Apparently based on equity and not standardized test scores. All schools are public. Supposedly tied for best in the world.
Interesting to note, however, that Shanghai beat them recently. Sure, Finland is good, but if Shanghai is better, why not look to them instead?
Your thoughts on this article? Variables controlled, market mechanisms in place, etc?
I think it’s a product of the native population; East Asians and Scandinavians are both known for being top scorers on most standardized IQ tests. Also, you’d need to compare the methods of standardized testing used in each country; it wouldn’t surprise me if the real difference is even greater, because Western educational systems probably give you grades for “environmental awareness” or “diversity studies”, while the Chinese (and for that matter, the Indians) are still doing smash hits on the hard sciences.
What about said native population?
Isn’t this the norm just about everywhere anyway? There are very few nation-wide test anywhere, and they also tend to be way easier than the normal everyday stuff your teacher will come up with.
Or maybe it is that the arrangement is de facto more decentralised than if you have a preponderence of important nation-wide test around which a bunch of performance lists are made for the benefit of the center. Isn’t central funding for schools in the US partly conditional (on the average scores on these tests)? Well that gives the center a big influence in defining what matters (which is invariably something it can digest, like statistics) doesn’t it?
They do have a great education system.
Here’s an interesting detail:
“… If a teacher is bad, it is the principal’s responsibility to notice and deal with it.”
It that sentence is correct, the schools may be able to freely hire and fire teachers, which would be quite an advantage. Does anybody know more about their school system?
Education is one of the most misunderstood goods (behind money). Like any good, its production is based on demand. In ancient Alexandria, for example, you could go listen to any lecture at any university in much the same way that you can watch almost any lecture video for free on mises.org. Lectures were just advertising. If you liked a lecturer, you could hire him to tutor you. Obviously, education is something that was a luxury.
There is more applied learning today than there was then, for sure. But there is even still more theoretical learning. Theoretical learning is, was, and always will be a luxury. Playing the Wii is also a luxury; theoretical learning is a much more affordable luxury today than it was in ancient Alexandria. But the point remains that it is a luxury, not a producer good. Applied learning is a producer good and has economic value by virtue of its serviceability in increasing the learner’s ability to generate income.
Socialization of the primary education of children is an obvious blunder (assuming the motivation really is to educate them). Two hundred years ago, primary education of children was something that only the wealthy could afford and only the “classed” would impose on their children. During the 19th century with the rise of the middle class, businessmen could start to afford to send their children to receive education in the hopes that their educated children might have a chance of marrying into the upper class.
Today, education is a “thou shalt” just like driving over the speed limit or smoking cannabis are “thou shalt nots”. Everything about the modern education system is anti-human. The schools are invariable ugly and lacking in charm or character. The child is planted in an environment where all property is public property except the few items he can manage to keep on his person. He has no personal space and certainly no privacy and he does not have the privilege of absconding to his room or playing with his toys. He is pulled from his parents at an age earlier than Spartan children began their education (seven years of age). Even the Spartans weren’t so brutal as to rip a child out of his mother’s arms while he’s still a toddler.
In the school environment, the child is utterly dependent - dependent for food, dependent for transportation, dependent for security. He is subject to a compressed social atmosphere that in no way resembles the relaxed, free-wheeling tribal socialization that his brain is hard-wired for by millions of years of evolution. The average child faces competition from peers who outmatch him in every respect - stronger, faster, cooler, better-looking, more well-spoken, more popular, etc. These alpha individuals “rule the roost”… they receive all the favors, all the grants, all the applause, all the success. The message sent to the average child is loud and clear: sit down, shut up, do as you’re told, and don’t imagine for a second that you will ever be on a par with your natural superiors.
The nature of learning is little more than memory-recall. Subjects are presented as a hap-hazard collection of largely unrelated facts and unanswered questions beyond the boundary of the usually limited imagination of the teacher himself or herself. Speculative, fanciful thinking is discouraged as unserious and disruptive to the teaching process. The right of the collective to “be educated” outweighs the interests and curiosity of the individual.
The character of punishment in the public school is anticipatory of the nature of punishment in the larger adult world: often arbitrary, faux “compassionate”, and designed to engender an abiding angst regarding “success” and “failure.” The big secret is that there hell exists… it’s called prison and it’s not a hell of a lot different than detention, except you generally won’t be raped and assaulted in detention. But the message is communicated to the “trouble-makers”… keep it up and you will one day go to the “Big Detention.”
When the bell rings, students hurry to their station so as not to be shamed by the teacher for “being late.” When the bell rings again, they jump up from their stations and run to stand in a queue to receive their daily lunch ration. This routine is drilled into them 200+ days a year and it is the true education they are receiving. The rest is just details. What matters is that the students learn to respond to the daily bells, not make trouble, be at their station when required and complete the assigned, mundane, pointless tasks.
The most naturally intelligent children who come from divorced, single-parent or other “non-uniform” homes quickly become bored with the whole charade. They quickly complete and turn in the assigned work - either acing it or flunking it based on where they are on the emotional roller-coaster that day. They are the most likely to be destroyed by the system - diagnosed with bullshit “mental disorders” and then stuffed with poisonous pills that will strip them of all zest for life and prep them for later addiction to more powerful legal drugs. By the time they make it through the boiler-room called “middle school”, they will have either withdrawn into some bizarre or dangerous sub-culture or they will have become completely anti-social and maybe dropped out.
OK, I’m going to stop here. Needless to say, I have no love for the public school system. For full disclosure, I attended public school from K-3, then was at a private (religious) school from 3-5 and then homeschooled 6-graduation so I have a somewhat unique perspective on it. I have two very smart children who are in public school due to circumstances not in my control (divorce, etc. etc.) and I am terrified at what the schools are capable of doing to them.
