Skewl! (School)

I am glad that I'm not the only one who thinks that education should not be the first thing that we cut. In her post, The Difficulties of Public Education, Megan Ryan talks about her surprise upon learning that Texas is ranked very poorly on a national level for education. She goes on to briefly discuss ways that we can cut other spending to spend more on education, giving the example of a noise reducing wall that might not even work that could be better spent improving our education system.

I agree with her, for the most part. I think there's more to the situation that she's not mentioning, but I'll talk about that in a minute. First, I totally agree that there are a lot of unnecessary spending projects that can and should be cut to free up more money for important issues such as education.

Education is our future. A well educated society is necessary if we want to maintain our place in the world. I can't emphasize enough how important I think education, quality education, is to us. I'm in college because I know the value of a good education, and am willing to work to get one.

I thus think that not only should we use more of our money for school, as Megan says, but that we should be using it more effectively. As she pointed out, there's not a lot of money to go around. But what should we be using it on? I think we should look at the leading schools in the world, and take a leaf from their books. I'm going to look at Finland, and what West Virginia has done to copy them.

One of the main things that strikes me about the education system in Finland is the respect given to teachers. Teaching is considered a prestigious position, with many people vying for the jobs, even though they don't pay much better than the ones here. Part of this comes from the training given to teachers, who go through intense training camps and are continually working to improve their methods. One aspect of this we can see, even here, is that the better educated a teacher is, the longer they'll stick around, and the better they're be at their job, on average.

Not only are they teachers much better trained, but they use something called a project based learning system. According to this article, "Project-based learning -- an integral part of Finland's education system -- uses one 'project' as a starting point for learning about multiple subjects and how they fit together." It's a fascinating system.


In conclusion, I think that some of these things should be brought to Texas. They work in Finland, and appear to be working in West Virginia, so I think we should give them a try. After all, they don't seem to require a lot more money, which we are short of, but could be implemented on the budget that we're on.