

There Is No Homework In Finland - caffeinewriter
http://neomam.com/infographics/there-is-no-homework-in-finland/

======
Tuna-Fish
There's so much wrong with that infographic I don't even know where to start.

There is homework in Finland. I have no clue where that idea came from. The
Finnish education system doesn't really match up well enough with the USA that
"high school" can be compared. A Finnish student typically starts elementary
school at 7, and spends 6 years in lower elementary. Then they move to upper
elementary and spend 3 years there. This is where the "responsibility to
learn" ends, and every school past that is voluntary. Past those 9 years,
students generally choose between vocational school or a _lukio_ , which is
sort of like high school that provides general teaching. I have no clue what
that 93% number means, but it is certainly not "proportion of age class that
completes _lukio_ ", as less than that sign up for one.

Finnish PISA scores, and all other lower educational metrics are anomalously
high when compared to similar peers worldwide. A lot of things are pointed out
as reasons for this, but most of those features are also valid, for example,
for other Nordic countries whose students don't perform nearly as well.

Personally, I think the difference is mostly the language. Finnish language is
notoriously hard to learn, but Finnish written language is very regular and
phonetic. This means that elementary school students spend _a lot_ less time
learning to read and write than students in almost any other countries. This
saves much time at an early age, which can then be used to learn other useful
subjects, giving Finnish students a head start on their foreign peers. A lot
of us, including me, actually taught ourselves to read before school with
little more than repeatedly annoying our parents by asking "What does this
letter sound like?".

Then again, I might just be another idiot assigning my pet cause for a
measured effect of uncertain origin.

I wonder how students fare in other countries with phonetic written languages?
As I understand, Turkey is one, and their scores are not very high. Could
someone describe the Turkish education system a little?

~~~
lazyant
Spanish, German, Italian are other "phonetic" languages (if that means that
they are pronounced the way they are written), I think the difference is that
kids learn to read/write a couple of years earlier.

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cs702
In Finland, teachers are selected from the top 10% of college graduates.[1]

In the US, nearly half of all new teachers come from the bottom third of
college graduates.[2]

Homework or no homework, Finnish students are learning directly from -- and
personally interacting with -- some of the brightest minds in their country,
every day.

\--

[1] [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-
Finlands...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands-
Schools-Successful.html)

[2]
[http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education...](http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education/Closing_the_talent_gap.pdf)

~~~
mathattack
When you combine the top 10% with a 12 to 1 student to teacher ratio, great
things can happen. This seems more like the US private school model.

I'm surprised they didn't mention that Finnish students start school at 7
years old. [1]

I would be interested to find out about the dispersion of the Finnish results.
Do they huddle around the mean, or are there very positive outliers? I don't
have any personal data points, and haven't seen anything published on this.

[1] [http://www.thedailyriff.com/articles/the-finland-
phenomenon-...](http://www.thedailyriff.com/articles/the-finland-phenomenon-
inside-the-worlds-most-surprising-school-system-588.php)

------
pflats
According to the article, 7% of Finnish children don't graduate high school,
compared to 25% of US children.

22% of US children live in poverty. 4% of Finnish children live in poverty.[1]

Strange.

Furthermore, it's my personal policy that anyone who creates an infographic
with a bar graph that starts at 520 and goes up to 570 should be ignored.
Either they are trying to intentionally skew interpretation of the data by
presenting it in a misleading fashion, or they don't know enough about
mathematics to understand why their graph is misleading. Neither one presents
a reliable source.

[1][http://www.nationmaster.com/compare/Finland/United-
States/Ec...](http://www.nationmaster.com/compare/Finland/United-
States/Economy)

~~~
wklauss
Yes, Finland is a great country to live in. Also Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
But people start loosing interest the moment you mention taxation.

This things don't come cheap and in the US is hard to sell the idea of "high
taxes = better quality of life".

~~~
cesarbs
Some of my colleagues at Microsoft have worked in Denmark and they all
complain about the taxation there and consider it unacceptable. I honestly
can't understand that. I'd rather give half my salary in taxes to the
government and get free education, healthcare and whatnot. My wife and I
definitely don't aspire to be rich, as long as we're comfortable we're ok, so
maybe that's our difference.

What I don't get is how people in the US pay 25% income tax and don't get
outraged for getting almost nothing back. Heck, we just put our daughter in
public school, and even though it's a public school we have to pay $360 a
month for full Kindergarten, otherwise she can only attend 2 hours a day.
Besides that, the school has to promote fundraisers to cover their costs,
because apparently the only thing the state pays for is teachers' salaries. At
least 911 is free.

