14.01.2014

Had my first lesson in Humanities today. Very interesting actually! In small groups we were discussing how you could create a theme week based on an important topic. Topics such as racism and self esteem were mentioned. While discussing self esteem we ended up comparing the Danish system to the British system. In many ways the British system just seems so outdated to me. It is how I imagine the Danish system would have been like 50 years ago. From pretty much day one at the age of 4 the kids are split into three different groups in the class: clever kids, normal kids and "not so clever" kids. That is unheard of in Denmark. The kids are assessed from a really early age too.
This made us discuss why the Danish system is so much better - at least when talking about self esteem. It is so hard to get rid of that "not so clever kid" label so its no wonder that a lot of people lack self esteem.

I imagined that it would be quite hard to discuss with the fellow students as they have obviously got a lot more experience in Humanities than I have got. All the students were on their final year too so really they should be quite a lot ahead of me you would think.
Turns out that once again I could quite easily discuss on the same level as the rest of the class so maybe the Danish school system doesn't deserved all that criticisms after all!

To me it seems like that the English students have a great knowledge but within a very narrow spectrum. They might very well be much better off in a math test than me but when it comes to general knowledge I think the Danish system has given me a much better background. A great example is that our teacher today (who was great btw) asked us what we knew about Nelson Mandela before showing us a short documentary about his life. Turns out that only one person could answer that - and not even with the right answer.
It is still very early days but at least until now it doesn't seem like I need to be worried about keeping up with the local students on quite a few topics.