Deb Meier is a pioneering educator in New York. I posted about the Finnish system recently. The key thing to remember is the Finns do not have a word for accountability. It is what is left when we are done with being responsible!
Dear friends.
The poor get poorer, and more get poorer. Meanwhile college tuitions keep rising. Meanwhile the media declare that no one who hasn’t got a BA can possibly qualify for a living wage. Something’s rotten in this proposition. It’s a catch-22. And it doesn’t have to be that way. It isn’t that way in Finland, for example.
Finland didn’t do it overnight, but they built it around critical democratic habits: competence and trust. They didn’t trade off one for the other. They joined competence and trust—just as we do when we hire a baby-sitter. I often go back to this metaphor because it seems so odd that we understand trust when it comes to a babysitter (even when our children are so young that we can’t really get “their side” of the story) but keep looking for a trust-proof solution to system-wide public schooling.
Trust and skepticism go fine…
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“accountability. It is what is left when we are done with being responsible!” – love what you wrote here…so true, yet not good enough for so many!
I agree. Somehow we need to change the conversation dial and bring this back into the classroom for our students.