4 ms·

Finland's schools are great because they are full of Finns, in the same way that schools with many Finns in the US do very well. Hong Kong and Singapore's scho

by temphn 15y ago

Finland's schools are great because they are full of Finns, in the same way that schools with many Finns in the US do very well. Hong Kong and Singapore's schools are great because they are full of Chinese, in the same way that schools with many Chinese in the US do very well, even in poor neighborhoods: http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/16/local/me-lincoln16 To begin with, the eight students agreed on a few generalities: Latino and Asian students came mostly from poor and working-class families. According to a study of census data, 84% of the Asian and Latino families in the neighborhoods around Lincoln High have median annual household incomes below $50,000. And yet the Science Bowl team is 90% Asian, as is the Academic Decathlon team. It is thus not likely to be the schools. It is more likely to be culture or (more controversially) genetics. But most articles don't even consider such explanations, preferring to keep looking under the streetlight for that quarter.

kalleboo 15y ago
This article does consider that though: They insist that Finland cannot serve as a model because it lacks racial diversity; but they fall silent when one points out that Finland has the same demographics as Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, and Norway, yet gets superior results. I am troubled by this “lacks diversity” argument, because it implies that African-American and Hispanic children cannot benefit by having highly experienced teachers, small classes, and a curriculum rich in the arts and activities.
- temphn 15y ago
  "Superior" is only one bit of information, in that it only says "x is greater than y"...but not by how much, and with no measure of statistical significance. Finland's technological and industrial output clusters with Sweden, Denmark, and Norway to a far greater extent than it does with countries outside Northern Europe. In the same way, when you look at the TIMSS, intra-European variance exists and is nontrivial, but European and East Asian nations do tend to cluster together quite a bit: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf See Table 3 on page 19. Top 5 countries in grade 8 in math: Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan. The very top European countries are towards the lower end of the East Asian distribution in math, and are only close in 4th grade (before puberty onset).
  - henrikschroder 15y ago
    Finland does so much better than Sweden that Swedish newspapers semi-regularly feature the same article as the parent of this discussion, i.e. "our schools are crap, Finland is right next to us, they're awesome, how do they do it, why can't we?". Of course, nothing ever happens.
- bilbo0s 15y ago
  Wow. I looked it up. You're right, Finland does much better internationally than most of the other Scandinavian nations. I would not have expected that result. One of the reasons I like HN is because sometimes, reading through comments, I see things that just blow my perceptions out of the water. I enjoy going back and reformulating my arguments.
  - eldina 15y ago
    There is a huge difference between Denmark and Finland both in the quality of the education a coming elementary school teacher goes through and perhaps more important in the level of applicants that are accepted for the education. In 2010 for many of the schools in Denmark where you can become a teacher there were no requirements on your grades from "gymnasiet" (equivalent of high school), you only had to have passed gymnasiet. In Denmark, coming teachers choose 2 or 3 subjects that will be there main subjects. For these subjects there are some requirements, unfortunately these are ridiculously low. In gymnasiet all subjects have a level A, B or C which indicates how deeply the subject is covered. Some subjects eg. Danish and history are mandatory and exists only in the highest level A form while others eg. languages, biology, physics, math, exist in usually at least two of the levels and depending on your choice of line you can choose different levels with the requirement that when finishing you must have had 2 non-mandatory A level subjects. To choose eg. nature & technique, a subject supposed to encompass physics, chemistry, biology and geography, as one of your main subjects when becoming an elementary school teacher, it is sufficient to have the medium grade in just a single of a list of subjects that are related to natural sciences and this only had to be on the middle B level. Another problem is that until 2007 the "seminars", the schools for educating teachers, were mainly relics from the late sixties, this having all the obvious implications given the hippie state of DK in those years. Also in DK through all levels of the educational system from elementary school through university, the main focus is on the students who are at the bottom of the skill spectrum.
