Hacker News Reader

Comment by geomark | Hacker News Reader

The Finnish education system is consistently praised for its great results. But in addition to innovative educational methods there may be an underlying advantage that Finland has over many other countries - its language. I read a study (can't find a link at the moment) that compared the time it takes children to learn to read and write English versus Finnish at the elementary school level. It was about three years for American school children to learn English and one year for Finnish children to learn Finnish. The Finnish language is apparently very regular with a simple grammar and small number of exceptions (I don't know; that's what the study said). The result is that Finnish kids move on to more advanced subjects sooner and have less friction in their learning due to the language.

View on HN

They have an entirely different school system http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/why-m...

From that article:

  . kids don't go to school until age 7
  . classes are 7:30-1pm with lot's of breaks
  . lessons only 45mins long
  . no standardized tests
  . nobody can fail
  . learning disability kids given custom lessons

> nobody can fail

I'm not sure that's a good thing.

I've always found the pressure of exams to be motivating.

Same here, and having "something to lose" gives you a sense of responsibility. If you can never lose, i'm not sure what message you are sending : like, being lazy and unwilling to be productive is an OK attitude ? in the end it basically defines your values as well.

Competition is also motivating. After all, what fun would football be if nobody kept score?

In this case, the message you're sending is, "A human being is only as valuable as their ability to contribute."

Now guess how much you contribute to the NSA's ability to prevent terrorism. (Hint: if you're unwilling, they'll extract the value from you anyways.)

> "A human being is only as valuable as their ability to contribute."

No, that's not exactly what I am saying at all. Not just their "ability", their willingness is equally important. Even if you don't care about the outcome, the effort should be rewarded somehow. Because in real life you rarely get anything for nothing.

I didn't say that was what you were saying.

I said that was the message you were sending.

"useless as you are"?

Kids respond much better to positive reinforcement than negative reinforement.

The best values are never cultivated through fear and threats. Just ask this of yourself: how many of you are here because you were told to get better at computers rather than you found cmputers fun and interesting?

> The best values are never cultivated through fear and threats.

I've never considered "fear" when I was told that I got to have more than x score to pass in next grade. That's just called expectations - and settings expectations on your growth as a human being is a positive thing.

Would you think it's acceptable that a 12 years old still can't read properly ? Because that's what happening in several countries now where we have removed any barrier to ensure kids have a certain level to progress on the education ladder.

> I've never considered "fear" when I was told that I got to > have more than x score to pass in next grade. That's just > called expectations - and settings expectations on your > growth as a human being is a positive thing.

We are talking about small children here. Specifically five to seven year old children being admitted to school in the Globe and mail article. Managing and setting expectations should be done age apropriately. Telling a seven year old that you are going to fail this grade unless you get so and so on an exam is far from appropriate and not a positive thing. It will most certainly instill fear and anxiety in a lot of small children.

> Would you think it's acceptable that a 12 years old still > can't read properly?

Don't be silly. It's hardly an appropriate comment in any case as litteracy in Finland is at 100% in age groups 15 and older.

> Because that's what happening in several countries now > where we have removed any barrier to ensure kids have a > certain level to progress on the education ladder.

Which countries are we discussing now?

> Because that's what happening in several countries now

Please list these countries.

France, and I know that first hand from several of my friend who are educating teenagers in junior high schools. And from what i gathered from them it's not just limited to France (at least in Europe).

Teenagers are obviously different than small kids, but this seems to be a more systematic problem than not failing small kids when they start school. Litteracy is only 99% in France in the 15 and older group, on par with the USA. I think that we can agree on the US system being broken. Looks like France is following suit. Given that, fixing the school system in France and learning from Finland does not sound like a bad idea.

Unless you have a better idea?

Literacy rate does not mean anything - the criteria is too low to account for the fact that most kids do not understand the words well nor master their own native language and obviously have a very hard time writing correct sentences on their own. It's not just about making kids fail indeed, but that's one factor that goes with everything else, i.e. evaluating the students less and less and making the programs lighter and lighter in order to accommodate the dropping overall level of students.

I feel we are gettinf further and further away from the original discussion and moving the goalposts as we go along, but the key takeaway from this is that France should focus more on supporting weaker learners rather than just administer more and more tests with strict passing grades.

A failing grade is pretty useless to all parties involved unless it is used to assess and correct what the underlying problem is.

What specific barriers were removed in France that should have been kept in place?

So sad.

We are talking about kids here. Kids should learn to learn, not learn to compete. More specifically school should educate every child, not only the top nth percentile who have the abilities and inclination to academically compete in all subject matters.

School should educate children, not sort children into winners and loosers.

Why should schools be in the business of deciding to help some kids and not help some other kids?

This is not strictly speaking true. Finnish kids can and do retake years, if they are not ready to advance. Also the kids start getting traditional grades after the first few years.

And, yes, it's a good thing that a child cannot fail in their first few years of school. Nobody should ever brand a child trying to learn a failure, especially not literally in their first year of education.

