Why Finland has the best schools

With the apparent way education is going in the USA, what would we have to lose by trying a new approach?


Op-Ed
Why Finland has the best schools

OK, I wasn't just blindly following Gardner — I had a position as a lecturer at the University of Eastern Finland for a semester. But the point is that, for five months, my wife, my son and I experienced a stunningly stress-free, and stunningly good, school system. Finland has a history of producing the highest global test scores in the Western world, as well as a trophy case full of other recent No. 1 global rankings, including most literate nation.

In Finland, children don't receive formal academic training until the age of 7. Until then, many are in day care and learn through play, songs, games and conversation. Most children walk or bike to school, even the youngest. School hours are short and homework is generally light.

Unlike in the United States, where many schools are slashing recess, schoolchildren in Finland have a mandatory 15-minute outdoor free-play break every hour of every day. Fresh air, nature and regular physical activity breaks are considered engines of learning. According to one Finnish maxim, “There is no bad weather. Only inadequate clothing.”

One evening, I asked my son what he did for gym that day. “They sent us into the woods with a map and compass and we had to find our way out,” he said.

Finland doesn't waste time or money on low-quality mass standardized testing. Instead, children are assessed every day, through direct observation, check-ins and quizzes by the highest-quality “personalized learning device” ever created — flesh-and-blood teachers.

In class, children are allowed to have fun, giggle and daydream from time to time. Finns put into practice the cultural mantras I heard over and over: “Let children be children,” “The work of a child is to play,” and “Children learn best through play.”


But what if the opposite is true?

What if high-poverty students are the children most urgently in need of the benefits that, for example, American parents of means obtain for their children in private schools, things that Finland delivers on a national public scale — highly qualified, highly respected and highly professionalized teachers who conduct personalized one-on-one instruction; manageable class sizes; a rich, developmentally correct curriculum; regular physical activity; little or no low-quality standardized tests and the toxic stress and wasted time and energy that accompanies them; daily assessments by teachers; and a classroom atmosphere of safety, collaboration, warmth and respect for children as cherished individuals?

Why should high-poverty students deserve anything less?

One day last November, when the first snow came to my part of Finland, I heard a commotion outside my university faculty office window, which is close to the teacher training school's outdoor play area. I walked over to investigate.

The field was filled with children savoring the first taste of winter amid the pine trees. My son was out there somewhere, but the children were so buried in winter clothes and moving so fast that I couldn't spot him. The noise of children laughing, shouting and singing as they tumbled in the fresh snow was close to deafening.

“Do you hear that?” asked the recess monitor, a special education teacher wearing a yellow safety smock.

“That,” she said proudly, “is the voice of happiness.”

William Doyle is a 2015-2016 Fulbright scholar and a lecturer on media and education at the University of Eastern Finland. His latest book is “PT 109: An American Epic of War, Survival and the Destiny of John F. Kennedy.”

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http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0318-doyle-finnish-schools-20160318-story.html

 

Left wing teachers unions prefer a rigid system and political indoctrination. Freedom as described in Finnish schools stands no chance here.

If you sent a bunch of American kids into the woods with a compass, half would get lost and run over while crossing a highway. The other half would be sexually violated by the bully in the group. Then there would be years of lawsuits. No school administrator would take a risk like that.

 

When it is cold as a witch's boob 18 months a year, kids have nothing better to do than their schoolwork.

 

Differences in scale. What's the population of Finland. The US is 330 million roughly. Most of our kids are in daycare by the time they can walk because mom has to work to pay the bills or if they aren't making at least 6 figures between them grandma and grandpa are raising the kids during the day till they reach school age.

 

Leading the western world is a pretty low bar, it must be said.

Why wouldn't you aim for 'leading the world'?

 

Finland is a homogenous country of 5 million people and no inner cities as we know them. The cultural differences are immense. If you were to take the exact Finnish schooling system and put it into inner city Detroit, you would not come out with glowing results. The primary problem in Detroit is cultural, not the schooling system. That's not to say that new ideas aren't welcome, but lets stop pretending like Finland is a valid comparison.

 

Detroit is only a part of America. The comparison is that in both America, and Finland, we're dealing with children. Further, how could we do worse then we're doing right now in our inner cities?

 

Quite the opposite.

