<p>I would highly, highly doubt that Finland is besting USA in innovation, as Finland has a super strict immigration policy and most innovation today is driven by immigration from Asia.</p>
<p>I really have no idea how diversity plays into this. Would anyone care to show me how ethnicity or anything for that matter plays into education? Even in a tiny country such as South Korea, there are many dialects of speech and subcultures. Language can be taught; I have been assimilated into the American culture, no one ever suspects that I was not born here. Is it the culture of the family that plays into this? Well, I can tell you that a lot of South Koreans get jobs right out of high school. However, the mentality is go the best you can. South Korean students are taught English alongside Korean. It is true, however, that the South Korean education is very focused on tests. Essentially imagine a test that is like SAT on steroids. 13 subjects ranging from Chemistry to mathematics. That determines your future. Also in Japan, a similar system is in place. Weeding out the ones who perform lower. Perhaps, that is why Korea and Japan seem to be booming in the technology sector. They weed out the lower performing students early and let only the highest performers go ahead to higher education and beyond. I am not a fan of that system. </p>
<p>[How</a> Finland Reached the Top of the Educational Rankings : NEA Today](<a href=“http://neatoday.org/2010/10/07/how-finland-reached-the-top-of-the-educational-rankings/]How”>http://neatoday.org/2010/10/07/how-finland-reached-the-top-of-the-educational-rankings/)
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<p>Also, how do you expect democracy to work without adequately educated public? The more educated in critical thinking, the less people gobble up the propaganda BS that politicians put up in the media…</p>
<p>Just learned South Korea is #2 in world’s education… Oh the irony, my family immigrated to the US to get a better education…</p>
<p>^ the education system really must have failed you if you can’t imagine how trying to teach people with diverse backgrounds may present a tough set of challenges. What would happen if you dropped a Finn into the middle of a Japanese class? Now throw in a student from Mexico, a couple students from Brazil, two from Algeria, and one from Detroit . I’m guessing that class, which works quite well for students raised in Japan and imbibed with it’s culture and expectations, may not serve these students quite as well. They will consequently do worse on tests and people will point out how terrible Japan’s education system is.</p>
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<p>Which study was that? Have a look at the PISA results, or other regularly conducted international assessments. You can focus the data just on the 'top 5%" performing students…US still comes in MUCH lower than many other countries, including Canada.</p>
<p>Xiggi is absolutely right. Just on the excuse of “homogeneity” of Finland, Canada is just behind Finland on the education front, yet it has a huge amount of diversity (like the US, a country of immigrants).</p>
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<p>In some ways it’s a silly comparison. As a country of about 5 million people, Finland is about 1/60th the size of the U.S., so there’s obviously going to be a lot more innovation going on in the U.S. than in Finland. It’s sort of like asking, “Is Minnesota more innovative than the United States?” And to that, I’d say, “Well, in a way, yes, because Minnesota is more innovative than most parts of the U.S., and more innovative than the entire U.S. on an average or per capita basis; but in a way, no, because there’s obviously a lot more total innovation in the United States just by virtue of its size.” I don’t put a lot of credence in the various innovation “index” or “scorecard” tables out there. Innovation is almost impossible to measure directly, so people try to get at it indirectly with a lot of proxy metrics, but the results depend largely on the particular metrics chosen, and I haven’t seen any particularly convincing ones. But FWIW, the official EU Innovation Scorecard says that rather than comparing the U.S. to individual EU member states, all much smaller, it’s more appropriate to compare the U.S. to the EU. And they rate the U.S. significantly more innovative than the EU as a whole, but within the EU they rate Finland way at the high end, along with Sweden, Denmark, and Germany.</p>
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<p>Really? What about Mark Zuckerberg? Steve Jobs? Larry Page? Larry Ellison? The list goes on and on. I don’t mean to discount the contributions of Asian immigrants, but to say “most innovation today is driven by immigration from Asia” sounds like a real stretch.</p>
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<p>Gujarat 2002 riots / Narendra Modi / BJP ?
