Finland To Become The First Country In The World To Get Rid Of All School Subjects

Way back (decades) when I was in high school I was lucky enough to have an English teacher and a Modern History teacher, both who believed in expanding the context of their curriculum material.These teachers encouraged new ways of seeing the material and expressing dissenting opinions. These classes were fun and entertaining (sometimes quite loud)  as well as providing us with a diploma. A bit more than a  decade later I volunteered at my sons' school in a pilot project to explore teaching in a different way from that normally used by that school division. Our goal was to explore the world of fiber, incorporating it into math, English (writing), history, science and social studies. The kids, teachers and I explored spinning, dyeing, weaving, felting, sewing, and quilting. The kids wrote about what they did, used math to carry out the tasks they did in their projects with fiber, and learned about how these skills were used historically and in historical economics, their value in everyday life in the past and their contribution to the world today. They learned how to accomplish certain products by group cooperation - quilting and felting for example. They learned about the science involved in so many fiber processes. We all had fun, we all ended up with items to take home and the teachers felt that the kids had a much broader and more balanced understanding of the subject of fiber, learning new skills and developing self confidence in the process. The quilt was raffled off and the money put towards upgrading the school playground. Now that's education.

I feel I have been lucky to have had some teachers who could think outside the box. My own kids have also been lucky this way. The grade 4 teacher at their school taught fractions using cooking and baking. This is a most sensible way to teach fractions, while learning to bake and cook as a group, to cooperate, and to enjoy their efforts together. Let's hope we can keep moving education in this direction and away from teaching kids not to think for themselves or to stand up for themselves, accepting whatever is told to them, producing workers who get no creative satisfaction from their jobs and who need mindless consumerism to give themselves a reason to go to work each day. I apologize for the harshness of this last part of this paragraph - my awareness of the current educational system (generally speaking) is growing daily and I find it appalling.

Thanks for reading.