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Reductiveness is under the surface of many of these numbers. Finland has high teacher salaries, which is a contributing factor but entirely outside of the way teaching methodologies are evaluated.

Chinese students can work like fiends because they are in competition for a shortage of seats at elite universities. Not too surprisingly they burn out or they slack off once the pressure is off.

My personal experience with self-paced learning in middle school tells me that some students are capable of blazing through a curriculum at 3X the normal pace of classroom instruction, under no pressure at all. Technology can enable self paced learning, and it's really the only answer to scale it up. So it's hard to blame technology for screwing up education.

Intuitively though at 40ish, most of the things I "learned" in school but never used have all fallen out of my head. The knowledge I have is things that I was actually excited to learn: computers, enough math to make computers do what I wanted, writing so I could socialize with other nerds better, history because I like history. Basically, you couldn't stop me from learning those things, but the things I was forced to learn ended up being somewhat of a waste of time for both me and the instructor, I think. I mean, you want to challenge kids a bit because they might resist something at first and then eventually realize they like it quite a bit (math for instance), but there's also a point where the tests mostly just become kayfabe. We say these people are doing "better" because they get a higher test score, but then they get into the real world where there is no test score, and that entire academic framework is kind of useless and maybe even harmful.

"Play based learning" is a huge misnomer, which is unfortunately common in unscientific academic fields like education. Any successful, intrinsically-motived learning is biologically categorized as "play" behavior; and knowledge-based, teacher-centered, direct instruction approaches (i.e. traditional schooling) are the most effective and most likely to be perceived as enjoyable "play" by a school pupil. So-called "play-based" or "student centered" approaches (i.e. expect the student to know what they're supposed to learn by themselves, while the teacher just slacks off) are merely a source of confusion and frustration for shoolkids.

When my daughter was in kindergarten, it was common to walk your kids to school, then let them play in the playground while chatting with the other parents, until the bell rang.

One mom told me: "I like the American school. It's like Singapore, but with fewer beatings."

In somewhere that period of Finland education system I remember there being testing. Just not large scale standardised testing. But everything did have tests. Still teachers did have quite large freedom even if criteria was state level. Also it was very much traditional lessons with only occasional small scale group work.

One impact for later time was increased immigration and challenges of integrating increasing amount non-native speakers in same system that used to have nearly exclusively native speakers.

Don't Finland, China and Singapore have the highest IQs of any countries? Why can't that be the answer? To me, what you do exactly in school is likely pretty secondary.

I don’t think reliable data exists for making these comparisons, but even if it did, how you perform on an IQ test is strongly influenced by your schooling.

Correct. The likely causality is in the reverse direction.

No serious person in the field thinks this. Do some research.

For PISA scores, Finland’s have been declining for 25 years and China only produces scores for the top schools in its top-tier cities (and while US averages don’t look so good in comparison, scores for Massachusetts look good, maybe better).

It feels to me unlikely that PISA scores should be particularly related to ‘country average IQ’ (except by confounders like malnutrition rates) where my understanding is that much of the research has been limited or of such poor quality that the topic has become so toxic as to discourage most potential further research.

There are no such thing as real country-by-country IQ scores.

That’s too strong. Country IQ estimates are messy, but cross country cognitive differences are measurable.

For example, PISA consistently finds substantial differences in math, reading, and science performance between countries.

They are measurable in theory, one supposes, but since that's never ever happened before, there are in practice no such scores.

> Maybe it seemed too good to be true and we should have been more critical of the findings.

I mean, I always was. My rule has always been - if something seems too good to be true, it is.

This is my biggest issue with ‘progressive’ types. They always seem to get drawn in by hype and flash, and neglect to consider 2nd order effects. I’ve had an endless number of conversations with friends of this persuasion where I point out very very obvious problems with some hot new idea they are so enamored with, which they inevitably poo-poo as me being a mean old cynical conservative. And a few years later we end up with articles like above.