8 ms·

Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

42 points by evancaine 17y ago

roc 17y ago
Culture. The system is derived from their cultural values and works because of the cultural values. It's been shown again and again in educational studies: some systems are certainly better than others, but culture is the primary factor.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  But there are noticeable differences in how schools are operated in Finland ("The Finnish philosophy with education is that everyone has something to contribute and those who struggle in certain subjects should not be left behind.") that should be looked at in trans-national comparisons. The detailed reading I am doing currently in The Mathematics Pre-Service Teachers Need to Know http://hub.mspnet.org/index.cfm/13083 http://hub.mspnet.org/index.cfm/13083 draws together research from various countries in various parts of the world that don't have a common "culture," but do have common teacher training curricula in teacher training programs (which are not even at university level in some of those countries) and common characteristics in math textbooks across languages and common characteristics in elementary school classrooms. Those characteristics are very important to look at if they result in success across varied world cultures. After edit: It's been shown again and again in educational studies What particular studies do you have in mind? Citations, please?
  - anamax 17y ago
    > But there are noticeable differences in how schools are operated in Finland ("The Finnish philosophy with education is that everyone has something to contribute and those who struggle in certain subjects should not be left behind.") that should be looked at in trans-national comparisons. Is that philosphy actually unique? (Since Finland is relatively small, I'm willing to believe that that philosophy is uniformly applied, but real scientists would check.) > common characteristics in math textbooks across languages and common characteristics in elementary school classrooms. Those characteristics are very important to look at if they result in success across varied world cultures. Yup. Also, one might want to look at what works in different cultures. (It may be that some things work in a lot of cultures, but not all. It may be that some things only work in certain cultures. And so on.)
  - roc 17y ago
    Absolutely, methods matter. But there appears to be a very real limit at which changing the method doesn't notably change the results. I don't have a quick cite list. But it's been consistent across literally every single study I've seen that controls for parental involvement/cultural value of education. It's more predictive than parents' education level, neighborhood, curriculum, socioeconomic status, etc. The only off-hand references I have to get you started are what the Michigan Department of Education has been beating my sister-in-law over the head with since she's enrolled my niece in public school. http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:n3iDh53x4ywJ:www.michigan.gov/documents/Final_Parent_Involvement_Fact_Sheet_14732_7.pdf+educational+study+parents+more+importan+than+schools&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESi1Zf8LcSmR43Wnxipj42z7ixpTyG8-rvBRrI-TrZKhKvWYI0OSbgB7PRg0VPNR38poxOKygnqH6Qsty4QS__X-Y6oWU11Mcmqe95elMRX4Hm6volQBcfD892V6Z5OZ-nJh6J6L&sig=AHIEtbQ9gadEneSnbwTjpWyQ1a0MqwZGgg http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:n3iDh53x4ywJ:w... http://pdonline.ascd.org/pd_online/whatworks/marzano2003_ch13.html http://pdonline.ascd.org/pd_online/whatworks/marzano2003_ch1...
    - tokenadult 17y ago
      Those are some very weak correlations reported in that second link, and of course observational studies of the kind reported there have nothing to say about causation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus... It is regrettable that United States school officials are not more curious about what is going on successfully in other countries.
roboneal 17y ago
Summary: 1. Finnish parents read with their children. 2. Low immigration - so "Finnish as a second language" is not a problem there. 3. Education and educators are valued highly by Finnish culture. 4. And contrary to all our K-4 efforts, kids don't start school to 7.
- lotharbot 17y ago
  You missed what I think is the key point: 5. instead of making a big deal out of kids being "behind", they recognize that everyone learns at their own rate. Kids don't get labeled as "dumb" or "incapable", they just keep being taught.
  - yardie 17y ago
    ^^^^^ As a parent you'd be amazed at how many people think their kid is special because they can do one thing that other babies at that age don't. Things like, "He walked before other babies","She started talking at a few months","She eats normal food and can hold a spoon". My wife fell into this trap when kids his age were walking or talking and he was just scooting along. I told her I'd worry about it if he's still crawling at 18. As long as the pediatrician tells me he's healthy that's good enough for me.
    - lotharbot 17y ago
      As a new parent myself, I cannot agree strongly enough. My 3-month-old can say "hungry" (way ahead of the curve) but can't yet roll over (behind the curve). That's simply the nature of people -- we don't all learn every topic at the same rate. Trying to push kids into learning at the same rate simply means you'll be ineffective at teaching some fraction of them. Recognizing that some of them just aren't ready to learn such-and-such topic yet, and pacing their education according to what they are ready to learn, is a far better approach. Related: I've really been enjoying the book "Your Child's Growing Mind"[1], which makes this very argument in its first chapter. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Your-Childs-Growing-Mind-Development/dp/0767916158/ http://www.amazon.com/Your-Childs-Growing-Mind-Development/d...
