Michael Moore: Why Finland has the Best Education

"Where To Invade Next is an expansive, hilarious, and subversive comedy in which the Academy Award®-winning director, playing the role of 'invader,' visits a host of nations to 'steal' some of their best ideas and bring them back home to the U.S. of A."

Extract from Michael Moore's 2015 film "Where to Invade Next".

Bud Caddell: Complexity and the Future of Advertising

Exhibition about the use of self-education as an emancipation tactic

Exhibition: "Really Useful Knowledge", 29 October 2014 – 9 February 2015 / Sabatini Building, Floor 1, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid.

"The notion of 'really useful knowledge' emerged at the beginning of the 19th century alongside the workers' awareness of the need for self–education. In the 1820s and 1830s, working class organisations in the UK introduced this phrase to describe a body of knowledge that encompassed various 'unpractical' disciplines such as politics, economy and philosophy, as opposed to the 'useful knowledge' proclaimed by business owners who had previously begun to invest more heavily in their companies' progress through financing workers' education in 'applicable' disciplines like engineering, physics, chemistry and mathematics. In this reference to the long–forgotten class struggles of early capitalism, the title of the exhibition suggests an inquiry into 'really useful knowledge' from a contemporary perspective.

The exhibition endeavours to position the notion of critical pedagogy as a crucial element in collective struggles, and explore the tension between individual and social emancipation through education with examples that are both historical and current, and their relation to organisational forms capable of leading unified resistance to the reproduction of capital. In doing so, the exhibition highlights the collective utilization of public resources, action and experiments, either forgotten or under threat of eradication, taking the museum as a pedagogical site devoted to the analysis of artistic forms interconnected with actual or desired social relations."

(Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía)

1

Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent

"One of the real challenges is to innovate fundamentally in education. Innovation is hard because it means doing something that people don't find very easy, for the most part. It means challenging what we take for granted, things that we think are obvious. The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense; things that people think, 'Well, it can't be done any other way because that's the way it's done.'"

(Ken Robinson, February 2010)

2

Finland's school system accomplishes some impressive feats: so what makes Finnish students so successful?

"Students get plenty of teacher interaction: Finland and New York City have the same number of teachers. But Finland has nearly half the number of students. Standardized testing is kept to a minimum: before a New York student reaches high school, he or she will have taken 10 standardized tests. Collectively, US students take 100 million standardized tests a year. Finland's only standardized test is taken when students are 16 years old. Kids have more time to be kids: an average us 5th grader has 50 minimum of homework per day. Finnish students rarely do homework until their teens. And while us elementary students average 27 minutes of recess students in Finland get about 75 minutes a day). Finland knows good teachers are essential: teachers in Finland are all required to have a Master's degree (which is fully subsidized by the state)."

(OnlineClasses.org, 21 January 2013)

1