The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland

> Giving our kids a rich social life and early education without the pressures of a traditional school model is probably the one thing Finnish society has figured out. (The rest is more or less a mess right now.)

Coming from Slovenia, that's what kindergarten is supposed to be. The word literally means "children's garden" and has nothing to do with school.

To quote wikipedia "literally children's garden, is a preschool educational approach traditionally based on playing, singing, practical activities such as drawing, and social interaction as part of the transition from home to school.".

I don't know what happened in the anglophone world that turned this joyful concept into school. My girlfriend grew up in the US and considers "kindergarten" to be the beginning of school school where they start by teaching you how to read&write. Wikipedia seems to confirm this notion.

Maybe it's just semantics and word-meaning drift.

The cost of day care over there is stunning. The day care we send our children to in Australia is very similar to what you describe (i.e., compassionate and loving staff, focus on play in a mixed social environment, lots of outings and great food).

But the cost is $85 per day, per child. We have two children so it costs more than our mortgage to take our children to day care. It is also one of the more affordable day cares.

The government is supposed to cover 50% of the cost, but only up to maximum of $7,500. Meaning they end up covering far less than half.

I live in Stockholm, Sweden and more or less day care system is same here. My son is 4 years old & he started day care when he was 1 and half. His life is so rich in terms of social activities, learning etc. We absolutely love this system. The money we pay is $130/month and thats the highest a family pay if both parents are working.

It should be noted that attending kindergarten is not mandatory in Finland and that there are different options for day care (e.g. at home or "family care" at the home of a licensed day care person). The other options are much more popular in rural communities due to distances.

This was recently changed so that the "preschool" became obligatory for 6 year olds, so they have to take educational activities for 4 hours a day at a kindergarten but may still have their day care elsewhere.

Btw, the aphorism quoted in the article is better translated as "what you learn without joy, you'll forget without sorrow".

Is there free daycare available in Finland? How good is it?

What does "French" mean in this context?

From what I've read about the Finish school system educators are selected from the top quartile of academic performers of university students. In the US, educators are ranked in the bottom 1/3.

The limited number of seats per profession is a new one, but kinda makes sense. However, by doing this the nation "locks in" their capacity for growth in these areas. It would seem that this is somewhat misguided. An economy cannot be very efficient if it makes decisions a decade in advance.

I'm from the US, but my mother read to me from the day I was born, and got me reading before I turned 3, and reading full books for kids by the time I was 4 or 5. Unsurprisingly, I tested as "on a college age reading level" from the 3rd grade onward.

She also did basic arithmetic with me as well, and I ended up pretty good at math and logical thinking.

I think a huge part of the education problem today is lack of engaged parents. They don't concentrate on teaching their kids before they send them to school, and once they're in school, they leave the teaching up to the teacher and do not assist really.

From my experience in Finland kids very rarely have been taught to read before school, and typically just a few kids on a first grade can read. Of course, having phonetic language helps, as once you know all the letters you can correctly write almost any word hear.

The views of the value of studies also differ quite a lot, but luckily it's way more common for uneducated parents to value a better education for their kids than the way around. It of course helps that all studies are free and students in universities are actually paid to attend (though less than they would get for being unemployed).

What average uni students want to study actually does not affect the quality of teachers as much as you suggest. In 2014* a total of 1649 applicants took the entrance exam for becoming a class teacher in Helsinki University, and 146 were selected among them. I don't believe many of the 146 best applications would rather study engineering or biology.

http://www.studentum.fi/Kasvatustieteellisen_paeaesykoe__d62...

Uh, I'm not sure this is correct...

Sure, some kids might learn to read, write and count before school, but it is definetly not a norm. The first two years of school here is mostly spent learning those skills.

"It sounds like the teachers in Finland are probably good enough to catch this - ours were not."

Yes, the teachers (not tests or rigorous standardization) are the keystone of the finnish school system.

Well, here the kindergarten with child-led play isn't that much part of the education system. Even the pre-school year is fundamentally just preparing kids for the school, which is still very much teacher-led.

The written Finnish being very easy to spell and read also probably contributes. There are only very few peculiarities that differentiate from the logical 1-1 mapping between letter symbols and vocal sounds. Practically all children all able to attain at least the basic functional literacy skills in a couple of years. (I really couldn't understand the concept of spelling bee competitions in US TV shows, like that one Peanuts animated film, until we started English.)

Remember that this article was talking about preschool. Once you get to the first school grade in Finland, you will be taught to read.

The other important note is that the environment for teachers is good. We get lots of great people into teaching right after college through Teach for America and other programs, but they don't want to stay teachers.

I don't think it's appropriate to complain about an article being incomplete when it was written to be a facet of a more complete series of articles.

That is, this article 'gloss[ed] over an important cultural norm' because it is mentioned in other Atlantic articles. Specifically, the text "Finnish schools have received substantial media attention for years now" links to another Atlantic article which says:

> For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master's degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.

and the text "because of the consistently strong performance of its 15-year-olds on international tests like the PISA" links to another Atlantic article which says:

> Teachers have a lot of autonomy. They are highly educated--they all have master’s degrees and becoming a teacher is highly competitive.

