USA, China, and Finland... Symptoms from three systems...

China has recently announced that they are going to increase spending on education to 4% of their GDP. This is significant in context of the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's saying "the way boost education development is to have schools run by educationalists. He also "defined "educationalists" to be those who love to teach and know how to teach, and those who have been teachers for their entire lives."


Now compare this with the US education system. With the administration 'making' school compete for survival, the school system is responding with rather dubious methods of making the grade (just to prevent losing their jobs when their school is shutdown). Ironically this is in the backdrop of the "No Child Left Behind" policy of the US administration.


Reading the article 'When test scores seem too good to believe' in USAtoday, how this pressure is making teachers (!)... Not students... adopt unfair means to spike up performance. This also makes me wonder about the system itself. How, what, and how much does an average student learn in a typical school lifetime?

The Atlanta Journal Constitution wrote a very thought provoking blog post on how China is edging ahead the race education in comparison to the US. In fact, the comparison to the former USSR's success in producing stellar education outcomes.

In contrast, Ira David Socol has an interesting perspective where Finland seems to have a better model and track record that both USA and China. The interesting factoid is also how Ireland has been suggested to follow Finland model for financial recovery. What would be even more interesting is to compare how Ireland's education system fares in comparison.