Why is Finland’s education system considered the best in the world?
The question as it was when I answered:
“Education in Finland: Would other education systems benefit from adopting Finland's system?
School starting age is 7, 5 hour school days (which typically start at around 9 AM), 15 minutes break after every lesson, no formal examinations until the age of 16, yet Finland typically scores in the top 3 in terms of academic achievement. What's stopping other countries such from adopting Finland's methods, especially since it's rather clear that their system is an ideal one?”
Thanks for asking to answer.
"The world" has set its priorities with regard to education. Those priorities vary, and I'm not aware of different goals that have been set in different countries.
Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish authority in education has written about this subject and he has pointed out that you can't just take some features of e.g. Finnish education system and transfer them into a totally different culture.
So, to adopt the positive features of Finnish education, you must adopt other things as well, like cultural values etc. Especially in the USA Finland is regarded to be a socialist country by many. What can I say? How likely they are to adopt anything from us? Some other countries may have better understanding of the Nordic Model and they might more likely benefit some of our features.
There is one feature in Finnish education system, that Pasi Sahlberg has pointed out and the same feature has been discussed in the context of the Nordic countries in general on Quora. It is the culture of trust.
It seems to be characteristic for Nordic countries that we trust our authorities, we trust each other, we trust our parents, teachers and students. And this has a huge impact on e.g. the professional independence of teachers and how students are tested. Of course we have rules, bureaucracy and control in our education system, but many things are still based on trust.
We trust that our teachers do their job without metering their results all the time. Same is with the students. We have tests, but we don't examine everybody all the time. We trust on their responsibility and their will to do their best and that they will develop inevitably.
The other cultural feature is prioritizing between whether we concentrate to offer the best for the best or the equally high quality "normal" education for all. In Finland we have chosen the latter. It is a cultural choice in general. I have understood that in the USA the choice is different.
The third feature is in the teacher education: in Finland it's hard to get to this education, the profession is highly valued and the salaries are quite good. The studies are high level and the educational pressure is rather in the teacher education than in the schools. When they are let out to the schools, they do very good work.
This all has lead to the good results in international tests like PISA. And as a comment to Matthew Daneman: I've learned from several sources in Finnish discussions, that we didn't really know how good our system was until we took part to the PISA tests. So I would say that our educational style is NOT the result of our test scores, it is just the opposite.
I tried to describe shortly how the cultural values affect the organization of the education system. I don't think it can be copied to an other system as such. But may be it can be used as an inspiration and the parts of it can be tested in other cultures too.