  - aptwebapps 15y ago
    Not to steal HN's thunder but that was a direct quote from the article.
- frooxie 15y ago
  According to Wikipedia, the percentage of ethnic Finns in Finland is 97.5%, while the percentage of ethnic Swedes in Sweden is "probably much lower than 85%". Now, some of these are Finns living in Sweden and vice versa, which complicates the picture, but it seems like Finland has very different demographics from Sweden.
  - Gravityloss 15y ago
    I read a paper by a Swedish researcher about this. Even if you compare schools with a similar proportion of immigrant descendants, Finnish schools tend to do well compared to Sweden. I think the biggest difference overall was a lower amount of underachievers in Finland. I don't know if the Finnish school system is that super great. Maybe you get some knowledge of this and that, and gain a work ethic, but one could teach the kids so much more about life than that would help them a lot later on. Also I've heard that talented / energetic people have more opportunities to go extra far elsewhere (I've heard positive stuff from California), while here it's more egalitarian, at least at normal schools. Our kids start school the year they turn seven and the school days are shorter than elsewhere.
olliesaunders 15y ago
Don’t downvote this guy. I don’t agree with him but it is an interesting point that should be addressed. It could be true. Science should advise.
- vukk 15y ago
  Few more points that might interest you http://hardwick.fi/blog/?p=2097 http://hardwick.fi/blog/?p=2097
wisty 15y ago
Also, Finns speak a Finnish, a Finno-Ugric language, which is said to be really easy to learn. It's phonetic, and technical words tend to be built out of simple Finnish words, not a weird mash of Latin, Greek, and other words. This makes it easy to do sciences, as you don't have to teach as much wacky vocabulary. (Note, I don't speak Finish, this is just what I've read). I've also heard that Lithuanians (who also speak a Finno-Urgric language) do relatively well in school, while Swedish Finns (who are richer than Finnish Finns) who go to Swedish-language schools do worse. Of course, in Education, there's never just one factor.
- arsatiki 15y ago
  Lithuanian is not a Finno-Ugric language, but a Baltic one. Perhaps you are thinking of Estonian? Personally I think using the metric system is more important for learning science than the instruction language. When you get down to it, the "simple Finnish words" are just as alien to everyday life as the Latino-Greek words. A word like "jännite" does not confer any more insight than "voltage". In advanced topics Finnish also uses loan words for things like electrons, momentum, grammatical cases and so on.
  - Maakuth 15y ago
    I beg to differ. Jännite has the same word base as "jännitys", which translates to tension or suspension. And that is a natural concept that is related to voltage and thus helps internalize the concept.
- shangaslammi 15y ago
  I don't know anyone who's said that Finnish is an easy language to learn. In fact, I think it's generally considered one of the hardest languages in the world (along with Hungarian, which has similar grammar). You are right, though, that the phonetics are easy and highly consistent. Also, in practice, most technical terms are borrowed from English, instead of inventing native, Finnish words for them.
- dalke 15y ago
  Most say it's hard to learn. Putting that aside, I know Finnish contains many borrowed words. Take church, which in Finnish is "kirkko", Swedish is kyrka, and in Scottish English, kirk. This form almost certainly comes from the Norse "kirkja". For a more technical term, consider "democracy", which is "demokratia". The Greek roots are obvious.
eplanit 15y ago
> It is more likely to be culture or (more controversially) genetics. Perhaps not genetics, but (also controversially) perhaps 'diversity' is over-rated. Many of the least diverse countries enjoy such positive results. The U.S. slips further and further as it gets more diverse.
- angus77 15y ago
  Canada's got at least the diversity the US has, and yet regularly ranks quite high in worldwide educational standards. Edit: added the following link http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-education-rankings-maths-science-reading http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-ed...
  - DilipJ 15y ago
    Canada is far less diverse than the US. Canada is about 90% white, the US is about 68% white. And most minorities in Canada are screened for education/intelligence before arrival, whereas in the US most minorities are a byproduct of the transatlantic slave trade/illegal immigration