Clayton -
I have two very smart children who are in public school due to circumstances not in my control
I hope you let them learn the mainstream and then systematically correct their misunderstanding 
Ok, I just read your entire post and MAN do you have some pent up emotion on the issue!
I am not sure I agree that many of your points are strong critiques, though you have some good ones in there. I recently had to write a college application essay on “what I care about” and so I chose education. While I did not intend it to be a full-blown critique, I thought it was rhetorically effective. I’ll send it to you and anyone else interested by PM (because I wouldn’t want some college admissions officer looking it up online, finding it posted somewhere, and then deciding I copied it)
@Wheylous: I do what I can but it can be tougher than you think. The teachers parasitically hijack the natural parent-child relationship. I’ll give you an example. I live in the state of Oregon, one of the more fascistic states on the West coast (at least, near urban areas). We have made it illegal for a parent to leave their child in a locked car even to step into a 7-11 for two minutes to grab a pack of smokes due to a tragic case where some disgusting woman left her toddler in her car for hours in the summer heat leading to the child’s death. Now, you have to take your children out of the car with you every time no matter what sun, rain, snow, doesn’t matter. Anyone who has children understands that this is a lot more cumbersome and time-consuming than it sounds, especially with 5-6 year olds (my kids’ ages).
To enforce this law, teachers - like the good fascists they are - have helpfully taken it upon themselves to inform your children that Mommy and Daddy can’t leave you in the car even for a minute. When my kids told me this, I tried countering the teacher. I said “well, yes, there is this new law they just made that you can’t get out of the car even for a minute but I think it’s not a very smart law and I don’t think your teacher should be telling you what Mom and Dad should or shouldn’t do” to which they took great offense as if I was saying the teacher was stupid or bad. “But that’s what the teacher said” was their response. I realized I was fighting gravity at that point… the issue had been impressed upon them in a way that made either me or the teacher the bad guy if I tried to disagree.
I’m not saying there’s no hope for refuting this nonsense eventually but it really imparts a feeling of helplessness which, I suppose, is precisely what it is meant to do. After my experiences with family law and the education system, I am very cynical. Anyone who thinks that things are the way they are as some kind of “natural, organic outgrowth” of the prevailing culture hasn’t experienced the dark underside of the system. It’s not what it appears to be to the casual observer with no children or with a sound, healthy and supportive family and extended family. Yeah, for those people, the system “just works”. But if you fall through the cracks, you are screwed.
Clayton -
What constitutes brutality is relative to the perspective of the individual. The Romans watched people eaten alive by wild beasts for entertainment in the Coliseum. The Spartans put their male children into a rigorously ascetic and punishing program of military training beginning at age seven. The Spanish fight bulls. We diagnose our children with “ADD” and force them to take poisonous chemical substances, like Ritalin. I see little difference between these forms of brutality from the point of view of the person undergoing the brutality. For onlookers, the level of repulsion just depends on when and where you were born.
Clayton -
Hm. I do find that the issue of authority in school bugs me. Not that I have a problem with authority or any of that. I am likely one of the least complexed/rebellious (in the popular sense) teenagers out there.
What I mean is that when a teacher is teaching a student, the sheer hierarchy and power they hold over us, as if what they teach us is the pristine and eternal truth, diables us from engaging in rational thinking. When I approach my friends on some economic and historical issues which have been taught incorrectly they are completely unreceptive and think I’ve fallen prey to some conspiracy theory.
It’s a real bummer when anyone outside the standardized school view tries to get a word in edgewise.
“Free market? But that’s profit and monopoly, history shows us!”
“Repeal child labor laws? Do you want to live in the 1800s?”
“End the FDA? Have you not read The Jungle?”
“Hoover’s laissez-faire policies destroyed America!”
“FDR and WW2 brought us out of the Great Depression!”
Btw, did you get my essay?
Nice exchange!
Sooo… does anybody know anything about that Finnisch education system?
Some big things: teachers, both primary and secondary, must have a masters degree to teach, and entrance to teaching programs is competitive - unlike our systems, where almost anyone can become a teacher. This would significantly increase teaching quality: taking teachers from the top of the academic cohort, rather than from more mediocre quartiles. Also, although all their education is public, it’s run on a voucher system, which gives parents more control over where their children are educated and allows for a level of competition that, whilst maybe inferior to that that would prevail in a free market, is still better than the public systems in most other countries. A good read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland. One other thing: education in Shanghai was mentioned as being superior. An important thing to note is that such an analysis suffers from a selection bias, in the sense that many of the schools there admit only the best students in the country, much in the same way Harvard only admits the best college applicants; the success of Harvard graduates could be attributed as much to the fact that Harvard only lets extremely skilled and motivated people in to begin with as to its actual teaching methods, and this applies equally to many of the top Shanghai high schools.
If our school system is that good, I feel sorry for you others. Only thing I learned in Finnish school was how to be lazy, most of people got pretty OK grades by doing nothing.
I’m an educator in the USA. I’m interested in hearing more from you since you went through the system.
How old are you? What was your experience like? You obviously seem critical.
I heard the finnish system is more decentralized and loose than in regimented american schools.
Im a student in the US. Dont like any of my teachers (maybe 1 in a year).
I visited Helsinki in early August. That’s about the extent of my input. Haha.
Some big things: teachers, both primary and secondary, must have a masters degree to teach, and entrance to teaching programs is competitive - unlike our systems, where almost anyone can become a teacher.
Man, how can a regulation ever be good? 
Seriously, mandating a degree just limits the options of the principal - how can this be good, assuming the principal already has incentives to serve the customers?
Seiesnalli - I recommend you start a new thread.