Finland has no private schools – and its pupils perform better than British children
fiat_lux @ fiat_lux @kbin.social Posts 12Comments 1,008Joined 2 yr. ago
fiat_lux @ fiat_lux @kbin.social
Posts
12
Comments
1,008
Joined
2 yr. ago
Neither I nor the article am American. If you feel that pressuring your elected officials in the US is not worthwhile and that certain things need to happen first, I understand, and I wish you luck in your efforts. For those of us who aren't from the US, I hope the knowledge of Finland's social policies is useful in your context. Keeping an eye on how others are succeeding can be helpful.
I totally agree with public education and not funding private schools with public money - I'm not a fan of segregation. I also don't think that's its necessary to ban private schools before implementing other helpful policies, like maternity leave or health care. My point is more that these things all combine to create good public education rather than pointing at just one part and suggesting it is the fix. I think ignoring the other components leads to disappointment when the single-solution proposals fail to deliver the expected results.
To be totally real, I also wanted to tell people what specific things they can ask their elected officials for in their own communities as a way of achieving more equitable outcomes globally. There's no reason not to copy Finland's homework. Except that Finland doesn't set homework.
Edit: clarification
Agreed. It is totally understandable to feel shitty about the situation. It sounds really hard and anyone would struggle with all of that.
My only suggestion to add is to remember to breathe deeply. Anytime you notice you're tense or feeling really bad, spend even 1 minute unclenching and taking several deep breaths from the very bottom of your lungs, let your shoulders drop, shake it out if you want.
It sounds stupid, and it won't solve the actual problems you're facing, and it may not even feel like it has done anything in that moment. But, it will reduce your body's chemical stress response just a little bit more each time you do it, allowing you to put that energy more easily into solutions. And that will help you keep moving just a little bit longer.
And, if nothing else, it's free, so worth trying.
I wish you much better times. Good luck.
Finland's schools are really good for a number of reasons, I'm not sure that private vs public is the only reason worth attributing it to, although i understand the context of the article makes it especially relevant.
For example, Finland provides three years of maternity leave and subsidized day care to parents, and preschool for all 5-year-olds, where the emphasis is on play and socializing. The state subsidizes parents, paying per month for every child until age 17. 97% of 6-year-olds attend public preschool, where children begin some academics. Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Student health care is free.
( a decade ago, not sure if numbers and strategies are still accurate, I lifted it from a Smithsonian article from 2011 because I couldn't remember specifics. Please correct me Suomi friends)
I appreciate you. 🙏 I have been considering looking into hardening my home network, but I dreaded the idea of figuring out which tools weren't just sponsored SEO-optimising AI-generated time-wasting network-snooping bullshit. This gives me somewhere to start.
Yes, I remember not being upset by the news of his passing.
What isn’t fine is that the FDA makes a practice of taking corporate bribes, allowing flawed or outright manipulated studies, etc and then suddenly approving foods, additives, drugs, that are known or strongly suspected to be unsafe.
Yeah, corruption isn't fine. I don't live on that continent though, so, I'm afraid I can't help you out much with Donald Rumsfeld. I just like accuracy in my science and proportionate anxiety about risks.
The bromate ingredients are only dangerous if the factory fucked up during production as well. If they're doing their job correctly, there is no bromate in your food.
It's sort of like how you don't have to worry about food poisoning from chicken when it's cooked through, even though it's not recommended to risk eating the raw stuff.
No idea about the other two banned ingredients, but the risk seems pretty low for these at least. I wouldn't bother throwing food away over their presence, personally, but that's just me.
Edit: too tired
Hundreds? We have written records of war there from 1350BC. The area was probably first settled 10,000 years ago. I'm sure there would be 8500 years more records of war had writing been invented... and we didn't keep losing the records in wars.
Skin colour was just a visual indicator of class that told white people that black people were lower in the social hierarchy than them. There's a lot of overlap, it's not like white people were terrified of the colour brown generally.
I think it would be a mistake to say that the Tulsa massacre, also known as The Black Wall Street wasn't a heady mixture of both classism and racism.
Honestly, there's very obvious evidence the Roman Pantheon had some influence, beyond the questionable name similarity theory. When the earliest Jewish written texts were being compiled in the 2nd century, Romans had been running half of Israel for like 300 years. But they were going through a bit of an "emperor-god with token nod to ancestral deities" phase at the time, so nobody else really took it seriously. A big part of the reason the Rabbis were collaborating on a written word version of Jewish law when they were pretty much oral-history-only before that is because they were actively trying not to include any sneaky Roman (or other non-divine) stuff in there.
And we knew that the Ancient Jews around Moses' time (1500BC) knew something about other gods that people nearby believed in, because there are references to them by name in the scriptures. Which is suspicious far beyond inference from "no other gods before me".
And we knew that there was a temple in the ancient town ruins that was dedicated at some point to zeus and greek, but nobody was able to date it accurately. It could have been left over from the period immediately after Jesus, it was too broken to tell and evidence of Greek pantheon cults wasn't controversial to anyone - provided it was from after Jesus and the Mishnah.
The argument that there couldn't be Greek influence in the Mishnah because the Greek pantheon never was widely known about/believed in prior to Roman invasion was impossible to prove false for a very long time. Dating stuff that old that accurately is hard and usually impossible. Nobody had good physical evidence of Greek pantheon worship in Israel before the earliest Talmud texts, and if all those Rabbis in the Kingdom knew about Greek gods, the worship of the pantheon would have to have been very common and widespread. It was fair to expect evidence of even a single Greek pantheon household shrine, because the Greeks left them everywhere else they went.