Each child should be encouraged to learn and, if needed, helped to learn at their own pace. It is far more important that each child gets a strong foundation to learn and truly learns the basics needed to continue their education in their first years than that they get a ranking.

That's certainly an advantage, but the reason people are so interested in Finnish schools is that the went from below average to the top after a deliberate reform movement in the 1970s and 1980s.

Finn here.

It's true that Finnish spelling is very simple. The mapping of sounds to letters is quite regular, and much more so than in English. As an example, the word 'computer' is 'tietokone'. The pronunciation is [tietokone].

As a result, a "spelling bee" is a completely foreign concept in Finland. A Finnish spelling bee would go on for days.

The grammar of Finnish, on the other hand, is very irregular and full of exceptions. There are 16 noun cases. This makes Finnish laborious for English-speakers to learn.

Well I believe finnish is not as defined as german, what's up with all these random 'ä'? When you say "kyntillä" out loud, the last character sounds more like an 'a' than an 'ä'

In Finnish, the letter 'ä' denotes the vowel [æ], which is close to the vowel you'd use in the words 'cat' or 'hat' in English.

This sound, to my knowledge, doesn't exist in Standard German.

If the word (I think you mean "kynttilä=candle"?) is pronounced correctly, the last character sounds like an "ä", which is a completely seperate character from "a". In fact, you can't even have an "a" in the same word with a "y" due to the vowel harmony rules.

The thing that makes Finnish alphabet very easy, is that every character corresponds to one sound (with the exception of "c", which can be either "k" or "s", but it isn't actually used in Finnish (it just exists for legacy and compatibility with Swedish)) and vice versa (with the exceptions of "w=v" and "å=o", but, again, they're not used in Finnish)

That is, a character will always sound the same, regardless of what is around it. There are no silent letters. No things like "ea -> ee" or "ph -> f" (if you write two different characters, you also pronounce two different sounds). No single vowels that randomly became long vowels (like English "ski -> skee" rather than "sky").

There is also a paper out claiming that elementary school students who learn math in English speaking countries lag behind those in, say, Chinese speaking countries, because the numbering system in English is irregular. For example, 11 and 12 does not follow the construction of 13 or 15. Or the fact that two-digit numbers are composed differently from three-digit numbers. I don't know if this claim is true, but it certainly drives me crazy when I started learning English.

>For example, 11 and 12 does not follow the construction of 13 or 15.

Maybe its because I'm an English speaker, but I don't understand what you mean by this statement - can you explain it?

  13 -> thirteen -> three ten
  14 -> fourteen -> four ten
  15 -> fifteen -> five ten

whereas

  11 -> eleven -> why not oneteen?
  12 -> twelve -> why not twoteen?

Germanic languages have a peculiarity in the words eleven and twelve, they stem from "one left" and "two left", respectively [0]. Cognates in German elf and zwölf, Swedish elv and tolv.

[0] "Cardinal Numerals: Old English from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective", http://bit.ly/1HhPzOB, page 161.

Interesting. Worth noting Spanish, French, Catalan and probably some more connected languages I'm not so familiar with are irregular up to 16 (17 is akin to 10-7, whereas 11-16 follow other rules)

left of what? (or from what?)

Of ten. "One ... two ... [...] ten... and one and another.

Okay now I get it. Start counting on your left hand. 1 .. 5, left-side, 6 .. 10, right-side. One-left, is "one full set of fingers, plus a left", repeating again, 11. Two left, 12. 3-ten, you change to a number count, because .. why not? It is self-documented .. and thus easier to teach. Maybe?

The reason, if anyone is wondering, is because of their base meanings:

  eleven -> one left
  twelve -> two left
  thirteen -> three and ten
  fourteen -> four and ten

According to the OED, the only non-Germanic language that uses "one left" is Lithuanian, which uses it from 11 to 19.

Not disputing what you say, but they also learn other languages at the same time.

"All students learn at least two foreign languages, mainly English and obligatory Swedish, up to high school."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland

Isn't studying a second or third language a different process than learning your first language? Your first language provides your basic operating system which you build on top of. Unless you grow up bilingual (another topic that is quite interesting).

Yeah, being bilingual may actually be an educational advantage.. I think of it like learning one language is understanding syntax, learning multiple languages is understanding the underlying concepts.

I don't know if the Finnish people I have known are exactly representative of the whole, but they were all bilingual (ie. parents spoke finnish and english or swedish at home).

If most Finns group up bilingual then maybe that's their advantage (or an additional advantage). Studies link growing up bilingual to improved cognitive abilities[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_advantages_of_bilingu...

In most parts of Finland, people only speak Finnish at home. It's mainly just Western Finland (and Helsinki to a lesser degree) where there are lots of finnish-swedish people that are bilingual. Elsewhere everyone tends to know English pretty well, but Swedish isn't nearly that common.

A recent study on bilingualim "advantage": Bilingualism changes children’s beliefs about the world around them http://www.concordia.ca/cunews/main/stories/2015/01/13/how-b...

On the other hand, the Chinese education also has great results but would be disadvantaged from that perspective, right?

I thought the same thing. How long does it take to learn to write Chinese? A lifetime?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com