If it were just that I saw a teaser from Michael Moore's latest film, I could have fitted that in, and still made tea.
If it were the joyous news that I feel vindicated I could have conveyed that with the help of Victorian punctuation (scads of exclamation marks) and exclamations to put before them.
But neither of those really address the point,: - which is that this deserves to go viral and all the committees, and the panels, and the interest groups and the Departments (those with the capital d - like health, anti-social behaviour, mental health, education,) should be made to hand in their cell-phones and secretaries and advisors at the door, and be made to sit down and watch this. And then answer questions from the public.
I would think that most of us know that Finland has a pretty good education system. But even if not, have you ever met a Finn who couldn't speak English, who wasn't well informed about world affairs, who didn't love to laugh - with or without beer - or who was even impolite?
On the whole easy-going, educated, and happy. Which, when we boil down all the tree-pissing contests, is pretty much what we all want our newborns to be when we first hold them and marvel at their uniqueness.
But how many of them come out the other side of childhood and into adulthood ticking all three boxes? In fact, how many of them don't come through it at all?
In Finland the central ethos is being happy. Simple.
They've done that - and consistently rank among the top 5 happiest nations in the world. We're around the 30th - depending whose figures one uses. But Finland, on each set of figures I've seen, is still up there in the top 5.
And 9.27 minutes of Michael Moore's new doco. is going to show us why that is; as well as providing successful solutions to the unfair, unwieldy problems of current educational, mental health, and drug-related problems that enmesh us?
Yes it is. And so are educators like me.
A couple of weeks ago I saw an article detailing how a group of Educators in England were bringing over teachers from China so they could teach the UK teachers in turn, about what they are doing in China to turn out such seriously high achieving students. And I wanted to have all their names and addresses so I could go down and shake them 'till their teeth rattled.
Disregarding the blazingly obvious fact that their own education hadn't fitted them for critical thinking, they could have saved themselves the money of flying people over from China. All they had to do was go to ANY University in the country and talk to any Chinese student. To back this up the obvious step was to ask anyone - even students on their gap-year teaching in ESL factories - how Chinese education works.
That too is simple. It is the apotheosis of all that could possibly be wrong with an education system. It produces citizens with no critical faculties whatsoever. It turns out men and women who have never had an original thought in their lives - thus explaining how ubiquitous Chinese rip-off brands are. It leads the world in student suicide rates with children as young as 9 throwing themselves off roofs of building in the days leading up to each new school term. It also provides a population who know less about the rest of the world than any Islander on a remote Pacific Island, and whose sense of entitlement is boundless. And staunchly upholds and promotes misogyny, and racism,
As to the actual mechanics of teaching? That's easy. Everything by rote. No interaction between students and teachers. No questions. In fact, teachers are almost dispensible: they cut themselves off from students with a huge desk and a microphone and spend the lesson reading from the texbook. (There's only one textbook required for each subject. No other source is ever consulted). For homework the students go back and learn the chapter off by heart. At the end of the term they are required to regurgitate the information. The student with the best memory wins. Simple again.
In order to attain these prodigious feats of memory children start learning at about 3. They start getting homework around about 5 but often, until then, parents provide it for them. they get up around 6 and study. They go to school to be droned at. They come home again and study until bedtime which gets later and later as the load increases through Primary and into Tertiary. They don't play. They don't know how to use their imagination. They don't play sport for fun but for competition. They don't party. They don't experiment.
When, in my first semester, I naiely asked students in a break-the-ice way what they enjoyed doing; what hobbies they had; what instruments they played; what sport they messed about with, what they did in their spare time. the answers were completely unanimous and very, very, sad.
Sleeping. Eating. Shopping. That's it. Even on high days and holidays. Sleeping. Eating. Shopping.
And THIS is what this silly shower want for our children? Well no, of course it isn't. They're just taking action on an argument from ignorance: Chinese students - ALL Chinese students work hard and study and get good results. Our kids get rubbish results and let the side down internationally. Let's do what the Chinese do.
No, desperate, frazzled, anxious educators, let's not.. Let's do what the Finns do. Let's turn out well-adjusted, thinking, knowledgeable adults. Let's make inroads on the disgracefully high mental health problems we have. Let's get a handle on teenage suicide and seek to stop the waste. Let's enable people to work at jobs they WANT to do; rather than locking them into a life-time of working for money. Let's empower them them so they don't have to live their entire lives dependent upon the results of a single exam. And let's, for gods' sakes give them happiness.
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