Éducation

L'éducation est un sujet qui prend de plus en plus de place dans ma tête. Je vais essayer de coucher quelques idées sur le sujet. Voici d'abord un petit vidéo d'Andreas Schleicher sur TED.

 

Voici quelques extraits qui me font réfléchir :

One way you can spend money is by paying teachers well, and you can see Korea investing a lot in attracting the best people into the teaching profession. And Korea also invests into long school days, which drives up costs further. Last but not least, Koreans want their teachers not only to teach but also to develop. They invest in professional development and collaboration and many other things. All that costs money. How can Korea afford all of this? The answer is, students in Korea learn in large classes. [...] You go to the next country on the list, Luxembourg, and you can see the red dot is exactly where it is for Korea, so Luxembourg spends the same per student as Korea does. But, you know, parents and teachers and policymakers in Luxembourg all like small classes. You know, it's very pleasant to walk into a small class. So they have invested all their money into there, and the blue bar, class size, is driving costs up. But even Luxembourg can spend its money only once, and the price for this is that teachers are not paid particularly well. Students don't have long hours of learning. And basically, teachers have little time to do anything else than teaching. So you can see two countries spent their money very differently, and actually how they spent their money matters a lot more than how much they invest in education.

Il semble que que la taille des classes ne soit pas un facteur aussi important qu'on pourrait le croire. C'est plus nuancé que ça. Pourrions-nous imaginer un modèle plus éclaté? Pas de classe? Des classes de 100000 étudiants? Toutes ces réponses?

Everybody agrees that education is important. Everybody says that. But the test of truth is, how do you weigh that priority against other priorities? How do countries pay their teachers relative to other highly skilled workers? Would you want your child to become a teacher rather than a lawyer? How do the media talk about schools and teachers? Those are the critical questions, and what we have learned from PISA is that, in high-performing education systems, the leaders have convinced their citizens to make choices that value education, their future, more than consumption today. And you know what's interesting? You won't believe it, but there are countries in which the most attractive place to be is not the shopping center but the school. Those things really exist.

J'espère que mes enfants vont grandir dans un monde où l'on valorise plus les enseignants que les avocats.

But placing a high value on education is just part of the picture. The other part is the belief that all children are capable of success. You have some countries where students are segregated early in their ages. You know, students are divided up, reflecting the belief that only some children can achieve world-class standards. But usually that is linked to very strong social disparities. If you go to Japan in Asia, or Finland in Europe, parents and teachers in those countries expect every student to succeed, and you can see that actually mirrored in student behavior. When we asked students what counts for success in mathematics, students in North America would typically tell us, you know, it's all about talent. If I'm not born as a genius in math, I'd better study something else. Nine out of 10 Japanese students say that it depends on my own investment, on my own effort, and that tells you a lot about the system that is around them.

Il suffit de lire Outliers de Malcolm Gladwell pour saisir l'impact d'une ségrégation. Je suis si heureux d'être né en février...

[...] what makes Finland so impressive is that only five percent of the performance variation amongst students lies between schools. Every school succeeds. This is where success is systemic. And how do they do that? They invest resources where they can make the most difference. They attract the strongest principals into the toughest schools, and the most talented teachers into the most challenging classroom.

Un pays où les plus forts choisissent les plus grands défis. Le Canada se classe bien en éducation comparativement aux autres pays. On a une bonne base, on est parmi les plus fort... il faut s'attaquer au défi de l'éducation!