What makes finnish kids so smart

These have been measured and re-measured by the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment PISA which has established, first, that the best performing countries do much better than the worst and, second, that the same countries head such league tables again and again: Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, South Korea. Those findings raise what ought to be a fruitful question: what do the successful lot have in common?

Yet the answer to that has proved surprisingly elusive. Not more money. Singapore spends less per student than most. Nor more study time. Finnish students begin school later, and study fewer hours, than in other rich countries. Actually, they don't. If these ideas were really taken seriously, they would change education radically.

Begin with hiring the best. The quality of teachers affects student performance more than anything else. Yet most school systems do not go all out to get the best. The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a non-profit organisation, says America typically recruits teachers from the bottom third of college graduates.

Washington, DC recently hired as chancellor for its public schools an alumna of an organisation called Teach for America, which seeks out top graduates and hires them to teach for two years. Both her appointment and the organisation caused a storm. A bias against the brightest happens partly because of lack of money governments fear they cannot afford them , and partly because other aims get in the way.

Almost every rich country has sought to reduce class size lately. Yet all other things being equal, smaller classes mean more teachers for the same pot of money, producing lower salaries and lower professional status. That may explain the paradox that, after primary school, there seems little or no relationship between class size and educational achievement.

AP Asian values or good policy? McKinsey argues that the best performing education systems nevertheless manage to attract the best. In Finland all new teachers must have a master's degree. They do this in a surprising way. You might think that schools should offer as much money as possible, seek to attract a large pool of applicants into teacher training and then pick the best. Not so, says McKinsey. They aren't. In practice, the top performers pay no more than average salaries.

Nor do they try to encourage a big pool of trainees and select the most successful. Almost the opposite. Singapore screens candidates with a fine mesh before teacher training and accepts only the number for which there are places. Once in, candidates are employed by the education ministry and more or less guaranteed a job. Finland also limits the supply of teacher-training places to demand.

In both countries, teaching is a high-status profession because it is fiercely competitive and there are generous funds for each trainee teacher because there are few of them. South Korea shows how the two systems produce different results.

Its primary-school teachers have to pass a four-year undergraduate degree from one of only a dozen universities. Getting in requires top grades; places are rationed to match vacancies.

In contrast, secondary-school teachers can get a diploma from any one of colleges, with laxer selection criteria. As a result, secondary-school teaching is the lower status job in South Korea; everyone wants to be a primary-school teacher. The lesson seems to be that teacher training needs to be hard to get into, not easy.

Teaching the teachers Having got good people, there is a temptation to shove them into classrooms and let them get on with it. For understandable reasons, teachers rarely get much training in their own classrooms in contrast, doctors do a lot of training in hospital wards. But successful countries can still do much to overcome the difficulty.

Singapore provides teachers with hours of training a year and appoints senior teachers to oversee professional development in each school. In Japan and Finland, groups of teachers visit each others' classrooms and plan lessons together. In Finland, they get an afternoon off a week for this. In Boston, which has one of America's most improved public-school systems, schedules are arranged so that those who teach the same subject have free classes together for common planning.

This helps spread good ideas around. When a Japanese teacher retires, she leaves a legacy. For the past few years, almost all countries have begun to focus more attention on testing, the commonest way to check if standards are falling.

McKinsey's research is neutral on the usefulness of this, pointing out that while Boston tests every student every year, Finland has largely dispensed with national examinations. Similarly, schools in New Zealand and England and Wales are tested every three or four years and the results published, whereas top-of-the-class Finland has no formal review and keeps the results of informal audits confidential.

But there is a pattern in what countries do once pupils and schools start to fail. The top performers intervene early and often. In any given year, a third of pupils get one-on-one remedial lessons. None of this is rocket science. Yet it goes against some of the unspoken assumptions of education policy. Scratch a teacher or an administrator or a parent , and you often hear that it is impossible to get the best teachers without paying big salaries; that teachers in, say, Singapore have high status because of Confucian values; or that Asian pupils are well behaved and attentive for cultural reasons.

McKinsey's conclusions seem more optimistic: getting good teachers depends on how you select and train them; teaching can become a career choice for top graduates without paying a fortune; and that, with the right policies, schools and pupils are not doomed to lag behind.

Mar 3, at pm Edited. Chris P - They use project-based learning. Does not sound like the drill and kill you seem to prefer. Here's another article that goes into detail: Monday, March 3, U. Search Advanced search…. Log in. Contact us. Close Menu. JavaScript is disabled.

For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. Thread starter The Helper Start date Mar 3, The Helper Administrator Staff member. High-school students here rarely get more than a half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted.

There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over college and kids don't start school until age 7. Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world.

They earned some of the top scores by year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world's C students even as U. Finnish youth, like their U. They dye their hair, love sarcasm and listen to rap and heavy metal. But by ninth grade they're way ahead in math, science and reading -- on track to keeping Finns among the world's most productive workers.

Read the article here. Jackal You can change this now in User CP Andyoyo TH. Jackal said:. Believe me, most students see school as a forced thing for the first nine years, especially the three last years.

And no, not everyone do their homework, but on the other hand we have less homework, and somewhat more emphasis on projects - which are a great way to learn when done right - and test.

If the outcome of education is better than elsewhere, then I guess the education is better than elsewhere. Asehujiko New Member. The Helper said:. They have no school uniforms. When social conformity places a high value on education, that turns out to be a good thing. Knowledge is the thing Finnish people have.

According to WSJ writer Ellen Gamerman, parents of newborns receive a government-paid gift pack that includes a picture book. Libraries are attached to shopping malls. Book buses road neighborhood streets like the Good Humor truck.

Finland also has a drop-out rate much lower than the U.