    - wmoxam 15y ago
      I guess it depends on what you consider 'diverse'. You seem to only consider skin colour. Besides, Canada is more like 80% 'white' vs 72% in the US. An interesting tidbit you may not know is that less then 60% of Canadians speak English as their mother tongue, vs 82% in the US.
      - DilipJ 15y ago
        Right, but a majority of those non-English speakers in Canada are in Quebec speaking French. I can't imagine there's that much of an IQ difference between French- and Anglo-Canadians...
        wmoxam 15y ago
yardie 15y ago
Afro-caribbean and first generation American chiming in here. I can assure you it is a cultural and institutional racism here. Being colleagues with other 1st generation Ghanaians, Nigerians, Haitians, and Jamaicans it is a recurring issue amongst the black community. Where 1st gen children who keep their culture of origin do well academically (if their culture demands it) but subsequent generations absorb more of the african-american culture which shuns academia. An example, my neighborhood highschool had enough left in the annual budget to fix the leaking roof in the science wing. The parents petitioned the schoolboard to have the money used to buy new football bleachers. This is the type of culture the students and teachers are up against. The US has a long, and controversial, history with genetics and eugenics research. Most researchers have been wise to avoid it because, realistically, it is a career ender. Unless you enjoy your research being lumped in with propaganda spouted by racist and facist you'd be wise to not go there.
- geogra4 15y ago
  >Where 1st gen children who keep their culture of origin do well academically (if their culture demands it) but subsequent generations absorb more of the african-american culture which shuns academia. You can't really change a culture though. Is there any way you think it can be fixed?
  - tokenadult 15y ago
    You can't really change a culture though. Changing cultures happens all the time. I am a fifth-generation descendant of my family living in this state, but I think and act considerably differently from my great-great-great grandfather and his son who first settled in this state before the Civil War. I differ pretty substantially culturally from my late dad, really, as does America as a whole from his generation to mine. One thing that promotes cultural change is interchange and communication among different cultures. Individual human beings are acculturated by their upbringing in one culture or another, but also pick and choose what cultural practices they desire to follow among the cultural practices they know about. Leadership of a school system (or of a country) involves urging people to follow cultural practices that will be to their long-term advantage, and setting up incentives so that individual human beings are nudged into following those practices. (Basis of knowledge: many-generations European-American who has lived overseas in east Asia twice in his life, married to a spouse who grew up in east Asia of east Asian ancestry since earliest historical times. We have a pick-and-choose blended culture in our family, and note that we have genuinely multicultural relatives, friends, neighbors, clients and work colleagues who pick and choose what cultural influences they follow.)
Eeko 15y ago
> It is thus not likely to be the schools. It is more likely to be culture or (more controversially) genetics. But finns are less smart than say, Asia, most of Europe and North Korea :( (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations) There is likely a multitude of reasons. And yes, stuff like ethnic diversity do cause problems. But that shit is not unsolveable. In Finland, there are schools & classrooms with very diverse ethnical backgrounds and yes, they rank worse than your average, homogenous classrooms. But the system still manages to achieve significant improvement with the individuals, even though the end-results are sub-average. And we are talking about students that often do not even know any local languages (or English, Swedish, German or French, which are in some rare cases available as teaching languages) and start their primary education years later than their Finnish peers. The shit is, you don't need perfection. You need improvement. Sure, it's theoretically possible that genetics or culture gives you edge on some stuff, but it is about as likely that they don't. In any way, that stance is incredibly counterproductive against any kind of thinkable improvement. It is also pretty bloody likely, that Finns and Chinese have figured out something right and there are lessons to be learned.

