Can Finland's Successful Educational Model Be Applied To Caribbean Students?

This model cannot work in the Caribbean because our schools are not about educating kids. Schools are about:

1. Convenience. A 3 hours school day is inconvenient for the parents; who will watch the kids when the parents work? Think about the amount of single parents. Can they afford to pay someone to supervise them or will the kids end up in gangs. Multiple clubs that cater for different skills sets of the kids would be necessary; similar to the different sports clubs we have. Having the kids focus on what they like and what they are good at would allow us to be the champions of science, films, etc. like Usain Bolt and others like him. Unfortunately charities are not going to support anything that compete with their business model, there would also be a huge fall off in colleges and universities enrollment, since it would be less likely that they would be able to continue to flood the market teaching people the same skill sets that most of graduates never use when they actually start working.

2. Social status. Private school graduates are not necessarily smarter than public schools students. They just have better access to books and teachers that explain the test requirements better. Those kids are also more likely to go to school every day and have less mental stress related problems than the poorer kids. This gives these schools a better average in terms of their pass rate. The focus on private school is based on I’m not sending my child to hang around those people when I can afford to send them to a private school. A lot of the private school graduates in America whose parents talk about how their child get all A’s in schools, realize after the student graduate that the curriculum there was so easy that the student did not qualify for college after graduation. It’s one of the reasons for parents wanting standardized tests. A college degree is a status symbol. Most college graduates do not work in their field of study. Most employers cannot tell the difference between someone using a fake college degree from someone using a real one, because companies have to train them anyway. This is why internship is so popular. You spent over 4 years in High School and 4 years in College and you need a 3 months internship to function in a job.

3. Money. Our school system is setup as a money making, employment machine. Are we going to raise teachers and administrators salary to allow them to live off 15 hours a week? Are we going to retrain them to teach multiple practical skills? Are we going to get colleges to work with employers to teach practical skills that the workforce really need instead of skill sets of convenience? Will we end the silly assumption that if you spend 4 years in college you are somehow smarter than someone who spend 4 years actually doing the job? Isn’t the purpose of obtaining a college degree saying that if I can afford to go to a private school and spend 4 years in college I should be paid more regardless of job performance?

Certification by Microsoft, CompTIA, etc. did a great job provide real training for potential employees to start working in their field of study and be effective immediately with only about six months’ to a year worth of training. Are colleges really going to collaborate with business and only teach students practical life-skills and what the need for the job for about a year? How would they make up for the money they get teaching other stuff the student don’t need for the other 3 to 5 years. What about the student who are able to acquire skills in their four years of high school if they don’t have to study for things they know they will never want to do?

A lot of people get confused thinking that our school system is meant to educate people and pull them out of poverty. It’s not doing that because that was never the intent. The intention is to serve the educators, keep idle minds busy, provide day care and create a status of I have a degree or my degree is better than yours, whether base on status or how long you’ve been in school. I still get a kick out of how people react when I tell them my Business Degree GPA is 4.0; although I make more money off my Certifications in America.

Creating an education system that will move Jamaica from a developing country to a developed country and elevate most of our citizen out of poverty is much easier than people think, we just need a government with the guts to do it. Japan is the size of Jamaica and have the world 3rd largest economy despite having little or no natural resources. All we have to do is copy them. I’m just saying…..