hugh3 17y ago
Genetics? The article doesn't even pause to consider the possibility that Finnish people, a small and relatively isolated population, might just happen to be, on average, genetically just a bit smarter than world population at large. While thinking about these things is horrendously unfashionable, it should be considered before we start assuming that we can replicate their success by copying their school system.
- Adrock 17y ago
  Equally unfashionable is the idea that there are advantages to homogeneous societies and classrooms.
  - drunkpotato 17y ago
    Your statement is glib and unproductive. Obviously there are advantages to homogeneous societies. There are advantages to heterogeneous societies, which the U.S. is a pretty good example of. The point is not which is "better", but what lessons can we take to improve the things in our society which are deficient? Education in the U.S. is currently deficient, and we should look at why and how and try to find out what works. Unfortunately, it's tricky to run experiments in education, because of political considerations and largely because the result has real effects on people's lives, but it's what needs to be done to improve.
    - yardie 17y ago
      A lot of big universities have research schools where they test schooling techniques on students, run assessments and see what works. The problem is most of these schools are near big universities. So you've got an overwhelming amount of students who are nurtured in an education rich environment (mama is a professor, papa is an adjunct, etc.), they are well ahead of the rest of the country as far as educational experiences. Then when they run the tests and think they have a success, it usually results in failure once they try to roll it out to schools in a completely different environment. What they should be doing is working on the baseline students, inner city schools, poor areas. But this requires professors to get out their comfort zones and they don't want to do that. A lot of these research schools are very competitive. They'll basically ace any test you put in front of them just because they can.
jerguismi 17y ago
Higher education in Finland is free, therefore education level is high. If I remember right, almost 60% of people have some kind of higher education, university or polytechnic. Education is valued here. And it is also said that entrepreneurship is not that valued in Finland because of high education... Most of the grads want to work for big companies & goverment positions.
- tome 17y ago
  I don't get it. Why would entrepreneurship not be valued because of high education?
  - sesqu 17y ago
    More education is less time in the workforce prior to parenthood, which probably has a lot to do with founding startups (less work experience, frustrations, capital, confidence).
- gaius 17y ago
  Yes but that is a meaningless statistic. Here in the UK the present gov has the target of 50% of school-leavers to go to university. What this means is diploma mills turning out media studies graduates who immediately go to work in fast food and retail with 20 grand of debt.
- cromulent 17y ago
  The education level is very high. However, the relatively low level of entrepreneurship is more likely due to the high cost of employing people. As the social benefits (such as parental leave, etc) are very high, it is difficult to be a small businessman with few employees. A couple of babies and an illness and your entire workforce is gone for months. You need to be a big company to balance it out.
shin_lao 17y ago
There are 5 M inhabitants in Finland. How much do they spend in their education system? Does it scale to a country of, say, 50 M inhabitants?
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  Why wouldn't it? The per-taxpayer cost ratio would remain the same.
  - yellowbkpk 17y ago
    As the bureaucracy got bigger, wouldn't it cost more? More levels of management, more paperwork, more time spent on oversight. I don't think the cost/size relationship in any government is linear.
    - RyanMcGreal 17y ago
      Good point. Still, a system an order of magnitude bigger might be only ten percent more expensive per student.
    - hugh3 17y ago
      But education isn't handled at the Federal level in the US (and to the extent that it is, it damn well shouldn't be).
      - yellowbkpk 17y ago
        It's handled at the state level. According to [0], Finland has roughly 600,000 students in what we might call K-12 and according to [1] almost all of our states each have at least as many students individually and most have more than double. (Not sure what my point was, but it was interesting to find the data :)) [0] http://www.stat.fi/til/opiskt/2007/opiskt_2007_2008-01-25_tie_001_en.html http://www.stat.fi/til/opiskt/2007/opiskt_2007_2008-01-25_ti... (Basic comprehensive school education, compulsory education school) [1] http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-26.pdf http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-26.pdf (adding elementary and high school columns together for K-12)
stretchwithme 17y ago
perhaps delaying the mind-warping effects of school for a few extra years really helps.
- btilly 17y ago