To me it feels like all taxes I pay in the US are mostly just for funding wars
:( Even in a shitty country like Brazil you get free education (up to grad
school - and state universities are the best in the country), free healthcare
and a state pension when you retire. Sure, it all sucks one way or another
[1], not because there's not enough money but because politicians down there
are extremely corrupt - fix the corruption and you get a tremendous quality of
life with a 27,5% income tax.

[1] Public healthcare varies from place to place - where I lived (Porto
Alegre, RS) it was ok, but in poorer places they don't have a lot of necessary
equipment and are understaffed. Although state universities have a lot of
research funding and the best professors, the facilities are quite poor. And
the state pension is very low, but that could be fixed by fixing the high
level of corruption we have first.

~~~
berntb
Well, first let me say that the US health care system seems like the worst one
in the Western world. We skip comparing with that.

[Edit: In Scandinavia] If you pay taxes for health care etc -- then someone
else decides the priorities. This is potentially very bad for _you_. After
paying taxes, you won't have enough money/insurance to go do expensive
treatments in other places.

(Edit: Let me put it like this. Health care is centrally planned. Consider the
size of that system per million people and realize it is very, very hard to
make it work.)

My standard example, from me and others I know:

Sweden (and probably Finland) are internationally acknowledged to be bad at
catching health problems. Doctors have lots of administration and just don't
have enough time to do diagnosis for individual patients.

The worst part is that the doctors will tell you something, anything, to get
you out of their hair.

(Anecdotally, Swedish doctors take jobs in Norway partly to get a chance to do
their d-mn _job_.)

Me and others I know have had _decades_ with e.g. losing your favorite sports
(easily treated knee problems), tiredness (undiagnosed food allergies with few
symptoms, lack of X, etc). And so on.

I have no idea if 0.5% or 10% of the population get their life quality
seriously lowered by this. And no one else know either, since that question
just isn't examined...

~~~
cesarbs
I had never considered that "who sets the priorities" angle. Thanks for
pointing that out :) I just wish healthcare in the US wasn't so ridiculously
expensive.

------
Zelphyr
Except you read all the comments in that article and the people from Finland
all say they do have homework.

While not as linkbaity perhaps it should be retitled, "Finland has an
excellent education system."

~~~
sp332
I also doubt that the average US 5th grader has 50 minutes of homework every
day.

~~~
MattGrommes
I don't know what the actual average is but as a parent of middle-schoolers
that sounds right. I've always fought my kids' teachers to keep them from
wasting too much time doing homework but if I didn't they'd probably have at
least this much. A friend of my wife had to email her son's 6th grade teacher
the other day explaining that the son was sent to bed early and could "only"
spend 4 hours on the homework that _day_.

~~~
nissimk
US party line seems to be 10 minutes per grade:

[http://www.nea.org/tools/16938.htm](http://www.nea.org/tools/16938.htm)

But many parents report that their kids require far longer to complete the
assignments. When my son had more than 15 - 20 minutes of homework in 1st
grade (5 repetitions of "write a sentence in Spanish that includes the
following word") last year we told him to stop and we sent a note to the
teacher. I have a friend whose kid takes 2 - 3 times longer than his
classmates to finish his homework. It's hard to tell if it is helpful or not
for him, but he's definitely not happy about it and he's still a small kid.

------
ianb
Interesting about the Master's Degree. In the U.S. teacher education seems
unrelated to performance, including Master's Degrees. Which isn't how it
should be. It makes me wonder if one of our great flaws here is in how we
teach teachers.

~~~
thejteam
If you have seen what constitutes a "masters" degree for teachers you wouldn't
be surprised. Honors high school courses are more rigorous. This is not an
exaggeration. My wife has taken several "masters" level teaching courses. They
were easier than all of the intro level classes at our undergraduate college.

The flaw is this: We need a certain number of teachers. Teachers are required
to get a masters degree or they stop getting raises. So teaching colleges make
it easy for anybody to get teaching masters degrees.

------
Matti
For somewhat less idealistic blog posts on education, Educationrealist is
worth reading:

[http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/2012-in-
rev...](http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/2012-in-review/)

[http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/most-
popula...](http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/most-popular-
posts-and-favorites/)

------
devilsadvocate9
When you adjust American PISA scores for demographics, you see that Americans
of all ethnic backgrounds do better than the countries of their ancestors[1].
The mystery of why American schools are so bad disappears when you control for
demographics.

This might also explain the mystery of why Finland scores so much higher than
Sweden and Norway. There are much higher levels of third world immigration in
the latter countries. The school system is not the only difference.

