Finland Education Quotes

If we all think the same way, none of us probably thinks very much.

Education became Finland’s best hope for preparing its population for a new economy based not on agriculture or manufacturing, but on knowledge.

It has become clear everywhere that the schools we have today will not be able to provide opportunities for students to learn what is necessary in the future.

The third aspect of change is a systematic development of respectful and inspiring working conditions for teachers and principals in Finnish schools.

The law on basic education in Finland specifically states that after school and homework, students should still be allowed time for hobbies and rest.

The secret of the Finland phenomenon, Wagner discovered, was a platform it built by elevating the education level of its teachers. Finland’s public school system was experiencing the same thing that made Harvard University’s curriculum and network the envy of the academic world: it hired only teachers with incredible qualifications and it had them mentor students closely. Thus, students who went to school at Harvard—or in Finland—started out a rung above their peers.

Free education, almost free healthcare, a generous benefits system and a better state pension than elsewhere, guarantee equal opportunities for all citizens. The only problem is that all these require a considerable amount of public revenue. This is why the common assertion that to be born in Finland is like winning the jackpot in the lottery is only applicable when you are at the receiving end. A far more common experience is that you need to win the lottery just to cover the tax bill.

The more time I spent in Finland, the more I started to worry that the reforms sweeping across the United States had the equation backwards. We were trying to reverse engineer a high-performance teaching culture through dazzlingly complex performance evaluations and value-added data analysis. It made sense to reward, train, and dismiss more teachers based on their performance, but that approach assumed that the worst teachers would be replaced with much better ones, and that the mediocre teachers would improve enough to give students the kind of education they deserved. However, there was not much evidence that either scenario was happening in reality.

Yes, Finland and the United States are different. But consider the fact that most American education is managed by the states. Finland’s population of 5.5 million is easily comparable to many an American state. In fact, more than half of America’s states—thirty of them—have populations smaller than Finland’s. Solely on the question of size, there’s no reason any number of states in the United States couldn’t implement a system just like Finland’s.

Do preschoolers need all the trappings of elementary school . . . ? The faux academic overstimulation? The enforced choices? The cult-like obsession with readiness? I would say, mostly, they do not. And I think some of these trappings, such as the notorious print-rich environments we encountered with their busy totems to industriousness, can actually interfere with the task of becoming a good communicator and a literate person. We spend a lot of energy on creating print-rich environments but that’s not at all the same thing as creating a language-rich environment. Consider again the hope that Finland offers; its guidelines for preprimary (preschool) education remind us that: “The basis for emerging literacy is that children have heard and listened, they have been heard, they have spoken and been spoken to, people have discussed things with them, and they have asked questions and received answers.” For our young children, what else is there to wish for?

The same question might be asked about the educational system. In 2016, an American professor and Fulbright scholar named William Doyle, just returned from a semester-long appointment at the University of Eastern Finland, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that for those five months, his family “experienced a stunningly stress-free, and stunningly good, school system.” His seven-year-old son was placed in the youngest class—not because of some developmental delay, but because children younger than seven “don’t receive formal academic training . . . Many are in day care and learn through play, songs, games and conversation.” Once in school, children get a mandated fifteen-minute outdoor recess break for every forty-five minutes of in-class instruction. The educational mantras Doyle remembers hearing the most while there: “‘Let children be children,’ ‘The work of a child is to play,’ and ‘Children learn best through play.’” And as far as outcomes go? Finland consistently ranks at or near the top of educational test score results in the Western world and has been ranked the most literate nation on Earth.[17] “The message that competition is appropriate, desirable, required, and even unavoidable is drummed into us from nursery school to graduate school; it is the subtext of every lesson,” writes educational consultant Alfie Kohn in his excellent book No Contest: The Case Against Competition: Why We Lose in Our Race to Win, which documents the negative impact of competition on genuine learning, and how

The national curriculum for the Swedish preschool is twenty pages long and goes on at length about things like fostering respect for one another, human rights, and democratic values, as well as a lifelong desire to learn. The document's word choices are a pretty good clue to what Swedish society wants and expects from toddlers and preschoolers. The curriculum features the word "play" thirteen times, "language" twelve times, "nature" six times, and "math" five times. But there is not a single mention of "literacy" or "writing." Instead, two of the most frequently used words are "learning" (with forty-eight appearances) and "development" (forty-seven). The other Scandinavian countries have similar early childhood education traditions. In Finland, formal teaching of reading doesn't start until the child begins first grade, at age seven, and in the Finnish equivalent of kindergarten, which children enroll in the year they turn six, teachers will only teach reading if a child is showing an interest in it. Despite this lack of emphasis on early literacy, Finland is considered the most literate country in the world, with Norway coming in second, and Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden rounding out the top five, according to a 2016 study by Central Connecticut State University. John Miller, who conducted the study, noted that the five Nordic countries scored so well because "their monolithic culture values reading.

