Finns And Education

By James Fulford

08/24/2011

Ann Althouse links to a story about Finnish education:

"Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Stu­dent health care is free … "

"Besides Finnish, math and science, the first graders take music, art, sports, religion and textile handcrafts. English begins in third grade, Swedish in fourth. By fifth grade the children have added biology, geography, history, physics and chemistry."

Which leads to a lively discussion among her commenters, one of who says

"So Finns in Finland are well educated. I bet that Finns raised in the US are also well educated."

This experimient has actually been tried in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which is heavily Finnish. I've written previously that

In fact there are a couple of high schools in America that have Finnish students. They do fairly well because they have fairly bright students. Houghton High School, in Michigan’s Finnish Upper Peninsula gets ten out of ten at GreatSchools.net. Here’s a snapshot of its student body: Students

Student Ethnicity

Information about this data

image
Source: MI Dept. of Education, 2007-2008
Ethnicity This School State Average
image White 95% 71%
image Asian 3% 2%
image Hispanic 1% 5%
image American Indian <1% <1%
image African American <1% 20%

As you can see, this is not the problem that the No Child Left Behind Act is trying to solve.

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