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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

"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).

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.

> It is thus not likely to be the schools. It is more likely to be culture or (more controversially) genetics.

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.

Afro-caribbean and first generation American chiming in here. I can assure you it is a cultural and institutional racism here. Being colleagues with other 1st generation Ghanaians, Nigerians, Haitians, and Jamaicans it is a recurring issue amongst the black community. Where 1st gen children who keep their culture of origin do well academically (if their culture demands it) but subsequent generations absorb more of the african-american culture which shuns academia. An example, my neighborhood highschool had enough left in the annual budget to fix the leaking roof in the science wing. The parents petitioned the schoolboard to have the money used to buy new football bleachers. This is the type of culture the students and teachers are up against.

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.

>subsequent generations absorb more of the african-american culture which shuns academia

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.

>Where 1st gen children who keep their culture of origin do well academically (if their culture demands it) but subsequent generations absorb more of the african-american culture which shuns academia.

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

You can't really change a culture though.

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.)

Hey, they have to sit in those bleachers ...

> It is more likely to be culture or (more controversially) genetics.

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.

Canada's got at least the diversity the US has, and yet regularly ranks quite high in worldwide educational standards.

Edit: added the following link

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

Canada is far less diverse than the US. Canada is about 90% white, the US is about 68% white. And most minorities in Canada are screened for education/intelligence before arrival, whereas in the US most minorities are a byproduct of the transatlantic slave trade/illegal immigration

I guess it depends on what you consider 'diverse'. You seem to only consider skin colour.

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.

Right, but a majority of those non-English speakers in Canada are in Quebec speaking French. I can't imagine there's that much of an IQ difference between French- and Anglo-Canadians...

Actually the non-english speakers are split evenly between french speakers, and speakers of other languages.

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

Also, Finns speak a Finnish, a Finno-Ugric language, which is said to be really easy to learn. It's phonetic, and technical words tend to be built out of simple Finnish words, not a weird mash of Latin, Greek, and other words. This makes it easy to do sciences, as you don't have to teach as much wacky vocabulary. (Note, I don't speak Finish, this is just what I've read).

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.

Lithuanian is not a Finno-Ugric language, but a Baltic one. Perhaps you are thinking of Estonian?

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.

I beg to differ. Jännite has the same word base as "jännitys", which translates to tension or suspension. And that is a natural concept that is related to voltage and thus helps internalize the concept.

I don't know anyone who's said that Finnish is an easy language to learn. In fact, I think it's generally considered one of the hardest languages in the world (along with Hungarian, which has similar grammar). You are right, though, that the phonetics are easy and highly consistent.

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

The language isn't easy to learn, but easy to write and read once you've learned to talk with it. This is the distinction usually made regarding the language differences. Also most of the professional vocabulary is lent from other languages. I prefer to speak English when talking about programming or tech in general. Then again this starts to take affect, at the earliest, in high school.

Most say it's hard to learn. Putting that aside, I know Finnish contains many borrowed words. Take church, which in Finnish is "kirkko", Swedish is kyrka, and in Scottish English, kirk. This form almost certainly comes from the Norse "kirkja".

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

This form almost certainly comes from the Norse "kirkja".

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.)

Certainly. But here I mean that the flow probably came through the Norse. The Scotts definitely got their term from the Norse. Since "Christianity gained a foothold in Finland during the 11th century. It was strengthened with growing Swedish influence in the 12th century and the Finnish "crusade" of Birger Jarl in the 13th century." [Wikipedia] and since the Swedes were often trading and plundering along the Finnish coast, then I strongly suspect that the current Finnish word came from the Swedish one, which comes from the same Germanic root as in English.

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).

The only part of education where the language matters is when it comes to spelling, and the key factor there is the distance between the spoken language and the written language. In Finnish, these are close, i.e. words are spelled "as they sound", the rules are simple and consistent and there are few special cases, and as a result Finnish children have a much easier time learning how to spell compared to Danish or English children.

The Finnish language is one theory. There's lots of derivative words and it's really easy to know the meaning of a new word. Look from here: http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.com/

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'

You don't consider language important in conveying ideas, thinking, etc?

What are you talking about?

> The only part of education where the language matters is when it comes to spelling

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

We're talking about elementary school education here, I find it extremely difficult to believe that some languages are "better" than others at conveying the ideas at this level of education.

Don’t downvote this guy. I don’t agree with him but it is an interesting point that should be addressed. It could be true. Science should advise.

Few more points that might interest you http://hardwick.fi/blog/?p=2097