“TEACHERS, teachers, teachers.” Thus the headmistress of a school near Helsinki, giving her not-exactly-rocket-science explanation for why Finland has the best education system in the world.
…….
It has achieved all this by changing its entire system, delegating
responsibility to teachers and giving them lots of support. There is no streaming and no selection; no magnet schools; no national curriculum; and few national exams. It is all, as that Finnish headmistress suggested, about getting good teachers–and then giving them freedom. If there is a lesson for EU leaders, it is: forget about multiple priority areas and action plans. European governments should go back to school. In Finland.
The Lisbon agenda proclaimed that the EU should aim to become the
world’s “most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy by 2010”.
Obviously, the words competitive and dynamic are hilariously inapt at
such a sluggish time, when most of France seems to have taken to the
streets to defend the notion that one’s first job should come with a
lifetime guarantee. But the phrase “knowledge-based” is almost as
incongruous.
Europe is failing its students. Seventeen of the top 20 universities in
the world are American, according to Shanghai’s Jiao Tong university.
Over a quarter of students studying outside their country of birth are
in America. Moreover, the EU’s universities seem to be falling further
behind–and not just behind America. Britain has almost doubled its
graduate numbers since the 1960s, but that increase (which is rapid by
EU standards) has been enough only to keep it in roughly the same
position in the rankings of countries measured by graduates per
head–in so far as numbers, rather than quality, can be a proxy for
total educational output. Germany has increased its graduate population
only slightly, and thereby plummeted from the middle of such rankings
to near the bottom.
The fact is that global competition in higher education has become
ferocious. South Korea has invested hugely in education and is now
overtaking Europe in numbers of graduates (it has the third-highest
number of graduates per head). China and India are producing more
graduate engineers than the entire EU, which may be one reason why
Microsoft has a huge research centre in Beijing (though it also has
more than one in Europe).
The blunt fact is that most Europeans do not value degrees as highly
as Asians or Americans appear to. In a new study for the Lisbon
Council, a Brussels pressure-group, Andreas Schleicher offers some
calculations that try to estimate what degrees are worth to university
graduates. Everybody does well: on average, a student gets a 10% return
on his (or more often his taxpayers’) investment. But in America the
average return is around 15%; in France and Italy it is only 8%.
Europe’s failings in higher education are familiar enough. More
surprisingly, it is falling behind in secondary schools as well. The
performance in mathematics of an average 15-year-old from a big
European country is at or below the international average, according to
the PISA study run by the OECD. Top of the list are Hong Kong, South
Korea and Japan, plus a few small outward-looking EU members (including
Finland).
Worse still, European schools do not provide the equality of
educational opportunity that people seem to think they do. The PISA
study also tries to assess how much student performance is affected by
socio-economic background and how much by personal skills, by
considering variations in mathematics results both within and between
schools. The first variation presumably reflects student skill; the
second, the socio-economic background of schools and students. If EU
countries had equitable education systems, one might expect a lot of
variation within schools, because pupils vary, but rather less between
schools.
In fact, one finds precisely the opposite. The differences between
schools are larger in most big EU countries than in the United States,
for all its supposed canyon between hyper-achieving magnet schools and
dismal sinkholes. Only a few small EU countries actually deliver an
equitable education; and these are the ones that have junked the
devices, such as stringent national curricula, or central direction
from state or national bureaucracies, that are supposed to ensure equal
education.
TO THE FINLAND STATION
The explanation, argues Mr Schleicher, is that European education is
stuck with an industrial mindset and has not adapted to the post-industrial world. Post-industrial organisations insist that
innovation must come from anywhere; that hierarchies must be flat; and
that everyone should be well educated. Manufacturing required a
pyramid: lots of unskilled manual workers, some skilled ones, plus a
few highly educated managers. The schools that meet this old
demand–with early selection of students into academic and vocational
streams, elite academic colleges and good vocational training–are
still around, especially in Germany and central Europe. They are
testimony to Europe’s resistance to change. (How many teachers does it
take to change a lightbulb? What do you mean, CHANGE?)
Looking at France today, one might despair that change will ever come.
Its government even blocked the publication of findings on French
educational achievement and incomes (in a spirit of friendly
co-operation, we have done some back-of-the-envelope calculations which suggest that standards in French schools are more closely related to incomes than in other countries). Yet in the 1960s, Finland had all these faults. Now, it has the best schools in the world. Finnish 15-year-olds have the highest level of mathematical skills, scientific knowledge and reading literacy of any rich industrialised country.
It has achieved all this by changing its entire system, delegating
responsibility to teachers and giving them lots of support. There is no streaming and no selection; no magnet schools; no national curriculum; and few national exams. It is all, as that Finnish headmistress suggested, about getting good teachers–and then giving them freedom. If there is a lesson for EU leaders, it is: forget about multiple priority areas and action plans. European governments should go back to school. In Finland.