So, the odds of finding a statue head identifiably from the same century as the oldest Jewish law standardisation attempts because of its art style, and being able to definitely date it after the rumoured Greek rulers of that city had been overthrown a few hundred years earlier ... and the head using imported stone from only one famous Greek island, which proves trade lines... and the rumours of Greek rulers and in that part of the old city during what was supposed to be the Kingdom of Israel... and the statue head being the right size for a statue with the same footprint as the broken statue plinth mentioning Zeus on the Temple? And all this, when the team digging went there to find proof the Bible was true?
Damn.
The archaeologists did a fantastic job. It cannot have been easy to present evidence contradicting the history of 3 of the world's dominant religions, using their own artifacts on their turf with their permission.
The museum also knew this statue head was not going to go down well with religious people, it was only recently they allowed it to be exhibited because of its implications. That took courage, even if I wish they had put up better barriers.
Not that the head was in great shape anyway, it's not even the most upsetting recent artifact destruction.
Yeah, I'll stop now.
Humans have emotional and often destructive reactions to information that conflicts with what they were always taught. No belief system or culture anywhere in the world is immune to that. Some cultures are a bit more flexible because their belief system doesn't go as hard on the "this is the only possible truth" line, but there are still times when it happens.
For anyone interested in why the guy lost it, it's because similarities between the Ancient Greek stories and stories found in Hebrew scripture used to be explained away some Jewish followers as "Both were independently inspired by (my) God and it is testament to His Power".
They claimed that there were almost no Greeks in ancient Israel, and that no worship was of other religions was really tolerated by the rulers then anyway, so the Greeks couldn't have even have had their own temples even if there were enough followers of a Greek god. If there were enough people for it to be a thing, there would be... you know, archaeological evidence of Greek temples and religion and worship in Israel predating the Judeo-Christian split. Right?
The followers claimed that because of all that, when the Talmud was written by a group of rabbis arguing about what the exact teachings of God really were (because it used to only be handed down through spoken word and Christians were being all "lol no, He never said that"), each Rabbi who contributed to the Talmud could not have been influenced enough by man-made beliefs for it to have hugely affected what the group agreed God definitely said and did. And they definitely couldnt have put things from multi-god religions in there. Therefore the basis of modern Judaism is and always has been rock solid, even though there is a huge chunk of time between when it happened and when it was written down.
And all was well... until 1978 when someone dug up the 2.5m tall statue of Athena imported from Greece and attached to a purpose-built Greek temple in Beth Shean / Scythopolis from 200 years earlier than the Talmud, 37km / 22mi from Nazareth (in the opposite direction of Greece) - in a pretty unavoidable place on the road to Jerusalem. Oops.
tl;dr You got your many-God filthy religious icon in my certainly pure, true, and original single-God belief system that we declared 200 years afterwards!
Edited to add: a little extra context. This Museum keeps the Dead Sea Scrolls and has an entire separate building of the museum, away from the archaeology collection, that is very religiously targeted where those Scrolls are shown. The Scrolls have also not been on display for a long while because of conservation work, but they just started exhibiting them again. So this guy was likely a religious zealot who came to see the Scrolls exhibit, but he stumbled into the archaeology department where they're a little more... science and evidence-based. And the museum is state funded. And the government owns the statue, Scrolls, and basically every Jewish religious artifact in existence. There are a lot of layers here, like everything in the region's history.
Haha, yes! Perfect text recreation of the sound too. 👌
And then people never get to find out stories like The Great Flood were around long before their religion existed and attributed to the word of their God? Nah. Learning is important.
The photo looks like it's of their Head of Athena which was found in Israel despite being made from Greek marble and representing a Greek goddess. It is hard evidence that non-judeo-christian belief systems existed and interacted, and were at least somewhat allowed to do so, before the Talmud but still inside Jewish territory. Specifically, groups like the Cult of Zeus-Akrios, which some people say influenced the development of Judaism and the writing of the Talmud around the time Judaism and Christianity split.
When your worldview requires that you follow the Talmud and that it is the foundations of Judaism and divine law handed down through Moses and oral rabbinic tradition only, but you have evidence that predates the Talmud which demonstrates visible and open polytheistic religious integration in a society you believe was only monotheist judeo-christian... it gets really difficult to dismiss some uncanny similarities between the religions. Similarities that are otherwise easily explained by religions stealing things from other older religions they encountered.
The very idea his God was created partly from pieces of a polytheistic religion is against everything he was raised to believe as truth. His brain probably broke trying to process it.
I'm not sure it's possible to describe as much of the technology, digital culture and design of 1999 as well as this song and video did. I had long forgotten about it and many of the references it makes, thanks for reminding me!
The dire straits video was definitely one of the big "whoa i have never seen this before" moments for animation, but I only saw it long after the release, so i unfortunately did not get to experience the novelty properly. Bless the Quantel Paintbox and the creative possibilities it unlocked though. Era-defining stuff.
Catchy and fun pop, but honestly, the video seems a bit average? It might just be that I prefer fun catchy pop that makes me think just a tiny bit - like I did with Kyari Pamyu Pamyu when I first saw her. The thought being: "What just happened?"
Not English or a FPTP system citizen either, I'm afraid. If it is any consolation, we have elected unfit leaders using a ranked voting system too. It's part of the reason I advocate for multiple-front approaches to social betterment - all parts of all systems can be compromised by bad actors.
I'm also I'm not familiar enough with how Finland's election system works to make a direct comparison there, I only have experience in public education policy, not electoral systems.