Why do Finland's schools get the best results? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#31

Post by cromulent » Thu, Apr 08, 2010, 3:39 PM UTC

jerguismi wrote: post #5

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.

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.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#32

Post by yardie » Thu, Apr 08, 2010, 3:42 PM UTC

charlesju wrote: post #25

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…

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.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#33

Post by sesqu » Thu, Apr 08, 2010, 3:42 PM UTC

tome wrote: post #10

jerguismi wrote: post #5

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.

I don't get it. Why would entrepreneurship not be valued because of high education?

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).

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#34

Post by Glide » Thu, Apr 08, 2010, 3:46 PM UTC

shin_lao wrote: post #6

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?

At the top it says they were behind South Korea in a test score. And South Korea is around 50 million... But South Korea's system is basically studying 24/7. Two very different systems with great results.

Then again South Korea's culture values education highly as well.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#35

Post by _h4xr » Thu, Apr 08, 2010, 3:46 PM UTC

vdm wrote: post #27

hugh3 wrote: post #4

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.

That's a slippery slope, next stop is saying that large poor families are just lazy and want to have sex instead of work and be smart. And that has nothing to do with being PC. cf. Guns, Germs and Steel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

That is definitely not an answer. Grandparent suggested that genetics plays a role in why people in one country are different from people in another. And you respond by saying that if he says that, he might say something else, which you find even more unacceptable!

It should be possible to admit that if 1) you're dealing with a country of genetic relatives, and 2) genetic factors are responsible for 60-80% of the variance in IQ, then Finland's superior education can be explained in part by the fact that it's full of Finns.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#36

Post by LargeWu » Thu, Apr 08, 2010, 3:47 PM UTC

anamax wrote: post #16

LargeWu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how it wouldn't. It's not like if you have 10 times as many students then you'll build a school 10 times as big. You'll instead build 10 times as many schools, all operating more or less independently at roughly the same scale as each other. There might be an additional layer of administration or two, which may cause some inefficiencies in certain areas that may be offset by economies of scale in others.

> I don't see how it wouldn't. Let's see if we can think of some reasons. > There might be an additional layer of administration or two, which may cause some inefficiencies in certain areas that may be offset by economies of scale in others. How do we know that the two "may" s cancel each other out. Moving organization-wide decision-making one level further away from the base often has an effect. Let's put Finland's…

You're right that I don't know that the two would cancel each other out. But even if there is some non-zero effect at work, when you spread it out over all taxpayers, any additional costs/savings are probably trivial.

The main factor at work here seems to be that education is highly valued in Finnish culture, as opposed to the US, where for a large segment of the population, it is not a priority. You can scale processes, but you can't scale culture.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#37

Post by lotharbot » Thu, Apr 08, 2010, 3:47 PM UTC

yardie wrote: post #20

lotharbot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

^^^^^ 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…

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/d...

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#38

Post by r7000 » Thu, Apr 08, 2010, 3:48 PM UTC

roboneal wrote: post #3

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.

Canada also scores highly in PISA rankings. However it is officially bilingual, has high immigration, many ESL and FSL students.

Within Canada: Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec score higher than the national average and they are the provinces with the highest in-migration.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#39

Post by Kliment » Thu, Apr 08, 2010, 3:48 PM UTC

acg wrote: post #22

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

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.

Re: Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

#40

Post by wdewind » Thu, Apr 08, 2010, 3:49 PM UTC

roboneal wrote: post #3

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.

1) and 4) seem to be the most important to me (not only reading specifically, but spending time in general). #4 is simply not possible in a lot of American households where school's primary function is daycare.

I certainly learned a lot about physics and algebra in high school, but I learned how to learn from my parents and my family.

I grew up in NYC going to public schools with a parent and a few relatives working as public teachers, so I'm pretty intimately familiar with the struggle of fixing public education on limited budget. Most of them generally share the opinion that schools can only do so much. They are absolutely necessary, and should continue getting better, but someone who is offered every resource in the world and doesn't have a home life that can support it will throw those resources away 99% of the time (from my experience that number is actually roughly accurate).

So I would look at education as something that can and should be improved, but it's also really important to look at education as the symptom of bigger cultural issues.

Americans tend to be pretty anti-intellectual and reject unfamiliar ideas. You can't really change that with education (alone), because people will always reject what school teaches them if their family doesn't support it, and in many cases the citizens will never vote in the budgets anyway. Main point: our mediocre education system is the symptom, find the cause.