  That leaped out at me as well. Piaget demonstrated that brain development tends to come in spurts that are closely correlated with growth spurts. One of the key ones generally hits in the range 5-7 and gives a sudden improvement in ability to learn concrete mental operations such as the ones involved in reading, writing and arithmetic. By contrast the decades long US trend is towards pushing abstract learning younger. There are some statistics indicating that this trend has been strongly correlated with increased gender disparities in school motivation and performance in favor of girls. Which makes sense since boys tend to hit that initial spurt later, and so are more likely to have bad experiences with the start of school. That could easily lead to long-lasting bad attitudes towards school that will guarantee poor performance later on. Also the Finnish attitude of less school makes perfect sense for me. Because the key is to maintain interest and motivation. The actual hours of instruction we need are not that great, but increasing hours at some point brings diminishing returns on instruction at the cost of frustration and pain for the students. This brings me to homework for obvious reasons. Research on the benefits of homework show an interesting mixed effect. Homework is practice, but practice can as easily fix wrong ideas as right ones. So homework drives responsibility for teaching to the ability of the home to ensure correct practice. The result is a strengthening of socioeconomic factors on school performance but little net difference in learning. Of course the strongest correlation found is that quantity of homework correlates with conflict at home. With said conflict arising due to the attempts of parents to get kids to do homework they don't want to do. So summarizing, delaying instruction until kids are ready to learn, giving them sufficient high quality instruction that they do learn, and then limiting the quantity enough to prevent frustration is likely to lead to sustained learning. And sustained learning has good results. Makes perfect sense and makes you wonder why the USA takes the opposite approach on each of those things.
  - stretchwithme 17y ago
    because we have adopted the "no child not dragged behind" system where all we need to do is test and measure everything relentlessly. It seems to me that mainstream schooling is like mainstream corporate employment. top-down control, mind-numbing meetings all day and the killing of individual initiative. we need more Montessori schools and more startups!
acg 17y ago
People also say that Finish is fiendishly difficult to learn. Perhaps there's some ground in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
- Kliment 17y ago
  Finnish is not insanely difficult to learn. It is however very difficult to teach using traditional methods. It is nott an Indo-European language, shares next to no vocabulary base with other language groups in the region, and is incompatible with the standard (historically Latin-derived) models of grammar. This makes a formal description of the language much more complex than the language itself. It is possible for non-natives to acquire Finnish (I did it, and natives have problems telling I am non-native) and it doesn't take much longer than it does to acquire any other European language. People who take Finnish lessons, however, tend to be unable to make the leap from passive understanding to active usage, and I suspect this is because language course present the grammar formally, making it much more complex than it really is in order to explain it.
  - acg 17y ago
    You refute that it is difficult to learn in the first sentence then go on to explain why it's difficult to learn. Finish may help with second language acquisition. My other point was the focus on linguistics. This could cause the Finish people to see things in a more lateral way as they have more linguistic tools to describe problems expressly because of the focus on languages. This leads to greater communication and understanding.
    - Kliment 17y ago
      I state none of this. Finnish is difficult to teach, not difficult to learn. My point was that Finnish is easy to acquire, or at least not significantly more difficult than other languages, but courses that teach Finnish do a worse job at it than those for most languages because the abstractions they use to explain grammar do not fit the language. Finnish does not have more linguistic tools than other languages (it has, arguably, less) and Finns are not more language-focused than other cultures, though there is a strong focus on foreign language teaching in Finnish schools (as there is in almost every country with a small population and a country-specific language).
greggraham 17y ago
Notice that technology is not a critical part of their success. I didn't see a lot of shots of kids in front of computers, but rather, teachers and students interacting with each other. I work at a private school that has a similar philosophy, which contrasts with the other private schools in the area with which we compete. We're not interested in 1-1 laptop programs because we don't want devices getting in the way of personal relationships. Of the upper tier private schools in the area, we have the highest scores and the lowest tuition, and very good acceptance rates in top colleges. We invest in teachers who are well educated (all at least masters, several PhDs) and are happy (very high retention rate). I don't mean to boast, but as technology director at this school, I'm always being asked about laptops, SmartBoards, and other cool and popular education technology things that we have decided not to use. I think it's important to carefully consider how technology can best be used, and to know when to stay with low-tech methods that work well.
charlesju 17y ago
