[Paracelsus]

I've learned to become deeply suspicious of people who vault across an ocean for a brief period of time, take a superficial look at an alternative education/medical/financial/you name it system, and then pronounce authoritatively that such systems will work in the author's country of origin. This article, with a murmured concession or two in favour of "Of course Finland is not the US", does precisely that.

How, in particular, does the author come to the view that Finland's students "learn better in their schools"? What data is that assertion based on? Where is the material from past Finnish students to say how they thought the system worked? Where is the data from teachers under the system (actually, scratch that -- the teachers have a vested interest in the system continuing to be dealt with on a Rolls Royce basis).

I think the shortest acid test of the Educational Utopia is this: what's Finland's unemployment rate?

According to this site: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/finland/...yment-rate ... it's 7.4% right now, and earlier this year it was ten percent. Its youth unemployment rate is 19.80%, and its highest was 35%. (By comparison, the US hovers around 12%). Its Labor Force Participation Rate hangs around in the sixties -- on par with the US. You would think a country with a utopian education system would be doing a lot better economically if its system was churning out markedly better students than the US. Wikipedia says 66% of Finland's economy comes from the services industries. So you are looking at some of the world's most sensitively-educated waiters and postmen for the most part.

Having a utopian education system also hasn't made the kids any happier. Finland has the 20th-highest suicide rate in the world. By comparison, the US comes in at number 33 -- for all its massive population and diverse, "poverty-stricken" population. It also has the lowest male life expectancy of all the Nordic countries, so it's a poisonous environment to men. It's such a bad situation that the OECD -- the same organisation that rates its education system so highly -- is "concerned" about its high rates of people killing themselves. Its youth suicide rates in particular have been trending upward: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21294729

Most significantly, Finland has a tiny, homogenous population: 5.5 million people, of which 3.4% are foreign -- among the lowest percentage in the EU, and they're mostly from Russia, Sweden, or Estonia. The author of the article waves this difference away, I think intentionally, but this is a massive difference between the two places.

Let's leave aside the fact it has the world's most extensive social welfare system and only a third of people actually work past the age of 61. This is all well and good when you have one of least densely populated countries on the face of the planet, with decent natural resources, but no significant strategic resources such that you really need to defend yourself from anybody. When there's more money to go around of course you can afford to have a luxury education system. But it horribly skews any rational analysis of how good or bad the education system is: it is as if the author went to a white, gated enclave and concluded that Philmore and Christina Pettigrew III's yearly ski trips, while very nice and doubtless of some benefit to children for the experience, ought be rolled out across the entire education system -- notwithstanding that the said experiences don't seem to be creating a country that's invented anything significant in the past seventy years except Angry Birds, nor a country that's really doing any better than anywhere else in the West economically.