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Except you read all the comments in that article and the people from Finland all say they do have homework. While not as linkbaity perhaps it should be retitled, "Finland has an excellent education system."
- A finn
What's left out of the analysis is the cost, especially the cost per student. That would include the fully subsidized master's degrees for teachers. In the US the spending per student can be pretty high in some areas, but performance seems low.
Does anyone have a fairly detailed comparison of education practices, spending, and outcomes from various countries?
Except you read all the comments in that article and the people from Finland all say they do have homework. While not as linkbaity perhaps it should be retitled, "Finland has an excellent education system."
In Finland, teachers are selected from the top 10% of college graduates.[1] In the US, nearly half of all new teachers come from the bottom third of college graduates.[2] Homework or no homework, Finnish students are learning directly from -- and personally interacting with -- some of the brightest minds in their country, every day. -- [1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands... [2] http://www…
There is homework in Finland. I have no clue where that idea came from. The Finnish education system doesn't really match up well enough with the USA that "high school" can be compared. A Finnish student typically starts elementary school at 7, and spends 6 years in lower elementary. Then they move to upper elementary and spend 3 years there. This is where the "responsibility to learn" ends, and every school past that is voluntary. Past those 9 years, students generally choose between vocational school or a lukio, which is sort of like high school that provides general teaching. I have no clue what that 93% number means, but it is certainly not "proportion of age class that completes lukio", as less than that sign up for one.
Finnish PISA scores, and all other lower educational metrics are anomalously high when compared to similar peers worldwide. A lot of things are pointed out as reasons for this, but most of those features are also valid, for example, for other Nordic countries whose students don't perform nearly as well.
Personally, I think the difference is mostly the language. Finnish language is notoriously hard to learn, but Finnish written language is very regular and phonetic. This means that elementary school students spend a lot less time learning to read and write than students in almost any other countries. This saves much time at an early age, which can then be used to learn other useful subjects, giving Finnish students a head start on their foreign peers. A lot of us, including me, actually taught ourselves to read before school with little more than repeatedly annoying our parents by asking "What does this letter sound like?".
Then again, I might just be another idiot assigning my pet cause for a measured effect of uncertain origin.
I wonder how students fare in other countries with phonetic written languages? As I understand, Turkey is one, and their scores are not very high. Could someone describe the Turkish education system a little?
Except you read all the comments in that article and the people from Finland all say they do have homework. While not as linkbaity perhaps it should be retitled, "Finland has an excellent education system."
School sucks in Finland too, it just might suck a bit less than in some countries. - A finn
Except you read all the comments in that article and the people from Finland all say they do have homework. While not as linkbaity perhaps it should be retitled, "Finland has an excellent education system."
I also doubt that the average US 5th grader has 50 minutes of homework every day.
Interesting about the Master's Degree. In the U.S. teacher education seems unrelated to performance, including Master's Degrees. Which isn't how it should be. It makes me wonder if one of our great flaws here is in how we teach teachers.
The flaw is this: We need a certain number of teachers. Teachers are required to get a masters degree or they stop getting raises. So teaching colleges make it easy for anybody to get teaching masters degrees.
According to the article, 7% of Finnish children don't graduate high school, compared to 25% of US children. 22% of US children live in poverty. 4% of Finnish children live in poverty.[1] Strange. Furthermore, it's my personal policy that anyone who creates an infographic with a bar graph that starts at 520 and goes up to 570 should be ignored. Either they are trying to intentionally skew interpretation of the data b…
This things don't come cheap and in the US is hard to sell the idea of "high taxes = better quality of life".