[1] [http://www.vdare.com/articles/pisa-scores-show-demography-
is...](http://www.vdare.com/articles/pisa-scores-show-demography-is-destiny-
in-education-too-but-washington-doesnt-want-you-to-k)

~~~
lyudmil
Why would comparing those two scores make any sense? The US has a good
education system if you compare it to the world average. It's no surprise that
people in that system would do better than wherever their ancestors are from
because the US is virtually guaranteed to outperform a randomly chosen place
in the world.

~~~
eshvk
> Why would comparing those two scores make any sense? The US has a good
> education system if you compare it to the world average. It's no surprise
> that people in that system would do better than wherever their ancestors are
> from because the US is virtually guaranteed to outperform a randomly chosen
> place in the world.

Because that says that Finnish-Americans do better than Finnish people in
Finland?

------
eshvk
I am not sure what to make of this:

1\. Sure high school graduation rates are higher in Finland than in the U.S.,
can you actually compare those across the board? Is what a high schooler
studies in Finland the same as what they study in the U.S.? Maybe there are
other societal issues why people drop out in the U.S. compared to Finland
which I understand has a homogenous largely white population.

2\. So there is no homework in Sweden? So fucking what? There is lots of
homework in India and China. If I understand correctly, those guys are
supposed to be eating our lunch?

3\. The teachers have masters degrees; yet it is not clear to me how adding
two more years of education is going to magically transform our education
system?

4\. The only thing that seems intriguing to me is individual attention. Good
classroom ratios. Yet is that feasible to scale up in the U.S.?

~~~
dirtyaura
Finland's success in Pisa scores is the reason that these practices are
highlighted. Although homogenous population plays a role, Finnish scores are
constantly better than almost equally homogenous Norway.

However, the true reason behind the success of Finnish school system is yet
unclear. One thing that certainly plays an important role is that teacher as a
profession has traditionally been highly regarded in Finnish society, and it's
not trivial to get in to universities to study teaching.

There are other interesting aspects, for example does the language play a
role: Finland has an affluent Swedish-speaking minority. There a separate
schools for Swedish speakers, but they follow similar practices as the rest of
the Finnish schooling system. However, for some odd reason doesn't fare as
well in Pisa tests than Finnish speaking students, despite that family
background of Swedish speakers have traditionally been more stable.

~~~
sampo
Here's some theory (very non-mainstream, I would assume) and discussion along
lines similar to what you wrote:

[http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.fi/](http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.fi/)

------
mushishi
I'm Finnish, and saying that there's no homework is utter misinformation. You
do have time to do exercises during the class, and if you're fast, you could
end up having no school work but not always. And this is mostly before high
school. After that you definitely get homework.

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jiipee_2
Uhhuh... There IS homework in finland, on all degrees of school. There are
17-20 students / teacher on average in elementary school, but some areas sport
figures of 40+ (But true: almost all of the teachers have university degree on
suitable field, quite often pedagogy.) 55% went to college (2010) (References
in Finnish:
[http://www.minedu.fi/etusivu/arkisto/2012/1406/koulutus.html...](http://www.minedu.fi/etusivu/arkisto/2012/1406/koulutus.html?lang=fi)
[http://www.oph.fi/download/131532_Opettajat_Suomessa_2010.pd...](http://www.oph.fi/download/131532_Opettajat_Suomessa_2010.pdf))

------
Isamu
Awesome - and I agree other countries could learn a thing or two from Finland
(and other apparent successes.)

What's left out of the analysis is the cost, especially the cost per student.
That would include the fully subsidized master's degrees for teachers. In the
US the spending per student can be pretty high in some areas, but performance
seems low.

Does anyone have a fairly detailed comparison of education practices,
spending, and outcomes from various countries?

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crusso
Without doing my own research, any article that opens with "no homework in
Finland" that is immediately denounced as untrue by Finnish people is to be
mostly disregarded as dubious.

I do note the irony of proclaiming the greatness of a lack of standardized
tests (because they're useless, right?) in one infographic while using a
standardized test to prove how great the Finnish education system is.

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milliams
Title: There Is No Homework In Finland

In text: "Finnish students rarely do homework until their teens"

This is an extremely misleading title. In the UK I didn't start doing homework
until I started secondary school at 11 (apart from the odd fun project) so
it's hardly different to that.

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mkoryak
I have always prided myself on almost never doing my homework in high school.
I did enough to get into college with a 2.1 GPA. I think I would have been
much better off if I was assigned less homework or if not doing homework did
not lower my grades, I would have had a better GPA.

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skrinko
Finland ≠ Sweden

~~~
caffeinewriter
Thanks for the heads up. Apparently I can't read.

