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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

I can't wait for Finns to pop in here to tell us about the dark sides of this success. There must be some. For one, there's a tax rate that would make most Americans, and even most Europeans, choke on their latte.

I'm not sure that's bad, but this article seems to neglect to mention that nothing comes for free. This isn't just "doing it smarter", it's also investing a massive chunk of money.

Additionally, I honestly doubt it's sustainable. The example of the Kosovar kid with a language delay is telling: this will only work if there's only a few such kids in the school at once. With immigration to Finland strongly increasing over the past 5 years, the problem may at some point be more difficult to tackle the "traditional way" when, at least in certain cities and suburbs, half the classroom has trouble with the language. I don't think there's an easy solution to this.

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I'm not sure that's bad, but this article seems to neglect to mention that nothing comes for free. This isn't just "doing it smarter", it's also investing a massive chunk of money.

Doesn't the article say: "Yet Finland spends about 30 percent less per student than the United States"?

And Finland's per-capita GDP is practically the same as that of the US.

a Finn popping up here.

I study at Aalto university, my mom is a teacher and I have thought this stuff a lot.

Dark side of success... What success? Given six million people, who all are smart as hell when 15 year olds, you could assume that there would be at least one university in Finland that would be in the group of 30 best universities in the world. Well, our best is Tampereen teknillinen yliopisto at rank 151. Switzerland has Universite de geneve at 33 while Sweden has Karolinska Institut at 51 http://www.4icu.org/top200/

I have heard that Finland has quite cheap engineers when compared internationally, but you can hardly speak of very high class upper education.

Teaching in Finland is far from perfect. I think these scores have a lot to do with language. As Finnish is written phonetically, average child knows how to read and write after first grade. It would be more fair to compare Finnish 13 year old with English speaking 15 year old.

Couldn't agree more! English bizantine writing system is a major drag. Sadly a spelling reform doesn't seem possible at the moment.

From the article it sounds like the Finns spend less and actually are "just doing it smarter."

They may spend less per child on education, but they probably spend more on social services.

Read the paragraph in the article that starts with "it's almost unheard of for a child to show up hungry or homeless."

Many American students face huge barriers to learning that originate outside of school. They are hungry, chronically ill, don't have a home, don't have a quiet space to study, don't have supportive parents, etc. No amount of school reform will fix those problems.

Check out season 4 of The Wire for a very grim account of a school in a very poor area.

There's some truth to that. However, most of the USA is not like season four of The Wire, and still manages to have public schools that are mediocre at best. If it's valid to use fictional schools from TV shows as examples, my experience is that schools in small to medium sized cities in the USA are shockingly similar to the one on South Park.

The main writer of that series was an ex-inner-city schoolteacher and based those stories on his own experience.

"Burns has said that he stumbled into teaching with little preparation because of the intense demand for teachers in inner-city schools.[2] Burns taught seventh grade. Psychologically, he compared the experience of teaching to the Vietnam War.[2] He found the experience profoundly challenging because of the emotional damage that the vast majority of his students had already experienced before reaching the classroom. He saw his primary role as instilling caring behavior in his pupils.[2] He felt his major impact was in giving the children an example of an "adult who's consistent, who's always there, who always comes through with what he said, then that's a new world for them."[2]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Burns

As a former student in a small town elementary school, I have little doubt Matt Stone and Trey Parker based the South Park school on their own experience growing up in Colorado. Mr. Hand is a bit much - but just a bit. Putting up with bizarre characters, listening to inappropriate personal life details, tolerating dumb lessons and watching videos in class were all standard occurrences.

Some amount of American school spending also goes towards addressing those problems, not really towards education, which can distort what the "education spending" figures mean.

For example, depending on which figures for education spending you use, it might include the free school lunch program, which is really more a kind of anti-poverty program that happens to be distributed via the schools. In addition, beefed up school security, anti-gang programs, and counseling programs are the school acting as policeman and social worker more than as educator. So it could be (but I can't say for sure) that Finland's lower per-student education budget still includes more actual spending on education, if other parts of the government take care of the other issues better.

Finland has free school lunches for everyone, and I guess counseling as well, but the other issues you mention aren't handled by schools as far as I know.

Top students get diminished returns for their abilities. Everything is based on your age, so students who learn faster just have it easier, but they can't advance any further than the slowest student in the class. As the teacher tells us, a lot of effort goes to helping the kids with more problems learning, keeping the lows as high as possible. Due to the "everyone needs to have equal education" setting, nothing is done to keep the brilliant brilliant.

This isn't a real _problem_ though, just something that could be better and I personally found annoying.

That's true to a significant extent in the U.S. as well, though districts vary on their policies towards "advanced" or "gifted" classes. I think that on average, even with "advanced" courses, the brilliant students progress further mostly through outside-of-school pursuits, whether it's the internet, independent reading, going to museums, an intellectual hobby, or something else along those lines.

They write in the article it's not about the money - they spend third less than the USA. Taxes have nothing to do with how children are being taught.

When all is said and done, I wonder if Hitler will have done more good than evil? For all the things he did when he was alive, one of his lasting legacies has been, he has made it incredibly shameful to be racist. Most people don't dare to be publicly racist anymore .. they use euphemisms like "immigrant" instead.

Good Lord, just because someone is pointing out that a certain problem might be in a way related to immigration, it doesn't mean that someone is racist. Can you really not see that "more immigrant kids in Finland" might lead to "more kids who have learning problems at school"? Simply because immigrants to Finland typically don't speak Finnish, are poorer than the average Finnish citizen, etc. This is far cry from saying immigrants are inferior.

Suppose that we found out that if immigration in US were heavily curtailed, then some social indicators such as "% of population with low income" or "average grades in standardized tests" would improve and then US would compare more favourably in relation to (say) Finland. That's not to say that immigration is a bad thing! I, for one, think that US is helping more people than Finland, even if reluctantly.

Finland has a policy of providing (wherever possible) early-stage immigrant education in the child's first language. Bilingualism, and an eventual transition to study in Suomi (or Swedish -- which seems to be a level alternative officially) are encouraged, of course, but the object of the game seems to be to get the young minds working as well as possible as early as possible, even if that means teaching reading and math skills in Somali, Vietnamese or Arabic in the interim. It seems to work.

But Finland doesn't have any immigrants, that's why they seem to be doing so well.

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