What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.html

by anthonyrubin • 18 years ago

53 76 18 years ago

online.wsj.com

ratsbane• 18 years ago

Remarkable... I wish the US system were more like that but I can't see it happening. My high school was nothing like that. Montessori schools seem to lean in that direction though. Can anyone with first-hand Montessori experience comment on that?

Alex39175• 18 years ago

That's the problem with Montessori. It's unclear what they actually believe. If you go through the mainstream literature on various educational theories, the proponents of each theory make a clear case about what this method does for children and why it is better than other methods, with some set of empirical results. With Montessori if you want access to their materials then you have to pay.[1] It's like the Scientology of the education world.

[1] With the exception of the original books from 90+ years ago.

dgabriel4• 18 years ago

I think you may be getting Montessori mixed up with Waldorf. Information on the montessori method is widely available (start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori, google for more). My son goes to a public Montessori school, and if I want access to the materials, I just ask the teacher. Everything is open, and parents (including prospective parents) are very much encouraged to observe the classroom.

Waldorf is kind of weird and secretive and expensive, and based on suspect and outdated science. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education

riahi• 18 years ago

I went to a Montessori school from pre-k to 5th grade. The school I went to was just completely different from any public elementary school I have visited in this country.

Instead of a one-size-fits-all mentality for education, each teacher developed a work-plan for each student that he/she was to complete at the end of the week. There were no desks, but workmats that we could arrange on the floor or at a table. Everything we did had to be kept on the workmat, but allowed for freedom of working wherever in the classroom. There were 9 week assessments which determined our progress and helped establish the pacing of our work-plans. Almost everything was independent. Teachers only taught in small groups of similarly leveled students, but this was maybe twice a week. They seemed to serve more as facilitators of learning, not leaders.

A similarity to this article was that second/third languages started early. I went to Montessori only speaking Persian and a little English, but within 1 year I was also enrolled in Spanish, and 3 years later in French. I have since forgotten the French--there are few to speak it with in Alabama, but I have retained decent fluency in Spanish. We had little in the way of sports aside from PE, but we had art classes twice a week (visual arts once on tuesdays and musical arts on thursdays). We also had computer training from a very early age; I remember being on the early internet waaaaay back in 1995 when I was 7.

Classes were interestingly set up as well. In one classroom there were 3 grades of students with two teachers. I think there were maybe 40 kids spread amongst the years. We stayed with the same teacher for 3 year blocks. My experiences were Pre-K and Kindergarten / First-Third Grades / Fourth-Sixth Grades. Interaction and cooperative learning between both grade-level and skill-level was encouraged, with the idea that one could only master the material if you could teach it to someone else.

Any further questions? I'll try to answer to the best of my ability.

DXL• 18 years ago

This was posted earlier on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126608

anthonyrubin• 18 years ago

Unfortunately the URL I submitted is different, so the duplication wasn't caught.

occam2• 18 years ago

"... one of the lowest percentages of immigrants of any Western European country: only two percent of its 5.2 million residents.

And a substantial fraction of Finland's immigrants consist of spouses of Finns, Finnish-speaking citizens of Russia (there are pockets of Finnish-speakers throughout the forests of northern Russia), Estonians, whose Uralic language is closest to Finnish, and Swedes (Swedish is the second official language). Third World immigrants make up less than one percent of the population."

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/070319_diversity.htm

martythemaniak• 18 years ago

Jesus, as if there weren't enough populist demagogues blaming every problem on immigrants already, now we have to put up with you here on HN.

http://www.siteselection.com/ssinsider/snapshot/sf011210.htm

Have a look at the rankings at the bottom, and then explain why Canada, with about 3-4 times more immigration per capita, outscores the US.

aswanson3• 18 years ago

Don't bait him. His SEO technique is to spam more popular blogs/forums with links back to his, and to get into these types of arguments, producing more link opportunities for him. Worse, we may get more of his constituency moving in. (There goes the neighborhood).