by temphn 15y ago

kalleboo 15y ago

This article does consider that though: They insist that Finland cannot serve as a model because it lacks racial diversity; but they fall silent when one points out that Finland has the same demographics as Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, and Norway, yet gets superior results. I am troubled by this “lacks diversity” argument, because it implies that African-American and Hispanic children cannot benefit by having highly experienced teachers, small classes, and a curriculum rich in the arts and activities.

temphn 15y ago
"Superior" is only one bit of information, in that it only says "x is greater than y"...but not by how much, and with no measure of statistical significance. Finland's technological and industrial output clusters with Sweden, Denmark, and Norway to a far greater extent than it does with countries outside Northern Europe. In the same way, when you look at the TIMSS, intra-European variance exists and is nontrivial, but European and East Asian nations do tend to cluster together quite a bit: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf See Table 3 on page 19. Top 5 countries in grade 8 in math: Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan. The very top European countries are towards the lower end of the East Asian distribution in math, and are only close in 4th grade (before puberty onset).
- henrikschroder 15y ago
  Finland does so much better than Sweden that Swedish newspapers semi-regularly feature the same article as the parent of this discussion, i.e. "our schools are crap, Finland is right next to us, they're awesome, how do they do it, why can't we?". Of course, nothing ever happens.
bilbo0s 15y ago
Wow. I looked it up. You're right, Finland does much better internationally than most of the other Scandinavian nations. I would not have expected that result. One of the reasons I like HN is because sometimes, reading through comments, I see things that just blow my perceptions out of the water. I enjoy going back and reformulating my arguments.
- eldina 15y ago
  There is a huge difference between Denmark and Finland both in the quality of the education a coming elementary school teacher goes through and perhaps more important in the level of applicants that are accepted for the education. In 2010 for many of the schools in Denmark where you can become a teacher there were no requirements on your grades from "gymnasiet" (equivalent of high school), you only had to have passed gymnasiet. In Denmark, coming teachers choose 2 or 3 subjects that will be there main subjects. For these subjects there are some requirements, unfortunately these are ridiculously low. In gymnasiet all subjects have a level A, B or C which indicates how deeply the subject is covered. Some subjects eg. Danish and history are mandatory and exists only in the highest level A form while others eg. languages, biology, physics, math, exist in usually at least two of the levels and depending on your choice of line you can choose different levels with the requirement that when finishing you must have had 2 non-mandatory A level subjects. To choose eg. nature & technique, a subject supposed to encompass physics, chemistry, biology and geography, as one of your main subjects when becoming an elementary school teacher, it is sufficient to have the medium grade in just a single of a list of subjects that are related to natural sciences and this only had to be on the middle B level. Another problem is that until 2007 the "seminars", the schools for educating teachers, were mainly relics from the late sixties, this having all the obvious implications given the hippie state of DK in those years. Also in DK through all levels of the educational system from elementary school through university, the main focus is on the students who are at the bottom of the skill spectrum.
- aptwebapps 15y ago
  Not to steal HN's thunder but that was a direct quote from the article.
frooxie 15y ago
According to Wikipedia, the percentage of ethnic Finns in Finland is 97.5%, while the percentage of ethnic Swedes in Sweden is "probably much lower than 85%". Now, some of these are Finns living in Sweden and vice versa, which complicates the picture, but it seems like Finland has very different demographics from Sweden.
- Gravityloss 15y ago
  I read a paper by a Swedish researcher about this. Even if you compare schools with a similar proportion of immigrant descendants, Finnish schools tend to do well compared to Sweden. I think the biggest difference overall was a lower amount of underachievers in Finland. I don't know if the Finnish school system is that super great. Maybe you get some knowledge of this and that, and gain a work ethic, but one could teach the kids so much more about life than that would help them a lot later on. Also I've heard that talented / energetic people have more opportunities to go extra far elsewhere (I've heard positive stuff from California), while here it's more egalitarian, at least at normal schools. Our kids start school the year they turn seven and the school days are shorter than elsewhere.

olliesaunders 15y ago

Don’t downvote this guy. I don’t agree with him but it is an interesting point that should be addressed. It could be true. Science should advise.

vukk 15y ago
Few more points that might interest you http://hardwick.fi/blog/?p=2097 http://hardwick.fi/blog/?p=2097

wisty 15y ago

Also, Finns speak a Finnish, a Finno-Ugric language, which is said to be really easy to learn. It's phonetic, and technical words tend to be built out of simple Finnish words, not a weird mash of Latin, Greek, and other words. This makes it easy to do sciences, as you don't have to teach as much wacky vocabulary. (Note, I don't speak Finish, this is just what I've read). I've also heard that Lithuanians (who also speak a Finno-Urgric language) do relatively well in school, while Swedish Finns (who are richer than Finnish Finns) who go to Swedish-language schools do worse. Of course, in Education, there's never just one factor.

arsatiki 15y ago
Lithuanian is not a Finno-Ugric language, but a Baltic one. Perhaps you are thinking of Estonian? Personally I think using the metric system is more important for learning science than the instruction language. When you get down to it, the "simple Finnish words" are just as alien to everyday life as the Latino-Greek words. A word like "jännite" does not confer any more insight than "voltage". In advanced topics Finnish also uses loan words for things like electrons, momentum, grammatical cases and so on.
- Maakuth 15y ago
  I beg to differ. Jännite has the same word base as "jännitys", which translates to tension or suspension. And that is a natural concept that is related to voltage and thus helps internalize the concept.
shangaslammi 15y ago
I don't know anyone who's said that Finnish is an easy language to learn. In fact, I think it's generally considered one of the hardest languages in the world (along with Hungarian, which has similar grammar). You are right, though, that the phonetics are easy and highly consistent. Also, in practice, most technical terms are borrowed from English, instead of inventing native, Finnish words for them.
dalke 15y ago
Most say it's hard to learn. Putting that aside, I know Finnish contains many borrowed words. Take church, which in Finnish is "kirkko", Swedish is kyrka, and in Scottish English, kirk. This form almost certainly comes from the Norse "kirkja". For a more technical term, consider "democracy", which is "demokratia". The Greek roots are obvious.

