
What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart? - anthonyrubin
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.html
======
enra
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.

~~~
pg
_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
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!

~~~
enra
True. We don't have any athlete superpower or fierce popularity contests. I
don't even remember that if anyone had been bullied over being good at school.
Of course some kids are more popular than others, and there are always few
tough guys, which are mostly regarded kind of sad cases.

But still for a half-nerd like myself, school was not a very intresting place
to be. I was more interested in the real world and computers. School is like
mundane job where you go because you have to, you have no control over it and
nothing is real. Equal minds is great thing to have, but it means that you
can't have so many best minds.

While our education may excel in PISA, still even our schools are not very
inspirational places, which I think they should be.

------
jbrun
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....](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071127.rmtimber1127/BNStory/robColumnsBlogs/)

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...](http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2007/11/kenyan-
runners.html))

My two cents anyways.

------
charlesju
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.

------
occam
"... 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>

~~~
gojomo
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".

~~~
Alex3917
"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.

~~~
gojomo
Sailer's other writings are no good reason to downvote the factual, relevant
excerpt above from user 'occam'.

And regarding those other writings, do you think you can give a fair summary,
and a convincing refutation, when you haven't read them?

~~~
Alex3917
I've read some of them, and I followed his spat with Gladwell. I also didn't
vote down his comment. My point was more that Steve Sailer in general has
never struck me as the model of intellectual integrity.

------
mynameishere
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.

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

------
ratsbane
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?

~~~
Alex3917
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.

~~~
dgabriel
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>

~~~
Alex3917
No I meant Montessori. The Wikipedia article and the information on
montessori.org provide a short description and a few example activities, but
neither contain anywhere near enough insight/information to make a rational
evaluation of the program. So far as I can tell you pretty much have to accept
everything on faith.

~~~
dgabriel
Seriously, as much info about Montessori as you want is out there, and unless
the school you're dealing with is a little shady, you should be able to walk
in & request anything without paying tuition. You can also find a lot more
than those two sites on the internet.

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ayin
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!

------
wave
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
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.

~~~
unalone
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.

~~~
dangrover
I agree. I had brain surgery recently (small tumor), and all I could do for
the week after is pretty much stare into space and think. I came upon a series
of epiphanies/hasty generalizations along those lines that seem pretty correct
to me now:

1\. Most people don't like what they do enough to do it when nobody's asking
them to do it.

2\. Most people can't singlehandedly start projects that require a lot of work
and have uncertain reward.

3\. Among those who enthusiastically do, very few can complete those projects.

4\. Institutions like schools and corporations are quite reasonably based
around this assumption, and work very well for most people. They set up
worthwhile hoops for people to jump through.

5\. In most institutions, the way to judge someone's worth is "What nifty,
pre-existing hoops that I know about did you opt to jump through?" If it's
something weird like getting a book published or starting a software business,
_it doesn't count_. The judge can't use this sort of thing in comparing one
candidate to another because there are few other candidates who have done the
same OR because the judge is possibly someone for whom the generalization in
1-2 applies and just doesn't get it.

I don't know a lot of other people my age who have real passion about what
they do and can pull through on significant projects that they start
themselves.

Thinking I was going to die for a few days before I learned of my prognosis
made me realize that rather than feeling weird and timid about this
distinction, I should see it as kind of a superpower and go more gung-ho on
some of my more successful endeavors.

What's also cool is that there are companies and individuals that can't
_afford_ to judge people according to the criteria in #5. And that isn't to
say that it's not occasionally worth jumping through other people's hoops when
it's not hurting anything :)

~~~
unalone
That last thing you stated is what I consider to be the ultimate check in
capitalism, the thing that makes the system work. You can't set up a corrupt
entity that lasts beyond a point, because things evolve too quickly.

Also, along the lines of 2 and 3, I think that's what explains why young
people tend to have such uncommon successes of such magnitude. It's not
because of drive per se: people of all ages have drive. But it's because the
fact that there's such an imbalance in the system that makes people move
forward.

I had an epiphany recently that, next to yours, seems pretty stupid and
shallow, but it's an epiphany that moved me nonetheless. It was the
realization that, despite all the stuff that I'd tried to do, all the stuff I
thought I could do, there were still some pretty basic social things I would
be incapable of, if I kept along the route I was going. And I didn't like
that. So I've started working out, eating more healthily, trying to normalize
a bit in preparation for college. And what I've found is that while I'm doing
that stuff, I find getting work done to be far easier, too. The two go hand-
in-hand. And it's at young ages that trying to show off in shallow ways really
stays a priority.

It's like the article about Zuckerberg that was on here a week ago. When he
was in high school, he wasn't a typical coder: he was an active fencer in the
top levels of the USFA, and he was in quite a few social clubs, too. This
isn't a case of somebody who's a brilliant coder going off and writing code.
That doesn't happen often at all, not even when you look at success stories in
Silicon Valley. Rather, he was a very bright person who dabbled in a lot of
things, who had an idea and who did whatever he could to bring that idea to
fruition. I think the part of that story that fascinated me the most was the
part describing how he began Facebook because his girlfriend snubbed him. What
an absolutely honest start to a site: something about that story felt
absolutely real to me.

------
nazgulnarsil
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.

------
vlad
This might do it:

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

Television educates you even when you watch Beverly Hills 90210.

------
helveticaman
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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Watson#Statement_claiming_links_between_race_and_intelligence)
<http://www.americancivilrightsreview.com/africanfailure.html>

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

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