The best method to protect the site from being inundated with more stuff like this is to try to stay as hacker-focused as possible, perhaps relegating the race/gender/IQ trifecta to the same status as religion and political discussion, or to accept the likely degradation in discussion.

mynameishere4• 18 years ago

Canada has extremely rigorous requirements for immigrants.

cypress-hill• 18 years ago

canada's immigrants tend to be more educated. this isn't much of a stretch, the people crossing the border at arizona in 110 degree heat tend to be some of the most disadvantaged from their own society

felipe• 18 years ago

And what's your point?

gojomo3• 18 years ago

I'm pro-immigration, in the classic "the more the merrier" tradition of those with confidence in both markets and human innovation.

But to be intellectually honest, we have to acknowledge that immigrants of different languages, cultures, and economic backgrounds will bring many 'average' statistics of education (and health, etc.) down. This is even true if the immigration is a net-benefit to both natives and newcomers.

With that in mind, the massive downvoting of the parent comment (at -9 at one point) is a dishonest enforcement of political correctness.

Even if you disagree with the conclusions of the linked article, and the other views of that article's author, the comment here is factual and relevant to the topic at hand, and the linked article includes other useful facts about Finland.

If the submission question "What makes Finnish kids so smart?" is legitimate at all -- the study of why one country has different results than others -- discussion has to be free to consider major things that make that country different from others. In Finland's case, that includes its traditional and apparently legally-enforced homogeneity.

I would not want to live in such a place, but I don't want my understanding of such places crippled by a long list of "things you can't say".

mynameishere4• 18 years ago

legally-enforced homogeneity

Honest question: Would you want to live in a country with legally-enforced diversity?

(Because that's where you're living.)

Alex39175• 18 years ago

"the massive downvoting of the parent comment is a dishonest enforcement of political correctness."

I don't read Sailer's blog, but from what I understand it's mainly devoted to proving that African-Americans have lower IQs because of inferior genetics. Now you might say, well if this really is true, then wouldn't denying it be intellectually dishonest? Here's the thing though. The black-white IQ gap has been almost entirely explained by controlling for SES and other factors. Anyone who spends all day quibbling over the last two or three points clearly just has an axe to grind for other reasons.

gruseom3• 18 years ago

I downvoted it, not because of political correctness, but because it seemed like linkbait. The account was only hours old and the post expressed no view of its own.

Also, the reference to "Third World" immigrants struck me as gratuitous, and suggestive in a negative way.

fauigerzigerk• 18 years ago

I agree with most of what you say. But I also think homogenity is not the whole story. How many non spanish speaking kids are there in a typical Mexican classroom? I know Mexico does have an indigenous population, but I think the share of Mexicans who don't speak proper spanish is very low. Probably even lower than that of native swedish or russian speakers in Finland.

My conclusion is that economic and teaching related causes are probably more significant than ethnic ones. I think you would find that mixed language elite schools anywhere in the world rank higher than the average Finnish school. Sadly, it's a poignant feature of most european immigrant populations that they are poor and uneducated. They don't just speak different languages, they don't speak any language particularly well. It's just averaging of course but that's what the PISA test does.

charlesju• 18 years ago

Interesting article, I think that while America has a long way to improve our education system, Americans sell themselves short. America has sprawling metropolises with a lot of urban poor. Trying to improve their education by throwing a couple of books their way is dismissive of the large problem at hand.

But also on the opposite end of the spectrum, we have a lot of the brightest minds in the world. Most of the top universities in the world are based in the United States, and our top students obviously do well in the global arena.

enra4• 18 years ago

I'm Finnish and I would say "I don't know". Article paints quite a rosy picture which isn't necessary true. Finnish schools(elementary to high school) are very boring. There are almost no other activities, no special classes, no school sports(only p.e. for everybody), no advanced classes and teaching is mostly done with books, paper and board.

Teachers maybe still care little bit about there students and think the main difference is that we are expected to learn and know more from the start. I started learning a second language when I was on first grade and third language on fifth grade. The bar is set high for everyone.

Getting to a college through admission test is quite a pain in the ass if you want to study medicine, law, economics or engineering in a decent city(and there is like three). You need about 6months of study and probably a training course for the test.

