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Why do Finland's schools get the best results?

news.bbc.co.uk

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

#81

Post by roboneal »

roboneal wrote: post #60
r7000 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Per Statistics Canada, Canada's immigrant population is highly educated, 90% emigrated legally, and a large percentage are Asian in origin. Is it safe to say that doesn't reflect recent (last 25 years) immigration patterns to the U.S. or to Western Europe?

Are the stats I quoted so out of context as to be worthy of downvoting?

I think it's an honest perspective and would have an impact on the educational outcomes of immigrant populations.

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

#83

Post by vegai »

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?

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

#84

Post by anamax »

LargeWu wrote: post #36
anamax wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 proces…

> 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.

I seriously doubt that. Large organizations are qualitatively different from small ones.

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

#85

Post by guano___ »

vegai wrote: post #83

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 teachin…

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.

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

#87

Post by dan1123 »

known wrote: post #86

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.

My 3 year old teaches me how to operate my cell phone... it's a little scary.

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

#88

Post by known »

dan1123 wrote: post #87
known wrote: post #86

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.

My 3 year old teaches me how to operate my cell phone... it's a little scary.

Ditto here.

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

#89

Post by Kliment »

acg wrote: post #55
Kliment wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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).

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

#90

Post by someone_else »

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.

Oh I can assure you we have at least as many idiots here as anywhere else, but I'd be willing to believe that Asians are a bit smarter on average than white people.
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