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

Re:Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t). by kalleboo on Sunday October 16, 2011 @01:45AM (#3116642)

This article does consider that though:

  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.

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Re:Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t). by bilbo0s on Sunday October 16, 2011 @01:58AM (#3116666)

Wow.

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.

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Re:Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t). by eldina on Sunday October 16, 2011 @03:30AM (#3116801)

There is a huge difference between Denmark and Finland both in the quality of the education a coming elementary school teacher goes through and perhaps more important in the level of applicants that are accepted for the education. In 2010 for many of the schools in Denmark where you can become a teacher there were no requirements on your grades from "gymnasiet" (equivalent of high school), you only had to have passed gymnasiet. In Denmark, coming teachers choose 2 or 3 subjects that will be there main subjects. For these subjects there are some requirements, unfortunately these are ridiculously low. In gymnasiet all subjects have a level A, B or C which indicates how deeply the subject is covered. Some subjects eg. Danish and history are mandatory and exists only in the highest level A form while others eg. languages, biology, physics, math, exist in usually at least two of the levels and depending on your choice of line you can choose different levels with the requirement that when finishing you must have had 2 non-mandatory A level subjects. To choose eg. nature & technique, a subject supposed to encompass physics, chemistry, biology and geography, as one of your main subjects when becoming an elementary school teacher, it is sufficient to have the medium grade in just a single of a list of subjects that are related to natural sciences and this only had to be on the middle B level.

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.

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Re:Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t). by aptwebapps on Sunday October 16, 2011 @09:25AM (#3117276)

Not to steal HN's thunder but that was a direct quote from the article.

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Re:Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t). by frooxie on Sunday October 16, 2011 @05:46AM (#3116973)

According to Wikipedia, the percentage of ethnic Finns in Finland is 97.5%, while the percentage of ethnic Swedes in Sweden is "probably much lower than 85%". Now, some of these are Finns living in Sweden and vice versa, which complicates the picture, but it seems like Finland has very different demographics from Sweden.

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Re:Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t). by Gravityloss on Sunday October 16, 2011 @02:19PM (#3117882)

I read a paper by a Swedish researcher about this. Even if you compare schools with a similar proportion of immigrant descendants, Finnish schools tend to do well compared to Sweden.

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.

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Re:Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t). by temphn on Sunday October 16, 2011 @01:56AM (#3116663)

"Superior" is only one bit of information, in that it only says "x is greater than y"...but not by how much, and with no measure of statistical significance.

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).

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Re:Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t). by henrikschroder on Sunday October 16, 2011 @04:37AM (#3116877)

Finland does so much better than Sweden that Swedish newspapers semi-regularly feature the same article as the parent of this discussion, i.e. "our schools are crap, Finland is right next to us, they're awesome, how do they do it, why can't we?".

Of course, nothing ever happens.

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