Edit: And I would say that low immigration helps. Over 12years of schooling, I didn't have a single classmate that didn't speak Finnish as native language.

Philosophaster• 18 years ago

"Teachers maybe still care little bit about there students and think the main difference is that we are expected to learn and know more from the start. I started learning a second language when I was on first grade and third language on fifth grade."

I've heard people speculate that learning more than one language early on encourages a certain "flexibility" of mind that helps with knowledge acquisition in general.

pg2• 18 years ago

There are almost no other activities, no special classes, no school sports (only p.e. for everybody), no advanced classes and teaching is mostly done with books, paper and board.

Maybe this is good.

jmtame• 18 years ago

When I read that part I immediately thought of your essay "Why Nerds are Unpopular."

Maybe there's a bit of psychology at play here. There might be a lower out casting of nerds if the popularity gap is smaller. Going off the essay, maybe it's far more acceptable to become more intelligent (both intellectually and scholastically) in this type of environment.

If that's the case, it sounds like a school full of nerds who are cool with nerds--sign me up!

ericwan• 18 years ago

agree except the sports part.

most of the discussion are of low quality and can be done with a smarter audience on HN or some other newsgroups.

But sports teams are good. it really encourages self-discipline, work ethics, and a competitive spirit.

mixmax• 18 years ago

I'll have a stab at an explanation.

I'm Danish, and I suspect that the Danish school system is similar to the Finnish. It also seems that Danes are held in some regard internationally - so an explanation rooted in the Danish educational system is probably not much off.

The Danish scchool system doesn't only teach you answers, it also teaches you which questions to ask. Schoolkids are encouraged to come up with their own ideas and explanations - and to be able to argue their validity. This ingrains a different kind of knowledge: Instead of kids that are able to recite the periodic table you get kids that are able to explain why it is put together the way it is. I think this is the pivotal point.

I don't think Danish, or Finnish, kids are smarter per se, but they are better at holistic thinking, reasoning and abstract thought because they learn from a young age to ask interesting questions and demand coherent answers.

icky• 18 years ago

> It also seems that Danes are held in some regard internationally

We're actually just flattering you so you won't come pillage our coasts anymore. ;-)

whacked_new2• 18 years ago

Could you explain why having a classmate that didn't speak Finnish natively is helpful for keeping up the bar?

Suppose you have an excellent transfer student who could do everything you did, but not in Finnish. Wouldn't your interaction be some kind of training for effective communication? Assuming again that said student is excellent, you would expect them to pick up the language in about a year, and wouldn't expect they become a hindrance during, would you?

enra4• 18 years ago

I was thinking more about elementary education. I also excluded exchange students since they probably don't take the test. You are right. It could be helpful in other ways, but probably not in the scoring of PISA.

I would assume that learning won't get any easier when you don't know the language. If you get bad start early on, it can hurt you later on or even frustrade you. So even it might be small aspect, it seems that PISA-test rewards for homogenous.

orib• 18 years ago

"Assuming again that said student is excellent"

That's a pretty big assumption. Realistically, they'll be about average. If you have significant numbers of immigrants, many of them will be below average (and many will be above)

Besides, that's still a year in which the teacher has to repeat parts of the lesson for the student, clarify words, and generally move somewhat more slowly to help the new student comprehend what's going on.

papersmith• 18 years ago

Sounds like education in East Asia as well, except classical musical instrument lessons being the only extracurricular activities, which are almost as demanding as schoolworks.

mwerty• 18 years ago

I'm curious about competitiveness: Are your grades public? Do people know how much other people scored in tests, etc.?

enra4• 18 years ago

No. We only have one nation wide test, which is a marticular exam(consisting of atleast four subjects: math, natural/social sciences, Finnish, English) in end of the high school. Even there they only publish(with your permission) if you passed or failed. At the ceremony where you get your final report and certificate, they usually state in loud if you scored Laudatur(10) or Eximia(9)(in scale of 4-10) and thats about public at it gets.

In elementary you only get grades at the end of the school year, and for first years you only get stated that if you're good or not so good in some subjects. At junior high to high school you usually get grades(4-10) on single courses which are then averaged and rounded to annual grades. So particular exam scores are not so important. If you're a good and active student, a one bad exam won't affect your annual grade so much or even at all.

