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If students designed their own schools...

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The Harvard education professor Howard Gardner once advised Americans, "Learn from Finland, which has the most effective schools and which does just about the opposite of what we are doing in the United States."

Following his recommendation, I enrolled my 7-year-old son in a primary school in Joensuu, Finland, which is about as far east as you can go in the European Union before you hit the guard towers of the Russian border.

OK, I wasn't just blindly following Gardner - I had a position as a lecturer at the University of Eastern Finland for a semester. But the point is that, for five months, my wife, my son and I experienced a stunningly stress-free, and stunningly good, school system. Finland has a history of producing the highest global test scores in the Western world, as well as a trophy case full of other recent No. 1 global rankings, including most literate nation.

In Finland, children don't receive formal academic training until the age of 7. Until then, many are in day care and learn through play, songs, games and conversation. Most children walk or bike to school, even the youngest. School hours are short and homework is generally light.

Unlike in the United States, where many schools are slashing recess, schoolchildren in Finland have a mandatory 15-minute outdoor free-play break every hour of every day. Fresh air, nature and regular physical activity breaks are considered engines of learning. According to one Finnish maxim, "There is no bad weather. Only inadequate clothing."

One evening, I asked my son what he did for gym that day. "They sent us into the woods with a map and compass and we had to find our way out," he said.

Finland doesn't waste time or money on low-quality mass standardized testing. Instead, children are assessed every day, through direct observation, check-ins and quizzes by the highest-quality "personalized learning device" ever created - flesh-and-blood teachers.

In class, children are allowed to have fun, giggle and daydream from time to time. Finns put into practice the cultural mantras I heard over and over: "Let children be children," "The work of a child is to play," and "Children learn best through play."

The emotional climate of the typical classroom is warm, safe, respectful and highly supportive. There are no scripted lessons and no quasi-martial requirements to walk in straight lines or sit up straight. As one Chinese student-teacher studying in Finland marveled to me, "In Chinese schools, you feel like you're in the military. Here, you feel like you're part of a really nice family." She is trying to figure out how she can stay in Finland permanently.

In the United States, teachers are routinely degraded by politicians, and thousands of teacher slots are filled by temps with six or seven weeks of summer training. In Finland teachers are the most trusted and admired professionals next to doctors, in part because they are required to have master's degrees in education with specialization in research and classroom practice.

"Our mission as adults is to protect our children from politicians," one Finnish childhood education professor told me. "We also have an ethical and moral responsibility to tell businesspeople to stay out of our building." In fact, any Finnish citizen is free to visit any school whenever they like, but her message was clear: Educators are the ultimate authorities on education, not bureaucrats, and not technology vendors.

Skeptics might claim that the Finnish model would never work in America's inner-city schools, which instead need boot-camp drilling and discipline, Stakhanovite workloads, relentless standardized test prep and screen-delivered testing.

But what if the opposite is true?

What if high-poverty students are the children most urgently in need of the benefits that, for example, American parents of means obtain for their children in private schools, things that Finland delivers on a national public scale - highly qualified, highly respected and highly professionalized teachers who conduct personalized one-on-one instruction; manageable class sizes; a rich, developmentally correct curriculum; regular physical activity; little or no low-quality standardized tests and the toxic stress and wasted time and energy that accompanies them; daily assessments by teachers; and a classroom atmosphere of safety, collaboration, warmth and respect for children as cherished individuals?

Why should high-poverty students deserve anything less?

One day last November, when the first snow came to my part of Finland, I heard a commotion outside my university faculty office window, which is close to the teacher training school's outdoor play area. I walked over to investigate.

The field was filled with children savoring the first taste of winter amid the pine trees. My son was out there somewhere, but the children were so buried in winter clothes and moving so fast that I couldn't spot him. The noise of children laughing, shouting and singing as they tumbled in the fresh snow was close to deafening.

"Do you hear that?" asked the recess monitor, a special education teacher wearing a yellow safety smock.

"That," she said proudly, "is the voice of happiness."
William Doyle is a 2015-2016 Fulbright scholar and a lecturer on media and education at the University of Eastern Finland. His latest book is "PT 109: An American Epic of War, Survival and the Destiny of John F. Kennedy." MORE FROM OPINION A minimum wage hike is the wrong fix Do universities need affirmative action for conservative professors? California should restore the trigger allowing parents to force change at low-performing schools

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The Harvard education professor Howard Gardner once advised Americans, "Learn from Finland, which has the most effective schools and which does just about the opposite of what we are doing in the United States."

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The ancient Greeks had different words for different kinds of love - like Ludus (playful love), Pragma (longstanding love) and Agape (universal love). Sixteen hundred years ago, Augustine argued that the essence of a good life is choosing the right things to love and loving them well.

