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Comment by estaseuropano | Hacker News Reader

Just to highlight this book is 40(?) years old.

If you want to see how an egalitarian education system reaches the best education system results in the world - Estonia and Finland are the countries to look at. Their education indeed follows the second model here. But rote learning is also included - the point is to challenge and support the child in manifold ways and keep in mind that they should enjoy themselves.

My point is though while in some countries this might be a class difference, really it comes down to a quality difference. Good quality does not actually need to be very expensive/rare, you can reach it at system level as do Estonia and Finland.

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Finland's population is about the same as Melbourne's, Estonia about the same as Adelaide.

I'd suspect it's likely that in countries with much larger populations, socio-cultural-economo class-like variance is probably higher, and inertia greater, so change is more difficult.

I live in Tasmania, half the adult population is functionally illiterate, and voting is compulsory, so we have a situation where the pool of talent to select from for society wide decision making is more limited, perhaps, and the decisions being made have to be somewhat tolerated by the population.

Agree in the general sense though, we should be looking to model our systems more on places like Finland and Estonia, rather than US / UK.

True, they are smaller, but the key is they managed this shift. Their education was not always top notch - it changed by careful and wise policy design over ~2 decades.

And while Estonia is small (1.4Mio), that still means we are talking about 600+ schools spread over an entire country (land area of the average US state), with a very low budget and vast differences by region, e.g. an impoverished east with Russian speakers, some very rural areas, and Tallinn and Tartu as major university towns with startup scenes.

Finland is a bit bigger in population but even more population diversity, from a significant Swedish and Russian minority in the cities and east to finns spread out over rural and city areas, up to nomadic reindeer herders with their own unique language in the far north. So definitely an entire education system with its own challenges, which was not always good.

> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Estonia

The comparison with Australia is quite ironic. I would argue implementing drastic changes in a school system in a place like Australia would be much easier than Finland. These things work much better with the economies of scales afforded by large cities. The population density of Melbourne is orders of magnitude higher than that of Finland and let's not forget, more than half the OZ population lives in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide.

I found that Australians (in terms of politicians) are particularly probe to make these arguments how things can't be done here. The irony is that they go often both ways, either it can't be done because Australia is too big, or because its too small. High speed rail is another example, supposedly it's not feasible because of the low population density, completely ignoring the fact that the density is actually very concentrated, which is ideal for high speed rail. Just a connection Melbourne-Sydney would be perfect, that's (one of?) the busiest air routes in the world. This is all about political will, not feasibility.

I hear that same "can't do spirit" often from American conservatives. I think the only true obstacle is a lack of political will.

I’m actually largely on board with can’t do in the us. It’s cultural. People want institutions to

1) work the relay they think they are supposed to work but have no idea

2) cost exactly zero dollars

3) function perfectly all the time

4) take their feedback and ignore the feedback of everyone else

American governance is so trapped by human paradoxes that it’s bound to function poorly. That’s particular to hear and particular to the societal narratives that we ((especially the right) ascribe to

Do you think places like the USA or Australia actually lack political will?

Far from it, there is plenty of political will in both countries. What's missing is any sort of coherent political will to drive good and beneficial change.

Ay least in so far as I'm able to discern what good and beneficial are. Certainly isn't the direction either country is headed.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply it can't be done, and I don't think I actually did write that anywhere.

Your reply is to my point. Australia is pretty divided politically, and it seems there's a not insignificant portion of the population who are intent on railing hard against anything that benefit someone else.

Yeah, it's political, and I think my point was something like: bigger populations distributed over large areas are difficult to appease.

About half the population of Australia doesn't live in the big cities.

Finland is an excellent model but it required weeding out bad teachers who couldn’t do better in the classroom or who couldn’t handle more difficult education and certification. This will never broadly happen in the US.

I always thought this is the most critical idea for America to incorporate.

Finland has stronger employment protections than the US, so it seems unlikely this kind of "weeding out" (at least in the way its advocates usually mean it) is what they're doing better.

Genuinely only speaking theoretically: the US's combination of teachers' unions, state, and national programmes could all conspire to deliver stronger protections to bad teachers than Finland does.

It does sound unlikely, but increasing the seriousness and prestige of the teaching profession was core to Finland’s improvement in global education rankings. This short article will introduce you to their system. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jun/17/highly-tra...

Indeed, both made masters level pedagogical degrees and regular upskilling mandatory. The salaries are also decent but not actually extravagant in comparison to other jobs. They do of course have six weeks summer vacation, which certainly helps to make it attractive :-)

I think this is misleading. There simply are not enough teachers in the us, largely because in a relative sense the pay is low.

It’s easy to point the finger at unions- mostly because it is a narrative that has been pushed hard for years.

The issues are way larger than the person in front of the classroom. Bad teachers don’t help but thinking I can just take test data at the end of the year and figure out which teachers are bad is wildly useless

It's not just a pay issue (although I do not want to under-emphasize its importance) but also of a professionalization and standards aspect. Both the Baltics and Finland have strict competency requirements for teachers, and national standards of quality.

The US in many places is still arguing endlessly about Charter schools and homeschooling to allow 'teaching' the most woo-woo nonsense, and offer endless bloviating about testing batteries but nothing about curriculum/pedagogy requirements. Textbook publishers cater to opposing markets (California and Texas) and its just as adversarial as every other element of US society these days.

I see your point, but think your jumping to arguments about unions and data illustrates the issue in the US. Finland has sidestepped much of the need for complicated centrally legislated or regulated reforms by elevating the professional stature of teachers, which lets more problems be solved entirely within the classroom. As you point out, our approach in the US requires the solutions to be more complicated and less trusting of the individuals best placed to make a difference.

Absolutely true and fair. Pardon the assumption of us contexts.

And I was about to argue with 40 years old by saying i think it was written in the 1980s! And I caught myself

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