MinsooKim/2011-12-31
미국에서 같은 회사에서 일한적이 있는 벗이 얼숲(Facebook)에 올린 글을 이곳에 다시 올립니다.
저는 최근에 법륜 스님이 독일에 와서 하신 강연을 듣는 것을 통해서 우리나라 젊은 학생들이 자살하는 비율이 높다는 것을 알게 되었습니다. 학생을 담고 있는 학교, 그리고 학교를 돌아가게 하는 교육체제가 좀 더 나은 쪽으로 바뀐다고 하여 자살로 나타나고 있는 모든 문제를 동시에 해결될 수 있는 것은 아니겠지만, 현재, 그리고 미래 시점에서 우리가 살아갈 사회에서 중요한 역할을 하는 것이 그 사회 어린 구성원을 가르치는 교육이라는 것은 맞기에, 희망을 담아내는 교육을 이야기하는 신문 기사가 눈에 들어옵니다.
우연인지 필연인지, 또 다른 벗이 이런 사진을 "한국인이 피곤할 수밖에 없는 이유. "라는 제목으로 얼숲(Facebook)올렸네요. 흐, 결국 다 죽자 이거네요. 공부를 바라보는 시각을 바꾸지 않으면 해결할 수 없는 문제로 보입니다.
부끄럽게도, 우리나라가, 교육을 포함해서 많은 것을 미국을 따라하기에, 이 기사에서 미국을 한국으로 바꾸어도 이 글월에서 이야기하는 가르침은 여전히 유효한 것으로 보입니다. 물론 핀란드(Finland)에서 그 시작이 "보다 경쟁적"이기 위한 것이 교육개혁을 하게한 이유라고 하지만, 정작 경쟁보다는 "협동"을 통해서 경쟁력을 확보한다는 것이 참 중요한 철학으로 읽힙니다. "협동"은 "평등"과 함께, 같이 사는 사회를 위해서 참으로 중요한 개념이라고 생각합니다.
아래에 중요 내용을 추려보았습니다. '...'으로 한 부분은 중간에 건너 뛴 부분을 나타냅니다. 굵은 글씨는 제가 했습니다.
-- MinsooKim 2011-12-31 04:14:08
Contents
What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success
Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play.
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Americans are consistently obsessed with certain questions: How can you keep track of students' performance if you don't test them constantly? How can you improve teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How do you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you provide school choice?
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As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. "There's no word for accountability in Finnish," he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. "Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."
For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master's degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.
And while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable. In his book Sahlberg quotes a line from Finnish writer named Samuli Puronen: "Real winners do not compete." It's hard to think of a more un-American idea, but when it comes to education, Finland's success shows that the Finnish attitude might have merits. There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.
Herein lay the real shocker. As Sahlberg continued, his core message emerged, whether or not anyone in his American audience heard it.
Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.
Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.
In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.
In fact, since academic excellence wasn't a particular priority on the Finnish to-do list, when Finland's students scored so high on the first PISA survey in 2001, many Finns thought the results must be a mistake. But subsequent PISA tests confirmed that Finland -- unlike, say, very similar countries such as Norway -- was producing academic excellence through its particular policy focus on equity.
That this point is almost always ignored or brushed aside in the U.S. seems especially poignant at the moment, after the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street movement have brought the problems of inequality in America into such sharp focus. The chasm between those who can afford $35,000 in tuition per child per year -- or even just the price of a house in a good public school district -- and the other "99 percent" is painfully plain to see.
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Yet Sahlberg doesn't think that questions of size or homogeneity should give Americans reason to dismiss the Finnish example. Finland is a relatively homogeneous country -- as of 2010, just 4.6 percent of Finnish residents had been born in another country, compared with 12.7 percent in the United States. But the number of foreign-born residents in Finland doubled during the decade leading up to 2010, and the country didn't lose its edge in education. Immigrants tended to concentrate in certain areas, causing some schools to become much more mixed than others, yet there has not been much change in the remarkable lack of variation between Finnish schools in the PISA surveys across the same period.
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What's more, despite their many differences, Finland and the U.S. have an educational goal in common. When Finnish policymakers decided to reform the country's education system in the 1970s, they did so because they realized that to be competitive, Finland couldn't rely on manufacturing or its scant natural resources and instead had to invest in a knowledge-based economy.
With America's manufacturing industries now in decline, the goal of educational policy in the U.S. -- as articulated by most everyone from President Obama on down -- is to preserve American competitiveness by doing the same thing. Finland's experience suggests that to win at that game, a country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but all of its population well, for the new economy. To possess some of the best schools in the world might still not be good enough if there are children being left behind.
Clearly, many were wrong. It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.
Key to School Improvement: Reading, Writing, Arithmetic ... and Character?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111230134836.htm#.Tv5SKfW0-w4.facebook
