Comment by Eeko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eeko | Hacker News Reader

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Well, the PISA testing started at 2000 and the current Finnish system was established back in the 1970's. Finland has always been pretty much at the top of the class with PISA studies. The fame came mostly as a shock for the nation, as we have always had pretty common lil'brother & grass-is-greener attitudes towards the rest of the world.

Also: the stuff measured by PISA (Math, sciences & reading) is only around 50% of the national curricula. The rest are about foreign languages, arts & excercise, religion, philosphy, history etc... There are more art, craft & music classes than say, mathematics. While wasting less time teaching and learning in classroom than most (http://blog.coreknowledge.org/2010/04/09/less-school-higher-...). If I were to engineer a PISA-breaking education system, I would probably not approach it like that.

(The curricula (.pdf): http://www.minedu.fi/export/sites/default/OPM/Koulutus/yleis...)

Just to be clear, I am not a proponent of standardized-test-based curricula. I just thought it was odd that they used an international standardized test as a basis for criticizing US standardized tests.

The curricula you linked to looks similar to the curricula that my children's schools use. The difference is in how the subjects are taught. I'm old enough to have gone to school before standardized testing was widespread in the US, and since my children go to school near where I grew up, I can compare the quality of education between then and now. The reading and writing requirements today (including vocabulary and grammar), are much weaker than I was exposed to. They rarely even read full books and do in depth reports. Instead, they simply read excerpts from anthologies and write in-class paragraphs. It's pretty sad, because writing teaches you a lot about how to think.

In all, I would say the science curriculum is broader and better. I was dismayed to learn that proofs are no longer taught in math, and I think that may be a result of the test-driven mentality of education.

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