eplanit 15y ago

> It is more likely to be culture or (more controversially) genetics. Perhaps not genetics, but (also controversially) perhaps 'diversity' is over-rated. Many of the least diverse countries enjoy such positive results. The U.S. slips further and further as it gets more diverse.

angus77 15y ago
Canada's got at least the diversity the US has, and yet regularly ranks quite high in worldwide educational standards. Edit: added the following link http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-education-rankings-maths-science-reading http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-ed...
- DilipJ 15y ago
  Canada is far less diverse than the US. Canada is about 90% white, the US is about 68% white. And most minorities in Canada are screened for education/intelligence before arrival, whereas in the US most minorities are a byproduct of the transatlantic slave trade/illegal immigration
  - wmoxam 15y ago
    I guess it depends on what you consider 'diverse'. You seem to only consider skin colour. Besides, Canada is more like 80% 'white' vs 72% in the US. An interesting tidbit you may not know is that less then 60% of Canadians speak English as their mother tongue, vs 82% in the US.
    - DilipJ 15y ago
      Right, but a majority of those non-English speakers in Canada are in Quebec speaking French. I can't imagine there's that much of an IQ difference between French- and Anglo-Canadians...
      - wmoxam 15y ago

yardie 15y ago

Afro-caribbean and first generation American chiming in here. I can assure you it is a cultural and institutional racism here. Being colleagues with other 1st generation Ghanaians, Nigerians, Haitians, and Jamaicans it is a recurring issue amongst the black community. Where 1st gen children who keep their culture of origin do well academically (if their culture demands it) but subsequent generations absorb more of the african-american culture which shuns academia. An example, my neighborhood highschool had enough left in the annual budget to fix the leaking roof in the science wing. The parents petitioned the schoolboard to have the money used to buy new football bleachers. This is the type of culture the students and teachers are up against. The US has a long, and controversial, history with genetics and eugenics research. Most researchers have been wise to avoid it because, realistically, it is a career ender. Unless you enjoy your research being lumped in with propaganda spouted by racist and facist you'd be wise to not go there.

geogra4 15y ago
>Where 1st gen children who keep their culture of origin do well academically (if their culture demands it) but subsequent generations absorb more of the african-american culture which shuns academia. You can't really change a culture though. Is there any way you think it can be fixed?
- tokenadult 15y ago
  You can't really change a culture though. Changing cultures happens all the time. I am a fifth-generation descendant of my family living in this state, but I think and act considerably differently from my great-great-great grandfather and his son who first settled in this state before the Civil War. I differ pretty substantially culturally from my late dad, really, as does America as a whole from his generation to mine. One thing that promotes cultural change is interchange and communication among different cultures. Individual human beings are acculturated by their upbringing in one culture or another, but also pick and choose what cultural practices they desire to follow among the cultural practices they know about. Leadership of a school system (or of a country) involves urging people to follow cultural practices that will be to their long-term advantage, and setting up incentives so that individual human beings are nudged into following those practices. (Basis of knowledge: many-generations European-American who has lived overseas in east Asia twice in his life, married to a spouse who grew up in east Asia of east Asian ancestry since earliest historical times. We have a pick-and-choose blended culture in our family, and note that we have genuinely multicultural relatives, friends, neighbors, clients and work colleagues who pick and choose what cultural influences they follow.)

Eeko 15y ago

> It is thus not likely to be the schools. It is more likely to be culture or (more controversially) genetics. But finns are less smart than say, Asia, most of Europe and North Korea :( (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations) There is likely a multitude of reasons. And yes, stuff like ethnic diversity do cause problems. But that shit is not unsolveable. In Finland, there are schools & classrooms with very diverse ethnical backgrounds and yes, they rank worse than your average, homogenous classrooms. But the system still manages to achieve significant improvement with the individuals, even though the end-results are sub-average. And we are talking about students that often do not even know any local languages (or English, Swedish, German or French, which are in some rare cases available as teaching languages) and start their primary education years later than their Finnish peers. The shit is, you don't need perfection. You need improvement. Sure, it's theoretically possible that genetics or culture gives you edge on some stuff, but it is about as likely that they don't. In any way, that stance is incredibly counterproductive against any kind of thinkable improvement. It is also pretty bloody likely, that Finns and Chinese have figured out something right and there are lessons to be learned.