I never thought these tests were fair comparisons. The United States has a lot more people than Finland and as a corollary the United States has to help a lot of people get through the educational process that are not as well off as the average citizen of Finland. In other words, we have a lot more ghettos than Finland and that hurts our aggregate scores. A much more accurate test would be to find those of us in the United States that have been afforded the same living amenities as those living in Finland. I would bet that we are not far off at all.
- yardie 17y ago
  So what your saying is the more socially stratified US is falling behind the socialist (compared to the US) Finland. There shouldn't be a lot more ghettos compared to Finland but there is. And the priorities are all screwed up. Obviously, Finland should be spending more money on defense, corporate welfare, and privatized healthcare so that their education budget should shoulder the cuts and they can brought down to the US level.
maxklein 17y ago
They may get the best results, but there are a lot of contributions to society that have come from less educated people. A lot of great athletes, musicians, inventors, generals, etc, have come from societies where the average result is not so high. Finland may have a high education level - but I could also make the claim that Finland is boring. If everyone gets educated the same, then everyone turns out the same and there is little diversity of thought. So I really don't think the world should aim towards using the finish system.
- enjo 17y ago
  I'm sure neither of us are going to be receiving a lot of upvotes, but I don't think your completely wrong. I've spent a fair amount of time in Finland working with various teams at Nokia. While Nokia obviously does a lot of things right, their decision making always baffled me. Watching Series 60 evolve was just baffling. They're emphasis on consensus around decision making led to all sorts of 'designed-by-committee' products built right into the core of S60. For example, S60 had an app-store long before the iPhone. It was a usability nightmare. It had different 'catalogs' each mostly selling the same stuff. Navigation was nearly impossible. You where dumped into a home screen with no real affordances. The whole thing was just a nightmare. It was that type of decision making and general lack of forward thinking that delayed the launch of the touchscreen S60 phones for years. When they did hit, they where far away from the iPhone in a lot of ways. It was really no wonder that iPhone leap-frogged them so effortlessly in terms of usability (and has taken a big chunk of their market share as well).
zppx 17y ago
Better results in school measures what exactly?
ippisl 17y ago
One of the bigger factors that differentiate between average teachers and great teachers is the ability of great teachers to give a lot of personalized feedback to every student. Also if other fields of learning like music, sports , computer programming and others, the importance of rapid personalized feedback to learning is very big. "in virtually every lesson is the provision of an additional teacher who helps those who struggle in a particular subject" There's a reasonable chance that the most of the advantage of the finish system comes from this method of teaching.
hugh3 17y ago
One thing that shouldn't be forgotten in all the handwringing about the US educational system is that the US still has by far the best universities in the world. Whatever ranking system you look at, US universities dominate the top of the leagues table (along with a few foreign universities like Oxford, NUS and the Ecole Polytechnique). While there are many reasons for this, it seems like crummy performance in a few primary-school level tests certainly isn't crippling the entire education system. For what it's worth, the Times Higher Education Supplement ranks the University of Helsinki as Finland's best university, in 108th place equal with UC Davis. Still a pretty impressive showing for such a small country; among the small (<10m) countries only Israel, Ireland and Singapore have entries in the top one hundred.
- heresy 17y ago
  Just a nit, New Zealand is also in that list of small countries. The University of Auckland (my alma mater) ranks 61.
known 17y ago
"You are a product of your environment." --Clement Stone
vegai 17y ago
A Finn here. I noticed a couple of mistakes there. > "Primary and secondary schooling is combined, so the pupils don't have to change schools at age 13. They avoid a potentially disruptive transition from one school to another." This is exactly contrary to the truth. Nearly everyone does change schools at age 13 and it is disruptive. "Teaching is a prestigious career in Finland. Teachers are highly valued and teaching standards are high." Yeeaaah, I don't know. Most teachers (even comprehensive school) are MSc or BSc the very least. Their pay doesn't reflect that. > "Children in Finland only start main school at age seven. " What?! You guys put your kids into schools earlier than that? But why?
- guano___ 17y ago
  Highly valued is not the same as being adequately rewarded. Being a teacher in finland is valued in the way that it is respected and prestigious, something that shines through in the high grades needed to become one. In alot of countries, this is not at all the case.
known 17y ago
Let child teach the parent. I pretend that I don't know how to kick a soccer ball. And my 3 yr old child teaches me how to kick his soccer ball and how to play with his remaining toys.
- dan1123 17y ago
  My 3 year old teaches me how to operate my cell phone... it's a little scary.
  - known 17y ago
    Ditto here.