But over the past several centuries our models of human behavior have amputated love. Hobbes and other philosophers argued that society is a machine driven by selfishness. Enlightenment philosophers emphasized reason over emotion. Contemporary social science was built on the idea that we're self-interested, calculating creatures.

This philosophical shift has caused unimaginable harm, especially in the sphere of education.

Education is one of those spheres where the heart is inseparable from the head. If students are going to succeed, they probably need to come from a home where they feel safe and secure, so they aren't paralyzed by anxiety and fear. They probably need to have experienced strong attachments so they know how to bond with teachers and parents. They probably need to have been bathed in love so they have some sense of identity, some confidence about their own worth and some sense of agency about their own future.

Even within the classroom, the key fact is the love between a teacher and a student: the teacher's willingness to pour time, attention and care into the student; the student's desire to be worthy of that care and win affection and approval.

For years, schools didn't have to think about love because there were so many other nurturing social institutions. But recently the family has frazzled and community has frayed. Today many students come to school lacking a secure emotional base.

Basically what's happened over the past generation is that we've put enormous effort into improving the academic piece of schooling, but progress has been nil because the students' emotional foundation has been collapsing under our feet. The schools are better than they were, but the gap between the rich and the poor is just as great as it was 20 years ago because the emotional environment is worse.

The good news is that attention is finally turning to the love lives of our students - to the psychic and emotional qualities they bring to the classroom. No one is better at chronicling this shift than Paul Tough, the author of " How Children Succeed" and now " Helping Children Succeed." In his latest book, he asks how, concretely, can we improve students' noncognitive skills. ("Noncognitive skills" is a euphemism social scientists use for those things students get from love and attachment.)

Tough notices that many of the teachers who improve their students' character never actually talk about character. They coach them in chess, or enthuse over science. Tough concludes that skills like resilience and self-control are not really skills the way reading is a skill, they are traits imparted by an environment.

The most important educational environment is the one that surrounds a child in the first five years, when the emotional foundations are being engraved. The gap between rich and poor students opens up before age 5 and stays pretty constant through high school. Despite this, the U.S. ranks 31st out of 32 developed nations in the amount it spends on early childhood.

Better policy can help. Some of the best programs help parents do what they are already doing but more consistently - to have "serve and return" interactions with their kids; to practice distanced empathy - to hear their children when they are upset, and to guide them back toward calmness.

Tough reports on research by Roland Fryer at Harvard showing that attempts to pay kids to read more and perform better have been largely ineffective. Students are not motivated by financial incentives. He also reports on research by C. Kirabo Jackson at Northwestern, which shows that while some teachers are good at raising their students' test scores, other teachers are really good at improving their students' school engagement. Teachers in the first group are amply rewarded these days, but teachers who motivate their students to show up every day and throw themselves into school life may not even realize how good they are, because emotional engagement is not something we measure and stress.

Teachers are now called upon not only to teach biology but to create a culture: a culture of caring criticism, so students feel loved while they improve; a culture of belonging, so fragile students feel their work has value. Suddenly, teachers must teach students how to feel about their own feelings; how not to be swallowed up by moments of failure, anger and sadness, but to slow the moment and step outside the emotional spiral.

Many teachers sense that students are more emotionally vulnerable today. Social policy has to find a hundred ways to nurture loving relationships. Today we have to fortify the heart if we're going to educate the mind.

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Opinion | The Building Blocks of Learning

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The ancient Greeks had different words for different kinds of love - like Ludus (playful love), Pragma (longstanding love) and Agape (universal love). Sixteen hundred years ago, Augustine argued that the essence of a good life is choosing the right things to love and loving them well.

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Molly Worthen

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Credit Credit Baptiste Alchourroun

BEFORE the semester began earlier this fall, I went to check out the classroom where I would be teaching an introductory American history course. Like most classrooms at my university, this one featured lots of helpful gadgets: a computer console linked to an audiovisual system, a projector screen that deploys at the touch of a button and USB ports galore. But one thing was missing. The piece of technology that I really needed is centuries old: a simple wooden lectern to hold my lecture notes. I managed to obtain one, but it took a week of emails and phone calls.

Perhaps my request was unusual. Isn't the old-fashioned lecture on the way out? A 2014 study showed that test scores in science and math courses improved after professors replaced lecture time with "active learning" methods like group work - prompting Eric Mazur, a Harvard physicist who has long campaigned against the lecture format, to declare that "it's almost unethical to be lecturing." Maryellen Weimer, a higher-education blogger, wrote: "If deep understanding is the objective, then the learner had best get out there and play the game."

