Notably excellent results are Russia. Unfortunately Finland isn't on that list - but I doubt that the performance will be better.
I personally don't think that having peer tutoring will help - it will only hold back the competent and hard working. Peer tutoring sounds (IMHO) too much like some Outcomes Based Education ideal/pipedream.
Different stats tell different stories, your results clearly surfaced a different conclusion than what my quick google turned up when I was trying to find the original article I was looking for:
"In the OECD's international assessment of student performance, PISA, Finland has consistently been among the highest scorers worldwide; in 2006 Finnish 15-year-olds came first in science and second in mathematics and reading literacy, in 2003 Finnish came first in reading literacy, mathematics, and science, while placing second in problem solving. In tertiary education, the World Economic Forum ranks Finland #1 in the world in enrollment and quality and #2 in maths and science education."
Their averages are nice, but they say nothing about how their system works for the students who can perform above average in their sleep. Unless you've got evidence to the contrary, I assume that the Finnish method isn't magically successful, and it looks good on paper at the expense of not enabling the best and brightest to reach their full potential. Given what the Wikipedia article says about the obstacles to establishing alternative schools, I'd say that being a highly gifted student in Finland is likely to be quite frustrating.
> I assume that the Finnish method isn't magically successful, and it looks good on paper at the expense of not enabling the best and brightest to reach their full potential.
Here's some supporting evidence. Let's compare it to a country of similar size, Singapore:
Of course, IMO scores are not exactly the most important measure ever, but I suspect, nonetheless, that smart Finnish students spend more time playing computer games than their counterparts in Singapore.
You're right, averages are nice, just like the ones you gave me. All I was doing was giving you a different set that I was able to dig up pretty quickly.
Anyways, if you can perform above average in your sleep, that's great. If you really think you'll benefit from being pushed to your level and reaching your full intellectual potential as quickly as possible, I'm sure there are still several schools that allow you to do that in Finland too, just like there are all over the rest of the world.
But if you don't think that, you can also benefit by learning to connect with your peers and build social capital in the process. Furthermore, normalizing out the rest of the room allows teachers to introduce more advanced topics much faster to the class on a continuous basis. And on top of that, by "helping teacher out", you'll free her up to take a closer look at each student on an individual level too.
And here's the selection bias part to the whole thing: if you're groomed in a society that values collective over individual advancement, you're much more likely to choose the latter than the former, which would help explain why you don't see as many high ranked math Olympiad contestants as you in a country like Singapore, where children are likely to be raised much more competitively.
I'm not saying that its stupid to have gifted classes in general. But you guys all seem to have a very strong resent towards your OWN education systems and your OWN experiences in elementary/middle/high school.
I can't be certain, as I didn't care enough about that crap in my own educational career, I was always able to satisfy my interests on my own, but you probably wouldn't have nearly as much of that if things were set up differently.
It's not simple, but there's a huge array of factors that go into making the system in Finland what it is. Its a complex webbing of a lot of social and cultural factors, and to many researchers on the topic (its currently the subject of a lot of active study), it actually DOES seem a bit like magic (or at least when the article came out, that's what it painted the picture like).
It's a system that benefits the norm. And though the highly gifted still need their own solution, which this process isn't meant to address in the first place, I'm sure you'll find that it produces results that are FAR better than what you see in middle america, where there's a far greater NEED for highly gifted schools because the normal ones are such crap.
The USA has a much better university system than Finland (or any country in Europe). So they must do something right.
> smarter kids in the room to normalize the average at a much higher level, which is exactly what happens in Finland.
The USA does a lot better than most countries with mathematics achievement. See here: http://nces.ed.gov/timss/table07_1.asp#f2
Notably excellent results are Russia. Unfortunately Finland isn't on that list - but I doubt that the performance will be better.
I personally don't think that having peer tutoring will help - it will only hold back the competent and hard working. Peer tutoring sounds (IMHO) too much like some Outcomes Based Education ideal/pipedream.