42 points by evancaine 17y ago

roc 17y ago

Culture. The system is derived from their cultural values and works because of the cultural values. It's been shown again and again in educational studies: some systems are certainly better than others, but culture is the primary factor.

tokenadult 17y ago
But there are noticeable differences in how schools are operated in Finland ("The Finnish philosophy with education is that everyone has something to contribute and those who struggle in certain subjects should not be left behind.") that should be looked at in trans-national comparisons. The detailed reading I am doing currently in The Mathematics Pre-Service Teachers Need to Know http://hub.mspnet.org/index.cfm/13083 http://hub.mspnet.org/index.cfm/13083 draws together research from various countries in various parts of the world that don't have a common "culture," but do have common teacher training curricula in teacher training programs (which are not even at university level in some of those countries) and common characteristics in math textbooks across languages and common characteristics in elementary school classrooms. Those characteristics are very important to look at if they result in success across varied world cultures. After edit: It's been shown again and again in educational studies What particular studies do you have in mind? Citations, please?
- anamax 17y ago
  > But there are noticeable differences in how schools are operated in Finland ("The Finnish philosophy with education is that everyone has something to contribute and those who struggle in certain subjects should not be left behind.") that should be looked at in trans-national comparisons. Is that philosphy actually unique? (Since Finland is relatively small, I'm willing to believe that that philosophy is uniformly applied, but real scientists would check.) > common characteristics in math textbooks across languages and common characteristics in elementary school classrooms. Those characteristics are very important to look at if they result in success across varied world cultures. Yup. Also, one might want to look at what works in different cultures. (It may be that some things work in a lot of cultures, but not all. It may be that some things only work in certain cultures. And so on.)
- roc 17y ago
  Absolutely, methods matter. But there appears to be a very real limit at which changing the method doesn't notably change the results. I don't have a quick cite list. But it's been consistent across literally every single study I've seen that controls for parental involvement/cultural value of education. It's more predictive than parents' education level, neighborhood, curriculum, socioeconomic status, etc. The only off-hand references I have to get you started are what the Michigan Department of Education has been beating my sister-in-law over the head with since she's enrolled my niece in public school. http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:n3iDh53x4ywJ:www.michigan.gov/documents/Final_Parent_Involvement_Fact_Sheet_14732_7.pdf+educational+study+parents+more+importan+than+schools&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESi1Zf8LcSmR43Wnxipj42z7ixpTyG8-rvBRrI-TrZKhKvWYI0OSbgB7PRg0VPNR38poxOKygnqH6Qsty4QS__X-Y6oWU11Mcmqe95elMRX4Hm6volQBcfD892V6Z5OZ-nJh6J6L&sig=AHIEtbQ9gadEneSnbwTjpWyQ1a0MqwZGgg http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:n3iDh53x4ywJ:w... http://pdonline.ascd.org/pd_online/whatworks/marzano2003_ch13.html http://pdonline.ascd.org/pd_online/whatworks/marzano2003_ch1...
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    Those are some very weak correlations reported in that second link, and of course observational studies of the kind reported there have nothing to say about causation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus... It is regrettable that United States school officials are not more curious about what is going on successfully in other countries.

roboneal 17y ago

Summary: 1. Finnish parents read with their children. 2. Low immigration - so "Finnish as a second language" is not a problem there. 3. Education and educators are valued highly by Finnish culture. 4. And contrary to all our K-4 efforts, kids don't start school to 7.

lotharbot 17y ago
You missed what I think is the key point: 5. instead of making a big deal out of kids being "behind", they recognize that everyone learns at their own rate. Kids don't get labeled as "dumb" or "incapable", they just keep being taught.
- yardie 17y ago
  ^^^^^ As a parent you'd be amazed at how many people think their kid is special because they can do one thing that other babies at that age don't. Things like, "He walked before other babies","She started talking at a few months","She eats normal food and can hold a spoon". My wife fell into this trap when kids his age were walking or talking and he was just scooting along. I told her I'd worry about it if he's still crawling at 18. As long as the pediatrician tells me he's healthy that's good enough for me.
  - lotharbot 17y ago
    As a new parent myself, I cannot agree strongly enough. My 3-month-old can say "hungry" (way ahead of the curve) but can't yet roll over (behind the curve). That's simply the nature of people -- we don't all learn every topic at the same rate. Trying to push kids into learning at the same rate simply means you'll be ineffective at teaching some fraction of them. Recognizing that some of them just aren't ready to learn such-and-such topic yet, and pacing their education according to what they are ready to learn, is a far better approach. Related: I've really been enjoying the book "Your Child's Growing Mind"[1], which makes this very argument in its first chapter. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Your-Childs-Growing-Mind-Development/dp/0767916158/ http://www.amazon.com/Your-Childs-Growing-Mind-Development/d...

