Money = a good education?

[kerign]

Yahoo!7 news reports that Australia is 
"...at bottom of education list"
 with only Belgium spending less than Australia on public education across primary, secondary and tertiary sectors. The wording of the article suggests that the people concerned (the researchers and the writers) believe that more funding = better education. I'm sure that anyone

Comments

[cliffius]

You know, I often here about Japan's 'ineffectiveness' of teaching English, but I honestly don't know what's wrong with it as 1, I don't work in a junior or a high school setting and 2, I've never seen English be taught in any other country.

What exactly is Japan doing wrong and what are other countries doing differently?

[kerign]

I haven't actually been comparing Japan's methods of teaching English in public schools with those that other countries use, because I have never experienced those either. Several accounts I've read (e.g. here) suggest that the situation in Korea differs only in the amounts that the Korean government spends on English education, and on the attitudes that the students have to learning English.

I can only compare EFL teaching here to my experience of learning Italian for two years at elementary level in Australia. Firstly, the fact that English is taught primarily by non-native speaker teachers (who often aren't particularly fluent) gets to me. Every language teacher I encountered in Australia was foreign or had attained a native-like standard in the language they were teaching. Secondly, too many teachers I know teach straight from their textbooks. They just aren't trained to make use of available resources.

That said, a large number of problems stem from Japan's educational system in the first place...