskoleprovet). That's below the random statistical average...