Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t).

To the contrary, taking the Sunday school story (it's not really the Bible story) of creation seriously as an explanation for the world's origin or the origin of species requires willfully massive amounts of scientific evidence.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/age.html

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-playing-field/201005...

If someone who takes the Sunday school story of creation seriously has sole influence on a school curriculum, that will be a lousy school curriculum about most areas of science. That said, I support the liberty of parents to direct the education of their own children while their children are minors, believing with John Stuart Mill that "A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body. An education established and controlled by the State should only exist, if it exist at all, as one among many competing experiments, carried on for the purpose of example and stimulus, to keep others up to a certain standard of excellence." On Liberty (1859), pp. 190-91. But within the framework of pluralism in provision of primary education, I strongly support government-funded schools using the best available evidence in designing curricula in science, mathematics, history, and really any subject, and that takes creationism out of the science curriculum.

(Basis of knowledge: I grew up in a religious denomination that promoted belief in creationism, and had a childhood friend, an all-but-Ph.D. electrical engineer, who grew up in a denomination that demanded belief in creationism. He took me to "creation science" conferences beginning at high school age, and I have read much from all sides on theories of the origin of humankind, the earth, and the universe. Creationism simply has no leg to stand on scientifically. I don't require my homeschooled children to believe in creationism, but rather read aloud to them books like Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne and The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins, so that they are more familiar with scientific evidence than most of their neighbors who attend the local public schools.)

I was comparing the level of primary and upper secondary school teaching with university teaching, not different universities. Seems like university rankings have little to do with that.

For what it's worth, I maintain that the quality of teaching drops by a whole lot in universities, if only because there are way fever universities around in Finland. My personal experience (some of which you share) is that in some common subjects (like maths) the group size in lectures more than quadrupled in the first year—way too many students for the lecturer to spare any individual attention, apart from answering some questions that came up in the class. Even the word changes from teacher to lecturer, reflecting quite well on the changed focus.

This duty of individual attention falls on TAs in smaller student groups, who usually have no pedagogical studies behind them and often resist taking any share of responsibility in how their students perform. The lack of attention to students is known and acknowledged, even marketed as 'academic freedom' and 'having to take responsibility for one's own studies'. While it's imporant to learn how to do that, the quality of teaching should not suffer as markedly as it does. Some struggling students banded together to overcome the steeply increased difficulty curve and others dropped out from the courses, often after the very first few weeks.

Speaking of catering to individuals, it would not take much to improve the life of an advanced upper secondary school student by a whole lot. Let the advanced students advance to freshman level concepts. Instead we faced the "it's not in the teaching plan" paralysis. It feels stupid to do three years of upper secondary level physics without touching vectors or calculus. Or bring out the matrices and linear algebra in maths (instead of showing a small glimpse in one elective course during the third year). Allow and even recommend some more advanced books on the topic. It must be better than playing Tetris on your Ti-83 calculator all day. Many currently bored students would regain some of the lost morale and momentum this way.

That is to say, that the average standards around the world are not that great either. Higher education could be better, but it is far from worst of what I've seen.

What about differences between languages in their ability to convey ideas.