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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

Of course, nothing ever happens.

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)

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.

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.

If you're referring to the oppositional culture hypothesis, there's a whole body of research that show it isn't nearly as common as widely perceived - most recently there is this: http://www.amazon.com/Kids-Dont-Want-Fail-Oppositional/dp/06... but I also linked to some other research in this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2046616

Certainly using school money to buy more football bleachers rather than invested in academics is not just something you'll find in poor minority schools - see pretty much any US university with a Div I or II basketball, football or hockey program.

You can't really change a culture though. Is there any way you think it can be fixed?

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.)

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.

Edit: added the following link

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-ed...

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.

The discussion was about diversity (and the imagined lack thereof in Canada), not about IQ ...

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.

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.

Also, in practice, most technical terms are borrowed from English, instead of inventing native, Finnish words for them.

For a more technical term, consider "democracy", which is "demokratia". The Greek roots are obvious.

It actually comes all the way from a Greek word that means "the Lord's," short for a term for churches that means "the assembly of the Lord" or "the house of the Lord."

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=church

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Church#Etymology

(Basis of knowledge: student of Biblical Greek, native speaker of English, sporadic student of various Germanic and Ugro-Altaic languages.)

The only etymology I could find is: kirkko [from Germanic. Compare Estonian kirik, Karelian kirikkö, Lapland girku, Swedish kyrka] : church

A quick scan of http://www.freeweb.hu/etymological/finnish.htm shows many words of Germanic origin. I like how "kihlat" (dowry) compares to the Swedish "gisslan" (hostage).

There's one example of the derivation:

'kirja' - 'book'

'kirjailija' - 'writer'

'kirjailla' - 'to embroider'

'kirjailu' - 'embroidery'

'kirjaimellinen' - 'literal'

'kirjaimellisesti' - 'literally'

'kirjaimisto' - 'alphabet'

'kirjain' - 'letter' (of the alphabet)

'kirjallinen' - 'written; literary'

'kirjallisuus' - 'literature'

'kirjaltaja' - 'typographer'

'kirjanen' - 'booklet'

'kirjasin' - 'font' (in typography)

'kirjasto' - 'library'

'kirjata' - 'to write down, to make a note of'

'kirje' - 'letter' (document)

'kirjeellinen' - 'by letter' (adj.)

'kirjelmä' - 'letter, note, message'

'kirjelmöidä' - 'to complain (by means of writing)'

'kirjoitella' - 'to write' (now and then)

'kirjoittaa' - 'to write'

'kirjoittaja' - 'writer' (person who performs a writing work)

'kirjoittaminen' - 'writing' (action)

'kirjoittautua' - 'to get enrolled, to log in'

'kirjoittelu' - 'writing' (now and then)

'kirjoitus' - 'writing' (result)

'kirjoituttaa' - 'to have ... written' (factitive of 'kirjoittaa')

'kirjuri' - 'scribe'

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