Educational Systems Alternatives (Korean, Finnish) and what can be learnt from them

http://ideas.ted.com/2014/09/04/what-the-best-education-systems-are-doing-right/

Summary:
The Korean model: Grit and hard, hard, hard work
The Finnish model: Extracurricular choice, Intrinsic Motivation

My views:

Very nice article about two contrasting education systems (Korean, Finnish) that have been acknowledged to have produced excellent outcomes. Importantly, the write up offers useful insights to those of us playing roles as parents and/or teachers (or other practitioners in the education systems). With a bit more push, one can extrapolate these findings towards creating the right cultural make up at a workplace.

While these two education systems showcase two diametrically opposite approaches to creating the right “products”, it is useful to think of building the best of these into environments where one has flexibility or sufficient authority/autonomy. Three immediate opportunities come to mind:

1. Home environment with young children: A pro-choice environment that juxtaposes freedom of choice with plenty of opportunities to build the grit/resilience muscle.
2. A school setup with sufficient flexibility for teachers to improvise the “system”, the time-table and/or syllabi: Perhaps the best setup to systematically and holistically build the best of these attributes at a young, impressionable age.
3. A work environment – a startup or even a large unit with plenty of possibilities to promote self-selection and choice for employees. An ideal balance would be coming up with a system of guided self selection – for employees to make choices on the kind of assignments that they take on, while rewarding behavior that results in gritting it out to the finish line for challenging tasks.

A personal reflection: This is yet another example of a point of view that I am beginning to develop more and more strongly that there are a lot of common concepts, principles and philosophies that guide three different segments that a lot of us find ourselves operating in – Parenting, Teaching and Leadership in a workplace.