Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "Louis' rant on schooling in NYC" video.

  1. Wow! A teacher not willing to help the students that have trouble learning something should be the only reason needed to fire that person. I understand that sometimes teachers fail to notice that somebody needs special support but if extra help is requested, it should be provided.
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  2. The ability to fluently read is indeed the most important skill to learn. If reading as an act itself feels like a chore, you can never easily learn anything that requires reading. Learning new stuff is basically about how fast you can input new data into your brain. And even though videos and audio recordings allow you to input some data even if you cannot read, those methods have lower bandwidth for most tasks. (There are exceptions, obviously. For example, for music studies having audio recordings is much better than text books.)
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  3. Increasing hours just makes things worse. Here in Finland, children are usually in the school for 6 hours a day and 5 days a week. And for those 6 hours, they get 15 minute break every hour so it's really 6 x 45 minutes per day from monday to friday. With 2.5 month holiday for the summer and 1 week holiday for the autumn, 2 week for the xmas, and 1 week holiday for the spring. Homework needs maybe 15-30 minutes per day and that's all. And Finland used to have really good results in the PISA tests around year 2005. The curriculum details have since changed a bit and results are a bit worse but the length of education or the amount of homework hasn't been changed. I'm not sure if the worse behavior is caused by minor curriculum changes or the use of smartphones in classrooms –in addition, one big change in Finland since 2005 has been integrating special education into normal classrooms without extra resources for the teacher of the normal classroom. I would guess this might be the real cause for worse results in recent years. It was done on the basis that it would improve understanding between "normal" people and "special" people but schools assumed it was cost minimization technique and just reduced staff instead of having one normal teacher and one special ed teacher per class. In practice, the normal teachers were expected to do everything they used to do and, in addition, do all the stuff the special ed teachers did previously. The minimum education for teachers in Finland is Master's degree from university, which obviously helps, too. And Finland doesn't have any private schools in practice and parents don't get to choose the school children go because all the schools follow the same curriculum with similar requirements for teachers.
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  4. 22:22 Your cat thinks you're getting too aggressive :D
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  5. That's only mandatory extra year in sense that you no longer can drop out of school after your 16th birthday like previously. The new system in Finland still has 9 year mandatory elementary school and you have to select some education after that (high school, trade school or "10th grade" which is basically repeating the 9th year with extra support – usually only people that cannot be accepted to any high school or trade school go there). Nowadays one can decide to drop out of all education after your 18th birthday.
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