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Comment by eshvk | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure what to make of this:

1. Sure high school graduation rates are higher in Finland than in the U.S., can you actually compare those across the board? Is what a high schooler studies in Finland the same as what they study in the U.S.? Maybe there are other societal issues why people drop out in the U.S. compared to Finland which I understand has a homogenous largely white population.

2. So there is no homework in Sweden? So fucking what? There is lots of homework in India and China. If I understand correctly, those guys are supposed to be eating our lunch?

3. The teachers have masters degrees; yet it is not clear to me how adding two more years of education is going to magically transform our education system?

4. The only thing that seems intriguing to me is individual attention. Good classroom ratios. Yet is that feasible to scale up in the U.S.?

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1. Since Finland students only get one standardized test, it's very difficult to determine. I have no idea why that's listed as a positive thing in the graphic; you can't improve what you don't measure!

2. According to the article, Finland's average PISA scores are higher than Hong Kong or Japan.

3 & 4. Since the degrees are subsidized by the sate, there are a lot more people getting them. This helps recruit enough teachers to maintain the 12:1 student/teacher ratio.

Re 1. Standardized tests reminds me of software dev managers who want to track bug counts to measure productivity.

There are so many factors to education that the result of any standardized test is questionable. Everyone thinks and problem solves differently and what the tests do is encourage teachers to teach students to all think in the same way in order to get the best result on the test. They teach to the test in order to make their own statistics look good so they won't be punished.

Ah, I was hoping to avoid this argument. If your students aren't doing well, having a "questionable" measurement is better than nothing.

Why do you take that as a given? A bad measurement can easily lead to you going further in the wrong direction.

... How do you know you're going in the wrong direction?

Finland's success in Pisa scores is the reason that these practices are highlighted. Although homogenous population plays a role, Finnish scores are constantly better than almost equally homogenous Norway.

However, the true reason behind the success of Finnish school system is yet unclear. One thing that certainly plays an important role is that teacher as a profession has traditionally been highly regarded in Finnish society, and it's not trivial to get in to universities to study teaching.

There are other interesting aspects, for example does the language play a role: Finland has an affluent Swedish-speaking minority. There a separate schools for Swedish speakers, but they follow similar practices as the rest of the Finnish schooling system. However, for some odd reason doesn't fare as well in Pisa tests than Finnish speaking students, despite that family background of Swedish speakers have traditionally been more stable.

>>Finnish scores are constantly better than almost equally homogenous Norway.

Uh, considering the high immigration into Norway -- can you back that up? (Finland is more like the rest of the EU in immigration.)

Here's some theory (very non-mainstream, I would assume) and discussion along lines similar to what you wrote:

http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.fi/

1. You can compare PISA tests as stated in the infographic.

3. My mother has a master degree in math, she is a high school teacher. Her understanding of maths due to her degree sets her apart from the normal teachers with a educational math degree, or any other degree which was not math orientated. You can see in her yearly results she is a good math teacher. I understand this does not hold true for all people. But something that you missed in the infographic is that teachers is held in high regard, something that is lacking in my country of origin and I believe a lot of other countries.

4. I can not answer your question. But yes its proven over and over again smaller classes gives better results.

Something that happened at my High school was your were sorted into classes by your marks and that really helped the kids to compete in the higher mark classes, but it also demoralised the kids in the lower mark classes. I know my mothers high school tries to follow the same kind of strategy but for technical reasons its not that possible and thus not so obvious.

> 3. My mother has a master degree in math, she is a high school teacher. Her understanding of maths due to her degree sets her apart from the normal teachers with a educational math degree, or any other degree which was not math orientated. You can see in her yearly results she is a good math teacher. I understand this does not hold true for all people. But something that you missed in the infographic is that teachers is held in high regard, something that is lacking in my country of origin and I believe a lot of other countries.

I am not clear how taking graduate courses in Mathematics which can range anything from Measure Theory, Abstract algebra to Grad. Real Analysis helps you become a better teacher to high schoolers whose interaction with mathematics should ideally have enough coverage from the basic level.

The respect thing is not clear to me. Lawyers and Investment bankers are not respected here in the U.S., yet they flourish. Ultimately, if you are passionate about what you do, what people think of you (or not) shouldn't matter so much.

My personal hypothesis is that people in America (parents) give way too much responsibility to the school to educate their children and expect magic to happen from people who are merely paid to take care of your children. Quit having kids or take more responsibility in teaching them. My mother is a teacher too and I recall she spent more time teaching me stuff at home before I even went to kindergarten and that definitely helped keep me ahead of the curve. Sure, her ability to teach helped her a bit but surely it is not that hard as a parent to take more of an active interest in your child's education rather than flopping helplessly and whining about schools and such. /end rant

> My personal hypothesis is that people in America (parents) give way too much responsibility to the school to educate their children and expect magic to happen from people who are merely paid to take care of your children. Quit having kids or take more responsibility in teaching them. My mother is a teacher too and I recall she spent more time teaching me stuff at home before I even went to kindergarten and that definitely helped keep me ahead of the curve. Sure, her ability to teach helped her a bit but surely it is not that hard as a parent to take more of an active interest in your child's education rather than flopping helplessly and whining about schools and such. /end rant

Do you have kids? It's not that simple. Picture this: you're a smart (at least according to the people around you) guy tht wants to give the best possible education to your kid by teaching them things at home to give them an advantage at school. You like learning and knowing things, and can't wait to pass this on to your kid. And then your kid turns out to be the complete opposite of you: an extroverted, extremely social creature that has a short attention span and who only wants to be around people and has very little interest in learning about how things work and stuff. It's really hard to connect to a kid like that - no way to spend hours teaching them things.

I used to say things like what you said until I experienced it myself. I was a bright kid who was always willing to learn, and thought I'd grow up to be the adult that teaches that bright kid things. Well, it didn't turn out that way. When your child shows so little interest in learning new things, you just give up after a while and hope it will somehow work out after a few years of going to school.

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