So grades aren't public, but usually other students and teachers know who is doing well and who isn't.

And I would add that none of our exams are multiple choice. In social sciences they are mostly essays and open questions, in languages vocabularity, listening, grammar, and writing tasks, math is math, and natural sciences are math and essays/open questions. So you cannot probably even fully compare your answers since sometimes there are more than one right answer and a way to answer it.

indiejade• 18 years ago

There's probably a correlation with being a "happy" country: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24371878/

mynameishere4• 18 years ago

The climate is pretty bad in the US for teachers.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_1_how_i_joined.html

...not every school is like that obviously, but particularily chaotic institutions will drag down the average.

wave• 18 years ago

Then why is the US the most innovative country in the world? I am not saying the others aren’t, but overall the US is the most innovative regardless of the poor schools. Maybe it doesn’t really matter who earns the top scores, it is what you accomplish with it.

neilk• 18 years ago

The USA rewards innovation and has the least friction applied to people trying to innovate.

This doesn't have anything to do with the question of whether the average student in the US is learning anything.

I can walk into any building in Silicon Valley and the Indians will come close to outnumbering the natives (and if the battle were held on a syllable-by-syllable basis, a clear loss for the home team.) It seems to me sometimes that Silicon Valley built something great based on widely available, merit-based, quality public education. Then around the 1970s they stopped funding that and started to rely only on prodigies from wealthy families, or outlier freaks from America, and the educational product of all the other countries.

unalone5• 18 years ago

The thing about the U.S. is that it encourages competition particularly in lower levels - not within the school system entirely, but also partially despite it.

The way public school systems are set up, you get multiple social spheres that are forced to interact. You've got the sports group - the people who push away their boredom for school with a fascination for physical activity. There're the honor students, or whatever you want to call them - the people who study for hours a day, who partake in activities with Machiavellian efficiency. The ones who will do anything as long as it means a shot at the Ivies.

Those are the two ones people know and talk about. The one that ISN'T mentioned, the one that absolutely exists, is the smaller sphere of people who know what they want to do with their life. It's always a set of bright students, but students that have no seeming motivation toward school. They're just as real a group as the other two, but they have no need to announce their presence, so they're really often missed when people talk about them. They're the people, I think, that really propel innovation.

The interesting thing is that beyond a sort of personal drive, those people tend to have nothing outwardly in common. There're very nerdy people in that group and there are people as far from nerds as they come. Quiet people, loud people. They blend between the other spheres - despite a focus on things not school-related, a ton of them go to really top-notch schools. I'd put myself in this category. I very rarely put an effort into any part of school, did no work, and I'm still going to a really top-notch public school. It's not an Ivy, it's not what I've been told for a long time I ought to be striving for, but I've known for a long time what I want to do with life and I don't think that an Ivy League school can help me any more than a really good school can. Me and people like me become part of the statistic that drag schools down a lot. The sports sphere helps a lot, because the sports sphere is the sort that really shouldn't be kept in schools, because the sports sphere just doesn't care. But among the top-tiered students, it's the ones that don't care about standardized testing or academics at all that keep American schools so low.

That's also a huge boon for America, though. I can't talk about other generations, but in this generation it's entirely likely that by the time we're all going to college a lot of us have tried our hands at several things and dabbled in them. A lot of us have some semblance of "real world" experience, in other words. I tried my hand at a web start-up in my sophomore year. In my senior year I published a book. Neither thing is world-changing, but it means that as I work on web development today, when I try writing again, I've got a lot of experience as to what learns and what doesn't. A friend of mine has been learning how to code and create models for game design since something like eighth grade. A bunch of my friends have launched sites and blogs of their own; one friend was mentioned on G4 for a tutorial he wrote. This isn't a particularly exceptional school I'm at, either; nearly every school I know the name of has its share of breakthrough kids.