In many quarters, the active learning craze is only the latest development in a long tradition of complaining about boring professors, flavored with a dash of that other great American pastime, populist resentment of experts. But there is an ominous note in the most recent chorus of calls to replace the "sage on the stage" with student-led discussion. These criticisms intersect with a broader crisis of confidence in the humanities. They are an attempt to further assimilate history, philosophy, literature and their sister disciplines to the goals and methods of the hard sciences - fields whose stars are rising in the eyes of administrators, politicians and higher-education entrepreneurs.

In the humanities, there are sound reasons for sticking with the traditional model of the large lecture course combined with small weekly discussion sections. Lectures are essential for teaching the humanities' most basic skills: comprehension and reasoning, skills whose value extends beyond the classroom to the essential demands of working life and citizenship.

Today's vogue for active learning is nothing new. In 1852, John Henry Newman wrote in "The Idea of a University" that true learning "consists, not merely in the passive reception into the mind of a number of ideas hitherto unknown to it, but in the mind's energetic and simultaneous action upon and towards and among those new ideas." The lecture course, too, has always had skeptics. In his 1869 inaugural address as president of Harvard University, Charles Eliot warned that "the lecturer pumps laboriously into sieves. The water may be wholesome, but it runs through. A mind must work to grow."

Eliot was a chemist, so perhaps we should take his criticisms with a grain of salt. In the humanities, a good lecture class does just what Newman said: It keeps students' minds in energetic and simultaneous action. And it teaches a rare skill in our smartphone-app-addled culture: the art of attention, the crucial first step in the "critical thinking" that educational theorists prize.

Those who want to abolish the lecture course do not understand what a lecture is. A lecture is not the declamation of an encyclopedia article. In the humanities, a lecture "places a premium on the connections between individual facts," Monessa Cummins, the chairwoman of the classics department and a popular lecturer at Grinnell College, told me. "It is not a recitation of facts, but the building of an argument."

Absorbing a long, complex argument is hard work, requiring students to synthesize, organize and react as they listen. In our time, when any reading assignment longer than a Facebook post seems ponderous, students have little experience doing this. Some research suggests that minority and low-income students struggle even more. But if we abandon the lecture format because students may find it difficult, we do them a disservice. Moreover, we capitulate to the worst features of the customer-service mentality that has seeped into the university from the business world. The solution, instead, is to teach those students how to gain all a great lecture course has to give them.

When Kjirsten Severson first began teaching philosophy at Clackamas Community College in Oregon, she realized that she needed to teach her students how to listen. "Where I needed to start was by teaching them how to create space in their inner world, so they could take on this argument on a clean canvas," she told me. She assigns an excerpt from Rebecca Shafir's "The Zen of Listening" to help students learn to clear their minds and focus. This ability to concentrate is not just a study skill. As Dr. Cummins put it, "Can they listen to a political candidate with an analytical ear? Can they go and listen to their minister with an analytical ear? Can they listen to one another? One of the things a lecture does is build that habit."

Listening continuously and taking notes for an hour is an unusual cognitive experience for most young people. Professors should embrace - and even advertise - lecture courses as an exercise in mindfulness and attention building, a mental workout that counteracts the junk food of nonstop social media. More and more of my colleagues are banning the use of laptops in their classrooms. They say that despite initial grumbling, students usually praise the policy by the end of the semester. "I think the students value a break from their multitasking lives," Andrew Delbanco, a professor of American Studies at Columbia University and an award-winning teacher, told me. "The classroom is an unusual space for them to be in: Here's a person talking about complicated ideas and challenging books and trying not to dumb them down, not playing for laughs, requiring 60 minutes of focused attention."

Holding their attention is not easy. I lecture from detailed notes, which I rehearse before each class until I know the script well enough to riff when inspiration strikes. I pace around, wave my arms, and call out questions to which I expect an answer. When the hour is done, I'm hot and sweaty. A good lecturer is "someone who conveys that there's something at stake in what you're talking about," Dr. Delbanco said. Or as Ms. Severson told me, "I'm a pretty shy person, but when I lecture, there's a certain charisma. This stuff matters to me - it saved my life."

Good lecturers communicate the emotional vitality of the intellectual endeavor ("the way she lectured always made you make connections to your own life," wrote one of Ms. Severson's students in an online review). But we also must persuade students to value that aspect of a lecture course often regarded as drudgery: note-taking. Note-taking is important partly for the record it creates, but let's be honest. Students forget most of the facts we teach them not long after the final exam, if not sooner. The real power of good notes lies in how they shape the mind.

