Caveat: Those Finns

There is a really interesting article about Finnish education at The Atlantic. I wrote before about the possibility that standardized testing neither helps nor harms quality of education, and speculated that the fact that countries as divergent in education policy as South Korea and Finland both score so high on comparative level-of-education surveys must have cultural roots.

The article, by a Finn working in the US, gives me a clue as to what that cultural aspect might be. I’ve always though it has to do with some qualitative valuation of education by, e.g. parents or educators, but the author points out a different possibility: collectivism and/or cooperation-based social models.

Korea, for all its competitiveness and inequality, shares with Finland a cultural valuation of cooperation and social cohesion over explicit dog-eat-dog social Darwinism. It seems that when Finns set out to reform their education system, they thought about how to encourage less of the latter in favor of the former.

Korea may have a lot of competition, but what I saw in the public school where I worked was constant reference back to cultural values of teamwork and collective achievement of goals. This means that even as Koreans are winnowing out low achievers with their never-ending tests, they are inculcating everyone with the importance of a kind of “everyone’s in this together” social philosophy. It’s cognitively dissonant, but it might point to a kind of counterbalance to the competition that ensures that scores rise across the board.

I’m not sure I have a point to make. But I highly recommend the article if you’re interested in education, “education reform,” and such issues. One stunning take-away: Finland achieves highest-in-the-world education rankings with no private schools. None. Wow.

Let’s not forget that the Soviets, and Cuba even today, achieve remarkable education standards with extremely low investment through focus on equity and equal access, too. I think the US would be wise to think about this. Market approaches will never raise achievement across the board – market approaches to education will do what markets do: there will be some winners and lots of losers. That drives inequality, not high standards across the board.