my school library opened today
the day started with me getting strssed cuz i wasnt getting anything done despite wanting to do a lot of things, plus my teacher yelling at us because we didn't prepare books for our reading session despite her telling us earlier that we'll be reading in class, therefore we don't have potential yada yada. and i took it personally lol.
anyways the same day, the school library opened and that means books at school!!! to be free from my hella stressed state!!! so i borrowed a book about finnish education.
tmi on why specifically finnish education
well i'm into education! because well 1. i want to do good in the education system and 2. i like learning and want to keep liking learning, but sometimes the system screws up my joy of learning so i want to learn how to use the system correctly and 3. everyone complains about the korean education system and i wanna know if the complaints are valid
when i first got into education was, well, when i first got ambitious! i was looking up how to adapt to the newest changes in the education system, which was purely for taking advantage of the system and not to know if the system is really good. but in sixth grade i read this book, idk the title but it introduced 631 공부법 (learning should be 60% playing, 30% studying standard school subjects, and 10% humanities education) for 5~6th graders. anyways the book said that modern education was designed to make people into obedient machines. before education was universal, school was mostly exploration and discussion, there was no standardized grading or a set time for class. and then when lower class people started getting education, they decided to redesign the system so that everyone gets graded like some product and are taught to obey the teacher the same way workers obey their boss. like why would the ideal class be quiet? my english hagwon works perfectly well, even better than school where quiet is the ideal state, becuase the students actually talk a lot! the book puts it like the whole world is just fake, controlled by billionaires who are the only ones who know the truth, and we've been brainwashed by flawed education and phones so we never question it. and then they talk about finnish education where these brainwashing techniques in education have been mostly undone, like nobody prohibits smoking in schools but nobody smokes. the cooler thing is they've been suffering from that same flawed education just 50 years ago because colonization. and i'm like 'whoa cool i should look into that'.
the most recent experience i had with contemplating education systems was mason's post educative limitations, you can see my thoughts then here and here. before that i had asked ava about education in germany, when i look back at the email thread it's sorta embarrassing what i said but there's no reason except ava's famous and an adult. but fame isn't a big factor in how bearbloggers see their internet status and i talk with a lot of adults both irl and online so lol. these people are australian and german, and i ended up reading some namuwiki on these countries' education systems, and later western (european/north american/australian/new zealand) education in general.
anyways the conclusions i drew from 2025 was:
- in both germany and australia, only the people who want to go to uni go to uni, therefore the quality of unis are mostly equal (compared to korea) and people who don't go to uni are well treated
- in germany this is changing, i think
- university equalization means there has to be some way to keep all unis getting bad, which means harder qualifications for entering/graduating uni. for example:
- having more students repeat a grade (korea almost never does this)
- picking certain students to go to uni at a younger age, germany is the most known example of this.
- making it easy to enter uni but hard to graduate (a namuwiki article said, koreans suffer in high school while westerners suffer in uni)
- south australia has a system similar to 고교학점제 that actually works. so students actually choose their classes based on their interests and career paths, you take classes not only from your school but also other schools and places that are not schools. plus standardized grading is getting phased out and in mason's school barely a thing. what's even cooler is some classes do self-paced learning. and all of this in high school, how the heck is that possible when everyone must be so sensitive about uni? until i realized they weren't.
- secondary education (and a bit less of primary education) depends a lot on teritiary education and everything after that. people use uni to get a better chance of being hired, people use high school to get a better chance of going to a good uni, people use middle school to get a better chance of going to a good high school and uni, and people use elementary school to get a better chance of going to a good middle school, high school, and uni. and what the korean ministry of education is doing right now is sorta stupid because it changes high school and university entrance without caring about what universities need. i've seen many people working at uni complain about how the changes in university entrance has made it harder to tell qualified students.
- (this part is where i think my reasoning is rushed) in korea, people are super competitive about going to a good uni. korean culture has always been competitive mainly due to confucianism and rapid economic development (because when korea was a developing country you needed to just work hard and compete with others to earn more money), but additionally the gap between universities is really big. by 'gap' i mean quality of education but also reputation, chances of being hired etc. and i'm not sure from here but many unis (especially outside of seoul), called 지잡대 in slang, are just there for people and regions to tell people that they've got unis so they've met the minimal standards for a human being / developed region. but actually their quality of education is not very good and it is better for students to learn things themselves through online lectures or spend more time on actually getting a job. in fact i have found claims that 90% of korean unis are useless and are keeping us from equalizing or enhancing unis. so maybe, things would work better if korea followed western europe / australia, got rid of a lot of 지잡대, equalized unis, and gave better support for people who choose not to go to uni?
and then i went to this camp in january and got to present on relevant topics. (one was about unbundling in K-12 education, and another was about AI literacy education) and by the end of camp i talked about it to a teacher i've never seen before, and i guess i spoke really passionately because the teacher told me, 'it seems like you're really really passionate about education.'
looking back on that last point about university equalization, i think the benefits of university equalization i found from researching europe and australia could be biased because i have a tendency to romanticize those places. plus there are places where universities are clearly ranked and yet students do what they enjoy and a lot of unis perform well. and there's a big difference between the west and korea, so i'll have to research successful education systems in asia to consider how cultural differences affect which education system is more effective.
wow that turned out to be a long ramble about my journey in learning about education. back to the book about finnish education, what can i take away from that?
- the book is written by a japanese who studied in a finnish public school during her second year of high school (that sounds like an extremely bold move to me, she mentions that she was not a very independent student and barely knew about finland and studying abroad, so everyone was opposed to her studying in finland), so i'm expecting i'll see the cultural differences between japan and finland. also i can learn about what it's like to study abroad in case i get to study abroad and be more accurate when i daydream about it (lol).
- i've never read about finnish education in depth before, so a whole book about finnish education is valuable just by itself.
- while most resources i've read about education in europe are written by koreans who glorify europe, this book is written by an actual student in finnish school who had to go through both the good and bad of finnish education.
so that's it for my rambles about education, i was expecting this to be a day review so back to the day review stuff.
cool things that happened today
i met a lot of people i liked!
- this morning some 2011 was in right front of the 9th grade class next to my class, explaining english grammar to another 2011. i saw her in the libary and asked her if she was in that class, she said no but when i mentioned that i saw her explaining english and she was really good, she said that it was her. the reason i felt good was because i successfully managed a convo with a 2011 i've first met!
- i met a 2013 from my linguistics olympiad club, and it was her first day volunteering at the library. i helped her out (i've never volunteered at the library btw) and i learned how books were organized.
- a 2011 i'm close with from the linguistics olympiad club knew a teacher who i think is a librarian pretty well. the 2011 had shown the librarian what we were doing in the club, and the librarian was impressed to see that i was the one who organized the club. she told me she was a HUFS graduate and it was cool to recognize some langs she had seen in her uni times from my linguistics olympiad resources. i told her that i'd visited HUFS before.