hugh3 17y ago

Genetics? The article doesn't even pause to consider the possibility that Finnish people, a small and relatively isolated population, might just happen to be, on average, genetically just a bit smarter than world population at large. While thinking about these things is horrendously unfashionable, it should be considered before we start assuming that we can replicate their success by copying their school system.

Adrock 17y ago
Equally unfashionable is the idea that there are advantages to homogeneous societies and classrooms.
- drunkpotato 17y ago
  Your statement is glib and unproductive. Obviously there are advantages to homogeneous societies. There are advantages to heterogeneous societies, which the U.S. is a pretty good example of. The point is not which is "better", but what lessons can we take to improve the things in our society which are deficient? Education in the U.S. is currently deficient, and we should look at why and how and try to find out what works. Unfortunately, it's tricky to run experiments in education, because of political considerations and largely because the result has real effects on people's lives, but it's what needs to be done to improve.
  - yardie 17y ago
    A lot of big universities have research schools where they test schooling techniques on students, run assessments and see what works. The problem is most of these schools are near big universities. So you've got an overwhelming amount of students who are nurtured in an education rich environment (mama is a professor, papa is an adjunct, etc.), they are well ahead of the rest of the country as far as educational experiences. Then when they run the tests and think they have a success, it usually results in failure once they try to roll it out to schools in a completely different environment. What they should be doing is working on the baseline students, inner city schools, poor areas. But this requires professors to get out their comfort zones and they don't want to do that. A lot of these research schools are very competitive. They'll basically ace any test you put in front of them just because they can.

jerguismi 17y ago

Higher education in Finland is free, therefore education level is high. If I remember right, almost 60% of people have some kind of higher education, university or polytechnic. Education is valued here. And it is also said that entrepreneurship is not that valued in Finland because of high education... Most of the grads want to work for big companies & goverment positions.

tome 17y ago
I don't get it. Why would entrepreneurship not be valued because of high education?
- sesqu 17y ago
  More education is less time in the workforce prior to parenthood, which probably has a lot to do with founding startups (less work experience, frustrations, capital, confidence).
gaius 17y ago
Yes but that is a meaningless statistic. Here in the UK the present gov has the target of 50% of school-leavers to go to university. What this means is diploma mills turning out media studies graduates who immediately go to work in fast food and retail with 20 grand of debt.
cromulent 17y ago
The education level is very high. However, the relatively low level of entrepreneurship is more likely due to the high cost of employing people. As the social benefits (such as parental leave, etc) are very high, it is difficult to be a small businessman with few employees. A couple of babies and an illness and your entire workforce is gone for months. You need to be a big company to balance it out.

shin_lao 17y ago

There are 5 M inhabitants in Finland. How much do they spend in their education system? Does it scale to a country of, say, 50 M inhabitants?

RyanMcGreal 17y ago
Why wouldn't it? The per-taxpayer cost ratio would remain the same.
- yellowbkpk 17y ago
  As the bureaucracy got bigger, wouldn't it cost more? More levels of management, more paperwork, more time spent on oversight. I don't think the cost/size relationship in any government is linear.
  - RyanMcGreal 17y ago
    Good point. Still, a system an order of magnitude bigger might be only ten percent more expensive per student.
  - hugh3 17y ago
    But education isn't handled at the Federal level in the US (and to the extent that it is, it damn well shouldn't be).
    - yellowbkpk 17y ago
      It's handled at the state level. According to [0], Finland has roughly 600,000 students in what we might call K-12 and according to [1] almost all of our states each have at least as many students individually and most have more than double. (Not sure what my point was, but it was interesting to find the data :)) [0] http://www.stat.fi/til/opiskt/2007/opiskt_2007_2008-01-25_tie_001_en.html http://www.stat.fi/til/opiskt/2007/opiskt_2007_2008-01-25_ti... (Basic comprehensive school education, compulsory education school) [1] http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-26.pdf http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-26.pdf (adding elementary and high school columns together for K-12)

stretchwithme 17y ago

perhaps delaying the mind-warping effects of school for a few extra years really helps.

