Tim Oates addresses the zombie ideas which misinterpret the success behind the Finnish education system, debunking the myths and accepted truths which 'refuse to die'.
Finland…some old stories re-emerge with new headlines. In
'Why bad ideas refuse to die' in The Guardian, Steven Poole said "Some ideas from the past… are just dead wrong and really should have been left to rot. When they reappear, what is rediscovered is a shambling corpse. These are zombie ideas". So too the myths about the Finnish education system; they just keep coming on back.
I thought that we had administered a silver bullet to the myths about Finnish educational success. Nope…they stagger on. The latest being on the
BBC website. It is not a criticism of Finland to say that the system peaked in 2000 (the first PISA administration – hence the massive educational tourism to the North) and that since then, they have struggled to find approaches which arrest a worrying slide in outcomes. Far from it, to acknowledge this is to fully understand the challenge in a country which improved dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s, and which stopped doing the very things which led to this extraordinary achievement.
Gabriel Heller Sahlgren and I
explored this history, putting to rest the myths which derived from those who only looked at the system as it was in 2000, and who failed to look at what the Finns did to secure their success, which topped out in that year. This we fully documented in
Finnish Fairy Stories and
Real Finnish Lessons.
Of course, there are lessons to be learned from Finland. But these are not to be found in a simple, superficial look at when Finns start formal school (Lucy Crehan's forthcoming 'Cleverlands' grapples well with this), or 'homework is low or non-existent' (family learning was a vital ingredient in the past, as was a deep societal commitment to universal literacy) and so on.
I am afraid that the same old chestnut appears time and time again…look at Finland now… In doing that, analysts are missing the very things in which they should be interested. Finland now is grappling with some very serious issues of educational challenge. Will what they are doing now arrest the slide? I hope so. But it’s not what they did when they went from low to high performance in the past.
Tim Oates
Group Director of Assessment Research and Development, Cambridge Assessment