I can only speak for my culture, not for others. But it seems to me that paradoxically, it's America's inability to handle kids like that that makes its school system so effective in delivering innovation. When you have a culture of youth that's already experienced and capable of learning from its mistakes, you have a core generation that has an edge over even the best-taught students from the rest of the world. You get a sort of encouragement of big ideas and of youth. You grow up hearing stories about Bill Gates at 19 and Steve Jobs at 21; about the Beatles and the Beach Boys and about all the musicians who started in grade school. (Incidentally, I think that the fact that there are no real writers who made it that young corresponds to the fact that so few young people want to be writers.) We get stories about Welles making Citizen Kane at an age when most graduates are just looking for jobs. It teaches this idea that it doesn't matter what your grades are, because you could be getting things done rather than studying, and that introduces a whole new aspect on to your world.

jbrun• 18 years ago

Part of the reason surely has to do with the economy. In Finland, two sectors are highly subsidized via R&D: Information Technology (Nokia) and Forestry (which is highly scientific).

Interesting article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071127....

These two drivers for the economy surely reinforce the importance of science and math in school. Students are more focused on areas of study with practical applications (jobs) in their own country - hence high math and science scores. And where you have more competition you have a positive feedback look (Kenyan Runners: http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2007/11/kenyan-runne...)

My two cents anyways.

vlad• 18 years ago

This might do it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126617

Television educates you even when you watch Beverly Hills 90210.

nazgulnarsil• 18 years ago

I'm going to go out on a limb and say it probably has something to do with culture. a culture that promotes a education is going to churn out more curious, creative people. And i don't mean "stay in school kids" commercials, I mean in all the unspoken assumptions about the world that are communicated from parents and other authority figures from a young age. You can't fake enthusiasm about education. The U.S. currently does not have it, so of course kids are smart enough to pick up on this and place education further down their priority list.

helveticaman• 18 years ago

Hackers, please. Let's get real here. Why are Finns so smart? It probably has very little to do with culture, teaching methods, or economics. These can all be limitations (I suspect oppressive teaching hinders Japanese kids), but Finland's secret is not related to any of these. It's related to biology. Finland's secret is brain size.

Mother nature doesn't fuck around. If your brain and its activity costs you anywhere from a fifth to a third of your metabolic energy, it's for a reason. This essentially amounts to all the discretionary spending your body has. That brain had better pull its weight, and it does. Skull size correlates with brain weight; brain weight determines surface area; surface area determines processor power.

Again, if your brain could be a smaller part of your metabolism, it would be. Mother nature squeezes every calorie for all it's worth. So there is an advantage in having a larger brain. And that advantage translates to being smarter. "Smarter" isn't a particularly mysterious quality either; in biology, it's basically how good you are at deciding what to do with your muscles. In the scheme of things, balance doesn't require much processing power; neither does homeostasis. What is really resource intensive is good old thinking. Writing requires forming markov chains. Memorizing is hard too. Understanding physics is also hard. Thinking--just plain old thinking--is very resource intensive.

So, why are Finnish kids so smart? Well, the PISA test doesn't convince me they're that smart. They strike me as being about as smart as white American kids. Thing is, the intelligence of Finns is not averaged out with the intelligence of people of other ethnic groups, who, regrettably, have smaller brains.

And before you call me racist, keep this in mind that the argument for different intelligence levels across races is borne out by a data set comprising millions of standardized test-score results, tens of thousands of autopsies, across many different countries, spanning centuries. The correlations have R-values in the .8 and above range. Don't call me racist; call Reality racist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain#Brain_energy_consumption http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Watson#Statement_claim... http://www.americancivilrightsreview.com/africanfailure.html

ayin• 18 years ago

This PISA test is ridiculous as a standard to measure the general intelligence. 400,000 is not a very big sample size in certain countries. It seems that this method measures more of the homogeneity of the education level of a country rather than the smartness of its students.

I'm curious about the sampling method of this test, it's really hard to select a representative sample among diversity such as U.S.

That being said, I do agree with the way a lot of classes are taught in American public schools. Especially the projects where students "glue things on a poster for an hour", mindless things like that really waste time and energy better used in something else.

And I cant help but think that Finnish kids really dont have much to do compared to people at other countries? They might as well do really well in their studies!

What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?

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