I have been enrolled in a teacher education program at my local university this last few months, and for one of the projects, I was asked to research and present on another country. I decided to check out the education system of a country which has caught my interest recently - Australia.

I was really impressed with what I learned - that Australia has a constructivist pedagogy - students learn things in a hands-on way. And they take this all the way up through high school - so that vocational skills are really focused on a lot in their upper grades.

Australian teachers also seem to have a profound respect for children's intellect. They believe that children are reasonable people, and that they can achieve great things right now. It's very refreshing, and certainly parallels my view on children which I had thought was very unusual, until I saw that all of Australia seems to see things the same way.

More specifically, the pedagogy folks have in Australia is what they call "Outcomes Based Education." Australians would contrast that with what we have in the USA - they call our system "Standards based education." Tests are not as important to Australian educators as they are to usa educators. The main goal in the Australian education system is to prepare the kids for real life - whereas the main goal in the usa system is to make certain kids have a basic competency in academic areas like science, and math and social studies, and so forth.

Here are some films which I found particularly inspirational - of Australian schools and Australian kids. You can see the spark of intelligence in the kids which you usually don't see in American kids. I attribute that to the better pedagogy (teaching style) of Australian educators.