 

My wife reviewed studies on this while working at Portland Public Schools. She says it's all true. Studies show that kids do better when they get frequent activity mixed with studies like this. Right wing politics and voter ignorance of the facts stand in the way of such reforms.

 

Detroit and all the other inner cities are indeed only a part of America..........The part that brings down our standardized test scores. If you were to take Detroit and include it into the Finnish school system, it would cause Finland's test scores to drop too.

 

wow. Are you so sure of your pessimism? Really? Nothing good to contribute? The concept of standardized test scores was a very bad idea by Republicans. It ruined education. One-size-fits-all doesn't work with humans.

 

Indeed.

 

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=197990900710284

 

As usual, you are wrong. You can thank LBJ for laying the groundwork for standardized testing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_and_Secondary_Education_Act

 

In finland they are dealing with finnish children. This would never work with black children.//

And we could do worse when the black kids burn the school down.

 

NOt familiar at all with the American education system are you?

 

Again you have no idea what you are talking about we've had standardized testing since FDR and his henchmen first put such things into play in the thirties. The purpose of testing is to ascertain whether the requisite material has been learned.

 

Really? Now would it work for black children in Finland? Or, are black's brains wired differently? And why would less pressure lead a child to burn a school down?

 

I think the one thing that got ignored was to have that system one would need much smaller classroom sizes and greater teacher autonomy.

 

There is a difference in academic performance between white, asian, hispanic, and black children in the US, even ones in the same school, so are arguing that you could replace Finnish students in a Finnish like school with African American children and they would have the same results as Finns?

 

It is also my understanding that in Finland, a teacher is a highly respected professional as a doctor would be- and paid as such. Parents attend conferences reliably, and are supportive, cooperative and grateful. I saw a mention of the frequent practice of parents bringing gifts of appreciation to teachers to thank them for what was being done for their children, and asking how they could help. Imagine that level of objectivity and cooperation in the US.... I doubt you could find a teacher anywhere here that has experienced it. Parental attitude and recognition of the nature of the learning and growing process seems to be far greater in Finland than the USA, and the results show it works.

 

"There is a difference in academic performance between white, asian, hispanic, and black children in the US, even ones in the same school, so are arguing that you could replace Finnish students in a Finnish like school with African American children and they would have the same results as Finns?"

Ah, this is about Finland's approach to education, and what we might be able to learn from it. I'm not sure why some in here want to concentrate on African Americans as if their a different species that should be ruled out of the conversation?

 

Wow, how disingenuous can one post be? Why, in affluent areas mostly popoulated by suburban republicans do their schools work so well? Seems the local control of the schools, in republican areas, decidedly refutes the validity of this post in all ways. So, the "right wing politics" bs is just that, bs. Want to know what kills education? Teacher unions, bureaucracy, overhead, etc. Feel free to reply.

 

Am I so sure of what pessimism? ....Do you mean the notion that you could institute the Finnish system in the Detroit Public Schools and it wouldn't magically transform Detroit Public Schools into scoring as high as Finland?....Oh I'm QUITE sure.

Finland is a homogenous country of 5 million people, with no inner cities as we know the term. We could cherry pick lots of pockets of 5 million within our country to undoubtedly score as high or higher than Finland, but when you include our inner city cesspools with high school graduation rates around 20%, in the aggregate, we can never compete with the 5 million in Finland. Success in school is mostly a function of culture. This process also works in reverse. Its not that private schools are really that much better at educating students, its that private schools have students that come from families that put a huge emphasis on education. When parents spend 10-20k per year per child to attend school, you can rest assured that is a family that stresses education, and in the aggregate, private schools are going to show superior results because they are filled with children from families that REALLY stress education.

By no means could you take a really successful high end private school, have them take over Detroit Public Schools, and then magically Detroit Public Schools are going to perform at the same level. Of course it wouldn't. The OP is making the same mistake. Just because Finland or a private school shows better results, does not automatically mean that their method of teaching is better. I'm all for new ideas and perhaps there are some good ideas in the Finnish system worth contemplating, but lets not point to aggregate results from two entirely different populations, and pretend like we are comparing apples to apples, because we are not.

 

Because comparing the Finnish approach to the US one is comparing apples to oranges because of the racial diversity in the US.

Chinese schools also outperform US schools also and they take exactly the opposite approach the Finns do and are highly structured.