Eeko

Not yet.

Apparently the province of Shanghai has already surpassed the Finnish educational success with their 23 million inhabitants. I have no doubt the Chinese are not trying to replicate that system as much as they can.

Though I would still prefer the Finnish system with 5-6h school days for my children, there is no reason to believe bigger systems would not be scalable for improvement.

And as far as I know, the US system used to be way more competitive back in the day. And we also have to think whether the educational depression is a state or a trend... (http://youtu.be/NXIR9ve0JU0)

> Don't get me wrong, Linus Trovalds and Nokia are great examples. But they aren't enough to make Finland a bed of innovation.

Not yet.

The entire country pretty much started industrializing a generation ago. A few big corporations in forestry and some high-tech is what brought us from the stone-age. But such establishments tend to shackle a fair amount of brain in such a small economy.

Given the record, I'm fairly optimistic of what will happen with all the brain freeing up from Nokia. It was a valued company hiring around as much people only in Finland (pop. 5m) than companies like Google hold globally. (pop. 7b)

The OS of the phone is much irrelevant (Windows, linux, meego, webos etc. are "cheap and good enough" if you really have the demand of billion such devices. Having open source OS helps, but I'd say it's more about who can sell the network cheap enough to suit the smartphones.

But the thing is, there is a lot of people who know they'd rather be playing with children in a kindergarten, doing archeology or reading books all day - but knew that following PURELY your heart is not the smart & rational thing to do when we signed up. Part of the problem is, that libart-schools are filled with kids who thought stuff will just work itself out, like it has always happened for them. Romantically just following ones dreams to the end.

I honestly don't know how else we could be sharing the lesson of pragmatism to the newer generation if we can't point out the consequences of everyone chasing their hopes at the same time. An imaginative person figures out new goals and dreams every day anyhow...

Universities pretty much had the monopoly for highly specialized knowledge until very recently. The companies, public and students waking up to the fact that knowing your rhetoric & poetry ain't so valuable any more IS the system breaking down. Right now.

You'll rather hire from HN than from Oxford.

Do companies really work that way? I think trying to max-out your competitiveness and money-making skills by hiring the right guys would make more sense than hiring via secluded grapevine.

That is to say, that the average standards around the world are not that great either. Higher education could be better, but it is far from worst of what I've seen.

Actually the opposite. The university system follows pretty much the same paradigm of equality and fair quality. There really is no shitty universities (at least within the institutions which claim the label...) nor spectacular ones. You get average quality. The university rankings tend to have an apex-fallacy (we are only interested on the ones at top), whereas the primary-education studies focus on national averages.

E.g. US has some spectacular private primary education facilities and some amazing higher education. But the quality varies highly across institutions. Finland has a very few private schools and even the best ones do not really perform significantly better the worst ones. The same is apparent in higher education. You get about the same degree from any university willing to give the education.

And whereas I used to think like you guys on catering for the individuals and the talented: I'm no longer quite sure on how it should be done. I've seen a fair share of different systems and products of those systems - some of which claim to address the problem of the gifted better than others. Yeah, you could do better to give greater challenges for the gifted. But there are so much other good and useful stuff people-who-get-bored-in-math-class could be doing. If you got the capacity, usually you end up using it, despite on how you are instructed to behave. You could be doing vector-calculus on the first grade: or you could be assisting your friends with the standard calculus. You could qualify for deeper math in high-school, but you could also spend your extra-time with arts, philosophy, student activities or just living your life if you don't have to worry about your school performance.

"A new Gallup poll, released Dec. 17, reveals that 40 percent of Americans still believe that humans were created by God within the last 10,000 years."

There is another 40% thinking like you claim, but there still is that 40% who are about as anti-scientific as you can get.

I said Finland could be fairly prone for brain-drain if stuff would get significantly worse in the future. (Like what is happening at Greece these days.) But right now I'm pretty sure that the progress will be, though not outright good, less bad than most of the world. A safer bet, to say.

And healthy amount of emigration is good for a nation. People go abroad for a few years or decades to make money, gain experience and positive influences and then can bring 'em back home.

Especially since the level of (tuition-free and gvment-sponsored on all levels) education, language-skills and the weather-back-home makes emigration fairly easy and tempting for most Finns. But so far the system does a pretty good job on keeping competitive. You might end up driving a smaller BMW than your neighbor, but the quality of education, health, stability etc. make it very attractive target for long-term settling down, making kids etc.

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.

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...)