This you already know: Parents want to send their kids to good schools. So that’s why they flock to neighborhoods — sometimes paying hundreds of thousands more to live there — that purport to have them. But what does “good school” really mean? Is it really all about the test scores?
Increasingly, educational experts say: not really. These days, many of them hail the importance of other, less tangible goals such as fostering social and emotional intelligence. Others tout the importance of executive function skills: the ability to plan, focus, remember instructions, and multitask. In the Finnish school system, purportedly the best in the world, academics are delayed, homework and testing are minimized, and free play time is valued.