btilly 17y ago
That leaped out at me as well. Piaget demonstrated that brain development tends to come in spurts that are closely correlated with growth spurts. One of the key ones generally hits in the range 5-7 and gives a sudden improvement in ability to learn concrete mental operations such as the ones involved in reading, writing and arithmetic. By contrast the decades long US trend is towards pushing abstract learning younger. There are some statistics indicating that this trend has been strongly correlated with increased gender disparities in school motivation and performance in favor of girls. Which makes sense since boys tend to hit that initial spurt later, and so are more likely to have bad experiences with the start of school. That could easily lead to long-lasting bad attitudes towards school that will guarantee poor performance later on. Also the Finnish attitude of less school makes perfect sense for me. Because the key is to maintain interest and motivation. The actual hours of instruction we need are not that great, but increasing hours at some point brings diminishing returns on instruction at the cost of frustration and pain for the students. This brings me to homework for obvious reasons. Research on the benefits of homework show an interesting mixed effect. Homework is practice, but practice can as easily fix wrong ideas as right ones. So homework drives responsibility for teaching to the ability of the home to ensure correct practice. The result is a strengthening of socioeconomic factors on school performance but little net difference in learning. Of course the strongest correlation found is that quantity of homework correlates with conflict at home. With said conflict arising due to the attempts of parents to get kids to do homework they don't want to do. So summarizing, delaying instruction until kids are ready to learn, giving them sufficient high quality instruction that they do learn, and then limiting the quantity enough to prevent frustration is likely to lead to sustained learning. And sustained learning has good results. Makes perfect sense and makes you wonder why the USA takes the opposite approach on each of those things.
- stretchwithme 17y ago
  because we have adopted the "no child not dragged behind" system where all we need to do is test and measure everything relentlessly. It seems to me that mainstream schooling is like mainstream corporate employment. top-down control, mind-numbing meetings all day and the killing of individual initiative. we need more Montessori schools and more startups!

acg 17y ago

People also say that Finish is fiendishly difficult to learn. Perhaps there's some ground in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Kliment 17y ago
Finnish is not insanely difficult to learn. It is however very difficult to teach using traditional methods. It is nott an Indo-European language, shares next to no vocabulary base with other language groups in the region, and is incompatible with the standard (historically Latin-derived) models of grammar. This makes a formal description of the language much more complex than the language itself. It is possible for non-natives to acquire Finnish (I did it, and natives have problems telling I am non-native) and it doesn't take much longer than it does to acquire any other European language. People who take Finnish lessons, however, tend to be unable to make the leap from passive understanding to active usage, and I suspect this is because language course present the grammar formally, making it much more complex than it really is in order to explain it.
- acg 17y ago
  You refute that it is difficult to learn in the first sentence then go on to explain why it's difficult to learn. Finish may help with second language acquisition. My other point was the focus on linguistics. This could cause the Finish people to see things in a more lateral way as they have more linguistic tools to describe problems expressly because of the focus on languages. This leads to greater communication and understanding.
  - Kliment 17y ago
    I state none of this. Finnish is difficult to teach, not difficult to learn. My point was that Finnish is easy to acquire, or at least not significantly more difficult than other languages, but courses that teach Finnish do a worse job at it than those for most languages because the abstractions they use to explain grammar do not fit the language. Finnish does not have more linguistic tools than other languages (it has, arguably, less) and Finns are not more language-focused than other cultures, though there is a strong focus on foreign language teaching in Finnish schools (as there is in almost every country with a small population and a country-specific language).

greggraham 17y ago

Notice that technology is not a critical part of their success. I didn't see a lot of shots of kids in front of computers, but rather, teachers and students interacting with each other. I work at a private school that has a similar philosophy, which contrasts with the other private schools in the area with which we compete. We're not interested in 1-1 laptop programs because we don't want devices getting in the way of personal relationships. Of the upper tier private schools in the area, we have the highest scores and the lowest tuition, and very good acceptance rates in top colleges. We invest in teachers who are well educated (all at least masters, several PhDs) and are happy (very high retention rate). I don't mean to boast, but as technology director at this school, I'm always being asked about laptops, SmartBoards, and other cool and popular education technology things that we have decided not to use. I think it's important to carefully consider how technology can best be used, and to know when to stay with low-tech methods that work well.