Finnish education appears paradoxical to outside observers because it seems to break a lot of the rules. In Finland, “less is more.” Children don’t start academics1 until the year they turn seven. They have a lot of recess (ten to fifteen minutes every forty-five minutes, even through high school), shorter school hours than we do in the United States (Finnish children spend nearly three hundred fewer hours2 in elementary school per year than Americans), and the lightest homework load of any industrialized nation. There are no gifted programs, few private schools, and no high-stakes national standardized tests. Yet over the past decade, Finland has consistently performed at the top on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to fifteen-year-olds in nations around the world. While American children3 usually hover around the middle of the pack on this test, Finland’s excel.

In Finland, all education schools were selective. Getting into a teacher-training program there was as prestigious as getting into medical school in the United States. The rigor started in the beginning, where it belonged, not years into a teacher’s career with complex evaluation schemes designed to weed out the worst performers, and destined to demoralize everyone else. A teacher union advertisement from the late 1980s began with this breathtaking boast: “A Finnish teacher has received the highest level of education in the world.” Such a claim could never have been made in the United States, or in most countries in the world.

In one of our conversations, she told me about Finland’s development of sisu, a rough cognate for grit. Etymologically, sisu denotes a person’s viscera, their “intestines (sisucunda).” It is defined as “having guts,” intentional, stoic, constant bravery in the face of adversity. 21 For Finns, sisu is a part of national culture, forged through their history of war with Russia and required by the harsh climate. 22 In this Nordic country, pride is equated with endurance. When Finnish mountain climber Veikka Gustafsson ascended a peak in Antarctica, it was named Mount Sisu. The fortitude to withstand war and foreign occupations is lyrically heralded in the Finnish epic poem, The Kalevala. 23 Even the saunas—two million, one for every three Finns in a country of approximately five and a half million—involve fortitude: A sauna roast is often followed by a nude plunge into the ice-cold Baltic Sea. If Iceland is happier than it has any right to be considering the hours the country spends plunged in darkness each year, Finland’s past circumstances, climate, and developed culture have turned it into one of the grittiest. Finland’s educational system is also currently ranked first, ahead of South Korea, now at number two. 24 The United States is midway down the list. 25 In Finland, there is no after-school tutoring or training, no “miracle pedagogy” in the classrooms, where students are on a first-name basis with their teachers, all of whom have master’s degrees. There is also more “creative play.” 26 Perhaps the tradition of sisu and play, I suspect, are part of the larger, unstated reason for its success. 27 “Wouldn’t it be great if you heard people talking about how they were going to do something to build their grit?” Duckworth asked.

The late nineteenth century witnessed the rise of Finnish-language schools and university education, something which mounted a direct challenge to the traditional dominance of Swedish. The result was a nationalist reaction by conservative ‘Svenomans’ who attempted to preserve the status of the Swedish minority. During World War I, they collaborated with the Germans, leading to a 1,900-strong Finland-Swede battalion being trained in Germany.

Finns are rightly proud of the strong foundations of their society. Famously high tax rates mean the nation is well equipped to look after its citizenry with some of the world’s best health care and education. Despite the high excise on alcohol, Finns appreciate the reliable public transport and world-class universities, libraries and other infrastructure these same taxes afford. Like much of the world, the country is holding its breath as ageing baby boomers retire and it attempts to maintain high pensions.

Singapore has found a way to provide cost-effective quality healthcare for its citizens with superior outcomes as 25% the cost of the US and 40% the cost of Europe. Israel has created a start-up ecosystem to rival Silicon Valley. Finland and Singapore consistently rank among the highest in PISA scores although their spending per pupil is among the lowest of OEDC nations. Zwolle, a town in the Netherlands, makes roads out of recycled plastic which are cheaper, last longer and are environmentally friendly. The Dutch pension system is the envy of the world. Swiss citizens passed a law to limit their congress’s ability to impose obligations on future generations, eliminating the moral hazard of elected officials engaging in “buy now, pay later” policy enactments. Ireland, once among the poorest nations in Europe now ranks among its most prosperous. Through its “Citizens Assemblies”, Petri dishes used to form political consensus at the ground level on sensitive matters such as abortion and gay marriage, it has morphed from one of the conservative societies to among the most liberal. New Zealand has just introduced ‘naked vegetables’, requiring produce in supermarkets to be sold without plastic packaging.