Instead, and in the same paragraph, the author says that this article will more specifically provide 'coverage on Finland’s youngest students', which the author thinks has been missing, and not cover the entire topic of Finnish schooling.

How is teacher compensation over there? I always thought we'd see better outcomes in schools if we paid enough for the best and brightest to become teachers.

Fact is, they cannot live in many "reasonably priced" housing markets (let alone the Bay/SF) on a typical teacher salary in the US.

> The smartest students, the most driven students, they all become teachers.

Part of that is the cultural status of teachers. But another large contributor is the policy status of teachers w.r.t rate of pay, autonomy, and educational requirements.

All teachers must obtain a Masters. They are paid in line with expected median or greater for those of their educational level. They are also, by policy, the main driving force and final say on curriculums and educational program design. Further, they are expected to remain current within their field and often publish throughout their career.

In other words, the pay and job preference is the type that attracts the academically minded. And does so without requiring them to assume standards of living far below their educational investment.

Society at large lends respect to fields based, by and large, on superficial reasons. In the U.S. we offer teachers pay and respect (within the job) more in line with short order cooks with a G.E.D. than professionals. Society's treatment of the profession reflects that.

I think there's a real resistance against solutions that don't feel like "getting tough". "increasing standards" and "raising expectations" are easy to sell. The idea that children need to do childish things is dismissed as too wishy-washy.

What most people don't seem to know is that fun and play simply is learning.

Kids play act scenarios all day that they're learning about. It's a way of internalizing what they've learned. Take away time for unstructured play, and you'll find a lot of kids have less ability to learn, simply because their brains need the play time to absorb the relevant facts.

We're using a curriculum-free homeschooling approach, and while my kids aren't on the exact same learning timetable, they're close enough to the normal education track -- and well beyond it in the areas that most interest them -- that I'm not worried. And they play all the time.

I think you're interpreting that backwards. "Ludus" originally referred to educational training sessions to build skills for later performing activities of direct practical benefit, mainly combat and political oratory. This is how "ludus" means both "play" and "school." It's originally "play" in the sense of "play-fighting," not in the sense of "having fun without a particular goal." Unlike Greek academies, Roman schools were entirely focused on building practical skills.

The idea of "play" as "having fun without any particular goal orientation" is a thoroughly modern idea. The idea that school should be a form of "play" in the modern sense is an even more recent one. It has no basis in ancient Rome.

If you ever read The Glass Bead Game(Das Glasperlenspiel) by Hermann Hesse, you'll see that Hesse was able to get a lot out of this overlap of terms.

Is 'unstructured' a euphemism? If the children are expected to 'behave predictably' and 'forced to interact with other children', doesn't that imply some structure? (I assume 'predictably' means something more specific than, say 'not try to set the school on fire.')

This article uses the terms 'spontaneous and free form' and 'guided and pedagogical'. It doesn't sound like the former requires children to interact with others, though I can't tell from the article. Certainly the latter isn't unstructured.

Swedish average wages are close to the top (if not at the top)in EU. The wage gap is a lot lower than most countries though. Just mentioning since I stated Swedish wages were low not long ago, but when I looked it up that wasn't the case overall, it's just that normally high paying jobs pay less there.

That article is misleading. Standardized curriculum was in fact one of the things people looking at Finland said was part of its success model in 2000. So this was never a "misconception".

Perhaps. But let's not jump to conclusions.

Strictly speaking, Finland is not a mono-culture. Finland has people from Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking cultures.

Your objection has been raised before. As http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-sc... points out:

> Some of the more vocal conservative reformers in America have grown weary of the “We-Love-Finland crowd” or so-called Finnish Envy. They argue that the United States has little to learn from a country of only 5.4 million people—4 percent of them foreign born. Yet the Finns seem to be onto something. Neighboring Norway, a country of similar size, embraces education policies similar to those in the United States. It employs standardized exams and teachers without master’s degrees. And like America, Norway’s PISA scores have been stalled in the middle ranges for the better part of a decade.

Mono-culturalism probably doesn't hurt, but their exceptional social safety net is probably more important. A lot of the problems that American students face very clearly start at their improverished homes.

Also, AFAIK, the sort of extreme rich-poor divides between schools that is so characteristic of the USA is far less common in Scandanavian countries.

But there is a lot to be said for smart, well-trained teachers. It all starts and ends there.

This has been debunked. The stats do no support this idea (that because the US has to deal with ESL, etc, it can't perform better). If you factor out ESL students in the US, the US still ranks poorly compared to other nations in the OECD, many of whom are far more multicultural than Finland.

Mono-cultural areas are areas where nobody wants to move to. These are almost exclusively third-world countries.

The borders of nations are a bad separation or aggregation for cultures, we'd have to look at cultures by themselves and compare results there. But for now the immigrant percentage of the population has to do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_immigrant...

China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Madagascar, Cuba, Lesotho, Philippines, Burma, Morocco, North Korea, Somalia, Eritrea, Colombia, Afghanistan, ... That's where you can find regions with pristine mono-cultures.

Comparing these to truly multi-cultural countries like Switzerland, Hong-Kong and Australia I strongly doubt your hypothesis.