"Note-taking should be just as eloquent as speaking," said Medora Ahern, a recent graduate of New Saint Andrews College in Idaho. I tracked her down after a visit there persuaded me that this tiny Christian college has preserved some of the best features of a traditional liberal arts education. She told me how learning to take attentive, analytical notes helped her succeed in debates with her classmates. "Debate is really all about note-taking, dissecting your opponent's idea, reducing it into a single sentence. There's something about the brevity of notes, putting an idea into a smaller space, that allows you psychologically to overcome that idea."

Technology can be a saboteur. Studies suggest that taking notes by hand helps students master material better than typing notes on a laptop, probably because most find it impossible to take verbatim notes with pen and paper. Verbatim transcription is never the goal: Students should synthesize as they listen.

This is not a "passive" learning experience, and it cannot be replicated by asking students to watch videotaped lectures online: the temptations of the Internet, the safeguard of the rewind button and the comforts of the dorm-room sofa are deadly to the attention span. But note-taking is not a skill professors can take for granted. We must teach it. Dr. Cummins assigns one student in each day's class the task of not only taking notes, but also presenting a critique of her argument at the next class meeting.

This kind of work prepares students to succeed in the class format that so many educators, parents and students fetishize: the small seminar discussion. A lecture course teaches students that listening is not the same thing as thinking about what you plan to say next - and that critical thinking depends on mastery of facts, not knee-jerk opinions. "We don't want to pretend that all we have to do is prod the student and the truth will come out," Dr. Delbanco told me.

Such words of caution are deeply unfashionable. But humanists have been beating back calls to update our methods, to follow the lead of the sciences, for a very long time. One hundred and sixty years ago, when education reformers proposed training students only in the sciences or "temporal callings," John Henry Newman defended the humanities as a repository of moral and cultural knowledge, but also as crucial disciplines for teaching a student how to think, "to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant." Such a student learns "when to speak and when to be silent," Newman wrote. "He is able to converse, he is able to listen."

Molly Worthen is the author, most recently, of "Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism," an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a contributing opinion writer.
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Molly Worthen BEFORE the semester began earlier this fall, I went to check out the classroom where I would be teaching an introductory American history course. Like most classrooms at my university, this one featured lots of helpful gadgets: a computer console linked to an audiovisual system, a projector screen that deploys at the touch of a button and USB ports galore.

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Malcolm London: "High School Training Ground"

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This article talks about students not feeling as much pressure in school and explains that the rooms are comfortable and a judgement free zone where kids are able to speak out and

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Students do more learning outside in the real world in the environment. How is it effective? Is it healthier for the students? How does it effect their mental health?

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How can we incorporate all types of learning?
What way of learning is most effective?

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Do students really need teachers to be successful?

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With having Kids start to design their own schools, are we giving them to much freedom. How do we know that students are actually getting work down when no teachers around to witness them learning.

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Finland schools talk much about how they live in a stress-free environment, my idea is we can re-search about how we can change the environment of schools in the United States. In America we have no breaks and we tend to have too many things to have to deal with at once, what and how can we change this in America? What ideas should we add to include a stress-free environment.

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Do we need them?

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Does starting school later help test scores rise and help students become more aware of school?

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Some people prefer a more independent and flexible school system, while others prefer a more rigid and structured system. Both have pros and cons, but how much should we bend to one side or the other?

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How can the social groups and barriers in schools negatively effect learning?

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How can the social groups and barriers in schools negatively effect learning?

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("social lines are barbed wire")

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are students equipped or disciplined enough to teach themselves?

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are students equipped or disciplined enough to teach themselves?

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Banning the use of laptops, or encouraging.

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Does starting school later help improve academic learning for students?

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social attitude towards teachers and their students performance

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social attitude towards teachers and their students performance

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Are we to blame for the violence in our schools? (the line about an armed kid who just needs a hug)

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Influence of pressure being put on stundents

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Influence of pressure being put on stundents

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Do students take classes solely because they like the topic or because they feel like it looks good on college applications?

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how can american schools allow kids to still have an enjoyable childhood

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Does High School favor certain students over the other?

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Does High School favor certain students over the other?

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should schools return to old fashioned form of education? 

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should schools return to old fashioned form of education? 

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How should we let children learn? At what age should they begin being taught subjects like math, english, etc?

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should kids be able to be their own teachers? How does this better their learning?

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Are we keeping students inside a building for too long?

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Should schools be teaching us information to be tested on or skills to use after school?

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Are they effective? Or are they not?

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how can learning be more useful and impactful for students rather than memorization

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Is emotional engagement of learning more effective than traditional methods?

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What countries are doing differently around the world and why?

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Should high-schoolers have a bigger and have more freedom in their choice of classes?

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How much should school be involved in the social and emotional lives of students?

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How does homelife affect learning?