Finland had required a matriculation test for 160 years; it was a way to motivate kids and teachers toward a clear, common goal, and it made a high school diploma mean something. Korea rerouted air traffic for their graduation test. Polish kids studied for their tests on nights and weekends, and they arrived for the exam wearing suits, ties, and dresses. In America, however, many people still believed in a different standard, one that explained a great deal about the country’s enduring mediocrity in education: According to this logic, students who passed the required classes and came to school the required number of days should receive their diplomas, regardless of what they had learned or what would happen to them when they tried to get a job at the Bama Companies. Those kids deserved a chance to fail later, not now. It was a perverse sort of compassion designed for a different century.

Which Country Has the Best Readers? One of the most comprehensive international reading studies was conducted by Warwick Elley for the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) in 1990 and 1991. Involving thirty-two countries, it assessed 210,000 nine- and fourteen-year-olds.22 Of all those children, which ones read best? For nine-year-olds, the four top nations were: Finland (569), the United States (547), Sweden (539), and France (531). But the U.S. position dropped to a tie for eighth when fourteen-year-olds were evaluated. This demonstrates that American children begin reading at a level that is among the best in the world, but since reading is an accrued skill and U.S. children appear to do less of it as they grow older, their scores decline when compared with countries where children read more as they mature.

More unusually, the government also made all private schools a part of this system, meaning they became funded by the government and were not allowed to charge fees or select students based on ability. Contrary to popular belief, this means that private schools do still exist in Finland, in that some schools are run by non-state organisations such as the church, but they lack the economic, social or academic selectivity common to private schools in other nations.

Catching children up on their reading in the first few years of elementary school seems to be a big focus here, as it was in Finland. Teachers

How insightful of Finland to devise a topic-based curriculum in their schools! This means that dicreet "subjects" that are taught may cross-fertilise each other, and the possibilities in this are amazing!

Partly thanks to Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy, Finnish musical education is among the best in the world, with Finnish conductors, singers and musicians performing with some of the world’s top orchestras. There are some excellent classical-music festivals in Finland.

The same study reported that countries such as Sweden and Finland have “better academic achievement and child well-being, despite children not starting school until age 7.

MATTERS: The child’s parents are involved in the PTA. DOESN’T: The child frequently watches television. A child whose parents are involved in the PTA tends to do well in school—which probably indicates that parents with a strong relationship to education get involved in the PTA, not that their PTA involvement somehow makes their children smarter. The ECLS data show no correlation, meanwhile, between a child’s test scores and the amount of television he watches. Despite the conventional wisdom, watching television apparently does not turn a child’s brain to mush. (In Finland, whose education system has been ranked the world’s best, most children do not begin school until age seven but have often learned to read on their own by watching American television with Finnish subtitles.) Nor, however, does using a computer at home turn a child into Einstein: the ECLS data show no correlation between computer use and school test scores.

Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?

The national curriculum for the Swedish preschool is twenty pages long and goes on at length about things like fostering respect for one another, human rights, and democratic values, as well as a lifelong desire to learn. The document’s word choices are a pretty good clue to what Swedish society wants and expects from toddlers and preschoolers. The curriculum features the word play thirteen times, language twelve times, nature six times, and math five times. But there is not a single mention of literacy or writing. Instead, two of the most frequently used words are learning (with forty-eight appearances) and development (forty-seven). The other Scandinavian countries have similar early childhood education traditions. In Finland, formal teaching of reading doesn’t start until the child begins first grade, at age seven, and in the Finnish equivalent of kindergarten, which children enroll in the year they turn six, teachers will only teach reading if a child is showing an interest in it. Despite this lack of emphasis on early literacy, Finland is considered the most literate country in the world, with Norway coming in second, and Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden rounding out the top five, according to a 2016 study by Central Connecticut State University. John Miller, who conducted the study, noted that the five Nordic countries scored so well because “their monolithic culture values reading.” They have something else in common: their commitment to play in the early years.