Finland has a problem. Their education system is so good they have too many foreign educators trying to visit and learn their secrets. So why do Finnish students always rank at or near the top of international comparisons? The Post this week began a series on that country by trying to figure out why their schools are so good.
One answer is surprisingly simple.
"The key," said Pekka Himanen, 31, a renowned scholar with a PhD in philosophy (earned at age 20) who is a kind of guru of information-age Finland, "isn’t how much is invested, it’s the people. The high quality of Finnish education depends on the high quality of Finnish teachers. You need to have a college-level degree to run a kindergarten. You need a master’s-level degree to teach at a primary school. Many of the best students want to be teachers. This is linked to the fact that we really believe we live in an information age, so it is respected to be in such a key information profession as teaching."
That says a lot about Finnish society but even more about the culture of modern day America. The Finns have a great respect for education. While many of our "leaders" claim to value education, their actions don’t back it up. They place politics above meaningful research, foster mysticism in place of understanding, and above all require simplistic approaches to improvement of the educational system.
However, the most telling statement about the value of education in this country is the attitude of our leaders towards people who have succeeded at the higher levels of that system. The stated educational goal of most every politician from W on down is to have every American student go to college.
But look at how much respect someone with knowledge and experience in a particular field receives the next time they produce findings that don’t support the political agenda. George Wallace in the 60’s called them "pointy-headed professors". Today they are dismissed as "intellectuals". In forty years, only the derisive titles have changed.
Great post, Tim. Goes to what Thomas Friedman says in The World is Flat in terms of our passive, resting on our laurels nature. I think it was in a column a couple of weeks ago he said something along the lines of the only entitlement we need to get rid of is our own sense of entitlement. We don’t value it because we have never had to compete before. We’re basically lazy because of it.
If you want to know why Finland succeeds, look at the demographics. If the US had the same demographics as Finland, the US would easily have the same level of success.
Pingback: The Education Wonks
To me, the most telling line in that excerpt is “Many of the best students want to be teachers.” I’m a mathematics graduate student at a large public university here in the USA and all of my fellow grad students know to do everything possible to avoid teaching the course for elementary education majors. The students are nearly universally the most numerically illiterate of any course, and also the ones who tend to get the angriest when asked to learn new material. Their feeling is that they’ve already passed the sixth grade; there’s no reason why they should learn “higher” (i.e., high school level) mathematics.
“If the US had the same demographics as Finland, the US would easily have the same level of success.”
—
What is this supposed to mean?
If you break down U.S. achievement by whatever demographic you think would be comparable (white suburban males and females?), U.S. achievement still lags behind Finland in many respects.
To be snide, I can say that their weather keeps them off the streets. But from the article, there seems to be a major investment and nice small classes. IN Israel they’re trying to make a new system, but it’s not based on real education. http://shilohmusings.blogspot.com/2005/01/dovratrotten-idea.html#comments