charlesju 17y ago

I never thought these tests were fair comparisons. The United States has a lot more people than Finland and as a corollary the United States has to help a lot of people get through the educational process that are not as well off as the average citizen of Finland. In other words, we have a lot more ghettos than Finland and that hurts our aggregate scores. A much more accurate test would be to find those of us in the United States that have been afforded the same living amenities as those living in Finland. I would bet that we are not far off at all.

yardie 17y ago
So what your saying is the more socially stratified US is falling behind the socialist (compared to the US) Finland. There shouldn't be a lot more ghettos compared to Finland but there is. And the priorities are all screwed up. Obviously, Finland should be spending more money on defense, corporate welfare, and privatized healthcare so that their education budget should shoulder the cuts and they can brought down to the US level.

maxklein 17y ago

They may get the best results, but there are a lot of contributions to society that have come from less educated people. A lot of great athletes, musicians, inventors, generals, etc, have come from societies where the average result is not so high. Finland may have a high education level - but I could also make the claim that Finland is boring. If everyone gets educated the same, then everyone turns out the same and there is little diversity of thought. So I really don't think the world should aim towards using the finish system.

enjo 17y ago
I'm sure neither of us are going to be receiving a lot of upvotes, but I don't think your completely wrong. I've spent a fair amount of time in Finland working with various teams at Nokia. While Nokia obviously does a lot of things right, their decision making always baffled me. Watching Series 60 evolve was just baffling. They're emphasis on consensus around decision making led to all sorts of 'designed-by-committee' products built right into the core of S60. For example, S60 had an app-store long before the iPhone. It was a usability nightmare. It had different 'catalogs' each mostly selling the same stuff. Navigation was nearly impossible. You where dumped into a home screen with no real affordances. The whole thing was just a nightmare. It was that type of decision making and general lack of forward thinking that delayed the launch of the touchscreen S60 phones for years. When they did hit, they where far away from the iPhone in a lot of ways. It was really no wonder that iPhone leap-frogged them so effortlessly in terms of usability (and has taken a big chunk of their market share as well).

zppx 17y ago

Better results in school measures what exactly?

ippisl 17y ago

One of the bigger factors that differentiate between average teachers and great teachers is the ability of great teachers to give a lot of personalized feedback to every student. Also if other fields of learning like music, sports , computer programming and others, the importance of rapid personalized feedback to learning is very big. "in virtually every lesson is the provision of an additional teacher who helps those who struggle in a particular subject" There's a reasonable chance that the most of the advantage of the finish system comes from this method of teaching.

hugh3 17y ago

One thing that shouldn't be forgotten in all the handwringing about the US educational system is that the US still has by far the best universities in the world. Whatever ranking system you look at, US universities dominate the top of the leagues table (along with a few foreign universities like Oxford, NUS and the Ecole Polytechnique). While there are many reasons for this, it seems like crummy performance in a few primary-school level tests certainly isn't crippling the entire education system. For what it's worth, the Times Higher Education Supplement ranks the University of Helsinki as Finland's best university, in 108th place equal with UC Davis. Still a pretty impressive showing for such a small country; among the small (<10m) countries only Israel, Ireland and Singapore have entries in the top one hundred.

heresy 17y ago
Just a nit, New Zealand is also in that list of small countries. The University of Auckland (my alma mater) ranks 61.

known 17y ago

"You are a product of your environment." --Clement Stone

vegai 17y ago

A Finn here. I noticed a couple of mistakes there. > "Primary and secondary schooling is combined, so the pupils don't have to change schools at age 13. They avoid a potentially disruptive transition from one school to another." This is exactly contrary to the truth. Nearly everyone does change schools at age 13 and it is disruptive. "Teaching is a prestigious career in Finland. Teachers are highly valued and teaching standards are high." Yeeaaah, I don't know. Most teachers (even comprehensive school) are MSc or BSc the very least. Their pay doesn't reflect that. > "Children in Finland only start main school at age seven. " What?! You guys put your kids into schools earlier than that? But why?

guano___ 17y ago
Highly valued is not the same as being adequately rewarded. Being a teacher in finland is valued in the way that it is respected and prestigious, something that shines through in the high grades needed to become one. In alot of countries, this is not at all the case.

known 17y ago

Let child teach the parent. I pretend that I don't know how to kick a soccer ball. And my 3 yr old child teaches me how to kick his soccer ball and how to play with his remaining toys.

dan1123 17y ago
My 3 year old teaches me how to operate my cell phone... it's a little scary.
- known 17y ago
  Ditto here.