I got to thinking about education and schooling today. I taught the fifth grade for four years and enjoyed it. I got a PhD in educational research, measurement (testing) and experimental design. That degree is aimed at doing research in education but I took a job at a branch of the University of Wisconsin that mostly taught undergraduates having their first four years of post K-12 schooling. In my School of Education, we did offer master's degrees. They were typically about one extra year of schooling beyond the first four. Graduate students working toward such degrees were in the program only after getting their first college degree, a license to teach in the public and private Kindergarten to 12th grade and doing some teaching.
So, I spent time with undergrads, typically aged 18 to 22 years old, and with experienced teachers working on master's degrees. I have children, grandchildren and great grandchildren and a wife who has a PhD in educational technology. The subject of life between age 5 and age 40 is of interest to me. We all know that the world and its possibilities is changing all the time. Things are not as they were when I was a kid, nor when I first became an assistant professor.
We live in an age of science and research, in which some of us try to apply scientific and critical and imaginative thinking to our lives. Some younger people today, empowered to enjoy sexual life without producing babies postpone becoming parents. They usually say they want to establish their careers first and have children later. Sometimes that seems to work out and sometimes it doesn't. No matter how becoming a parent happens, it is one of the most important events in anyone's life.
Even a parent who isn't clear about how to be a good caretaker and guide for a new baby generally wants a child to have a good life. What exactly a good life is remains something of an open question. We can usually be confident at later ages that we know if a child and later that adult suffered or lived happily. But when a child is eleven years old or has even grown to be 31 years old, we older, supposedly wiser humans can't say accurately which studies or skills or mates or locations or religions will bring the most happiness. We have to fall back on generalities such as "Do your best" and "Be nice". These generalities are time-tested but vague enough that if unhappiness appears we can't tell what went wrong.
Many Americans still have a basically pioneer-settle-the-country attitude. They often take refuge in an old idea: whatever you set your hand to, do it with all your might. So, if I study "hard", work "hard", play "hard", the idea is I will probably become happy, eventually. So, let's make school difficult because then it will be good.
Reading the Brooking Brief on differences in Republican and Democratic ideas about our schools https://goo.gl/FKWf6K (the full link is much longer but I used Google's Shortener)
led me to shopping among Amazon's books about schooling (what we do in schools) and education (what we learn from all sources). You can't wander far among education sources these days without hearing about Finland's schools. I especially liked this paragraph about "Teach Like Finland" by Timothy Walker and Pasi Salhberg:
Finland shocked the world when its fifteen-year-olds scored highest on the first Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a set of tests touted for evaluating critical-thinking skills in math, science, and reading. That was in 2001; but even today, this tiny Nordic nation continues to amaze. How does Finnish education—with short school days, light homework loads, and little standardized testing—produce students who match the PISA scores of high-powered, stressed-out kids in Asia?