Caste discrimination / religion discrimination / Scheduled Caste / Scheduled Tribe / Other Backward Caste ?</p>
<p>This is America, we all speak English.</p>
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<p>Yes, we do have our homegrown far right fascists like Modi. <sigh></sigh></p>
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<p>People at the top hardly drive the real innovation. As it is, R&D in Silicon Valley is often done in India these days.</p>
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<p>Just like a lot of Nokia’s R&D is done in Massachusetts.</p>
<p>Agree. You have to go to the source, always.</p>
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<p>I have no trouble acknowledging that language barriers complicate matters for educators. But at the same time, our schools are failing a lot of native English speakers in almost 100% native-speaker school settings, so you can’t blame that on language barriers. In fact, the data I’ve seen say that Asian immigrants, a significant fraction of whom start with a native language other than English, are on the whole doing quite well, thank you very much, at least relative to other groups. </p>
<p>On the results side there are two problems with our schools. One is the achievement gap between Asian and upper middle class white kids on the high side, and black and Latino kids on the low side. Working class and poor white kids substantially underperform Asians of all socio-economic strata and upper middle class whites, but generally outperform blacks and Latinos. A lot of the Latino kids don’t have English as a first language, but a lot of them do these days, and I don’t think the achievement gap is entirely among the non-native English speakers. Almost all the black kids are native speakers of English, as are the vast majority of the working-class and poor white kids. A significant fraction of the Asian kids aren’t native English speakers. So language can’t account for all of the achievement gap, or even most of it. Not persuaded? Consider this:</p>
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<p>So by some measures, immigration is actually pulling up educational standards in the U.S., not pulling them down.</p>
<p>The other problem is that, even setting aside the racial achievement gap, a lot of our schools, perhaps most, are just doing a crappy job for everyone. Yes, a few high end private schools and upper-middle class suburban schools are doing pretty well even by world standards. But most of our urban schools, most rural schools, and most suburban schools in modest (as opposed to high end) suburbs aren’t. </p>
<p>Bottom line, I think (agreeing with xiggi) “cultural diversity” and “language barriers” are pretty lame excuses. What’s more, if cultural homogeneity were the key to Finland’s success, then every culturally homogeneous country should match Finland’s educational achievements. But clearly they don’t. So there must be something else going on here, possibly something worth learning about. Or maybe as long as our own kids are doing OK, we really just don’t care. That may be the deeper problem.</p>
<p>I really do not see what innovation has to with the theme of this thread. What is next? Counting the numbers of patents by decade and country of origin? </p>
<p>Does it matter if Finland produces more students who will go on to build the next Nokia or Linux? The story here is that some countries have been able to make the correct adjustments required in THEIR country. No, we cannot simply emulate what educators do in Korea, Shanghai, Holland, or Belgium. But, what we can do is evaluate the systemic changes they created. Not everything is worth adopting, but it is better than repeating the same errors we made in the past 60 years … over and over again. </p>
<p>And, fwiw, the very best first step is to recognize that we do, in fact, have serious problems in every level of our education cycle.</p>
<p>its not that hard to explain. maybe they just have more parents that value and care about enforcing education? the whole thing with people not knowing english can be solved very easily. stop giving ESL classes. the sooner you force people to use the language, the sooner they learn. there is absolutely no reason why a person cant be fluent in english after 3 years living in US.</p>
<p>look at the atlanta cheating problem. they are blaming no child left behind for the whole problem. please… why arent all schools cheating then? its not the policy’s fault that most parents and the community doesnt value education as much as they should. teachers are not magicians. teachers can only teach to those that want to learn. hopefully this situation can cause enough alarm to cause some change around atlanta.</p>
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<p>Here we go again. Is it possible that Finnish parents value and care about education? Yes! But probably not more or less than billions of other citizens. I believe that it quite unversak for parents to wish and hope for a better future for their children. However, not every parent does have the ability or knowledge to make it happen. </p>
<p>The changes in Finland (and other countries) are not the result of parental changes. They are the result of decisions made by people who were entrusted to guide the education systen in another direction.</p>
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<p>No, I don’t think that’s it at all. As xiggi explained somewhere upthread, the Finns take the view that education is NOT the parents’ responsibility. It’s the students’ responsibility, the teachers’ responsibility, the schools’ responsibility, and ultimately the government’s responsibility, but it’s not the parents’ responsibility. They reward teachers with social prestige that teachers here just aren’t accorded, and consequently they attract a very large and very talented pool from which they select the very best to become primary and secondary school teachers. Our reward system doesn’t work like that; yes, some very talented people go into K-12 teaching, but it’s generally seen as a low-paying and not a prestigious job, bogged down in bureaucratic rules, and filled mostly by graduates of mediocre state teachers’ colleges many of whom couldn’t get into better schools (with apologies to all the teachers out there who don’t fit that description, but you know who your colleagues are). They give their teachers outstanding training; we don’t really have anything comparable, at least not as a regular required part of qualifying to become a teacher. They don’t tie the teachers’ hands with a lot of bureaucracy and highly prescriptive rules. But they do require that teachers give a lot of individualized attention to the students who are struggling with the material, so that everyone advances together. And as I understand it they have no qualms about reassigning, removing, or retraining teachers who just aren’t getting the job done. And they get results. </p>
<p>This did not happen overnight, it didn’t happen by accident, and it didn’t happen by parents suddenly deciding to “enforce” educational standards. They decided as a society that education needed to be a top priority, and they went about overhauling a middling educational system, testing and experimenting and noodling and drawing on the best literature and best thinking on how to do this until they found methods that worked. It’s a rather remarkable success story.</p>
<p>Bclintonk, thank you for describing the Finnish system in more eloquent terms than I did. And fwiw, it is nice to find a subject where we can agree. :)</p>
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<p>Is that a good model? Shouldn’t parents have at least some responsibility for their kids’ education?</p>
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<p>If the schools aren’t doing a good job or are only hit-and-miss, then absolutely, the parents need to be involved. That’s the case in this country. But if the schools are consistently doing a good job, as seems to be the case in Finland, then no, parental involvement may not be necessary. And in a way parental involvement might even be unhelpful, because if the teachers are successfully performing at a high professional level and getting their students to achieve at a high level, then the unprofessional, half-informed, and self-serving interference of parents might simply screw up that process. </p>
<p>There are certain situations where we just trust the professionals. If your kid os going through basic training in the Marine Corps, you don’t touch base with that kid every night to keep him motivated, or schedule a meeting with the drill instructor to lobby for special treatment for your kid. If your kid is training to be a military officer at West Point, you pretty much don’t get involved. If your kid is training for an Olympic athletic competition, you leave it to the kid and the coaches. If your kid is in medical school, you don’t interfere. In all those situations we trust the professionals to get in right. We don’t trust the professionals in K-12 education because we’re not sure they’re professionals, and we’re not sure they’re getting it right. If they are highly skilled, well-trained professionals who are getting it right, then parental involvement may not be necessary, or warranted.</p>