Early Childhood Education in Finland
Earlier this year, the Reason Foundation’s Shikha Dalmia and Lisa Snell cited Finland as evidence for their view that universal preschool is a bad idea:
Early education in general is not so crucial to the long-term intellectual growth of children. Finland offers strong evidence for this view. Its kids consistently outperform their global peers in reading, math and science on international assessments even though they don’t begin formal education until they are 7.
For one thing, Dalmia and Snell are just wrong about this — Finland starts voluntary preschool at 6 and over ninety percent of children enroll. Compulsory education begins at 7. But more to the point, this is a situation where actually visiting Finland is informative. Children under 6 in Finland have an “unconditional right” to places in heavily subsidized centers. When speaking English, Finns call these centers “day care” centers and not “preschool.” But I went to three of them and spoke to teachers who teach there and administrators who run them, and they looked like preschool to me. Of course I’m not an expert. But Sara Mead is an expert and she says it “meets most of the standards for what we in the United States would call preschool.” In particular, you have college educated teachers, you have national curriculum guidelines, and while you don’t have much formal instruction you do see an enormous amount of emphasis placed on children’s intellectual development.
Beyond what Sara says, I would also observe that there are quite deliberate efforts to use early childhood education to help narrow achievement gaps. Finland has a relatively low poverty rate and relatively few immigrants compared to the United States, but the people we spoke to there talked about deliberate efforts to do outreach to immigrant families — even ones with unemployed parents — to help them learn Finnish. They also have a lot of special ed preschool teachers to specifically target kids with problems. Far from being an example of a country achieving educational success without early childhood preparation, I would say that excellent preschooling is one of the three main pillars (along with low levels of child poverty and high levels of competition to become a teacher) of Finland’s educational success.
23 Responses to “Early Childhood Education in Finland”
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December 16th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
To build on Matt’s post: The important thing about early childhood education is not “education,” per se. Here in the States, we are focusing far too much on academic achievement as a measure of educational success. The early years, typically until about six or seven, are when we learn to get along with others and regulate ourselves. The Finnish “day care” centers appear to fulfill the same functions American day care, preschool, and kindergarten used to fulfill: socialization, cooperation, problem solving, and emotional and sensory development. These skills are crucial to lifelong functioning and coping and are being lost or delayed at an appalling rate.
In trying to teach our children reading, writing, and arithmetic, we’ve forgotten to teach them how to learn, think, and thrive.
December 16th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
For one thing, Dalmia and Snell are just wrong about this
I think it’s a defensible working assumption that any “fact” wingtards bring into their arguments is either going to be misinterpreted, irrelevant, wrong, or a flat-out and deliberate lie. They think they know the truth already. The details of the “proof” are just for rubes.
December 16th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
I’m constantly amazed when I’m told how things are done in other countries by people who have never been to the country in question, especially when discussing a place to which I have been. Reading about other cultures is great but there’s no substitute for seeing things for yourself.
December 16th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
“I would also observe that there are quite deliberate efforts to use early childhood education to help narrow achievement gaps.”
I am sure that the following has been said before, since we are on MY’s 12th plus finland post, but has an adequete answer to this been given yet? Finland has had 500 years to “narrow achievement gaps” with gypsies. Maybe you can say that immigrants can be excused because finland has barely had time to work it’s finlandy magic, but not with gypsies. This doesn’t pull down aggregate finish stats much because they are pretty tiny, just 1-2% of the population. But that should have made it even easier to narrow gaps with/assimilate, right? They also look more like “standard” finns than US minorities do vis a vis US whites. It should have been a piece of cake for progressive finland, right?
December 16th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
http://www.errc.org/cikk.php?cikk=2077
December 16th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Both making daycare more like school and preschool at six are fairly recent phenomenons, late 90’s maybe. This is related to the trend of more homework, basically the Sara Mead school of thought. Anyone have an opinion if it’s improved anything? I kind of think it hasn’t here in Sweden at least, but I’m too lazy to look up stats.
December 16th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
You’re really on a Roma tip, aren’t you, ynx? Because there’s nothing at all to distinguish them from, say, African-Americans, apart from pretty much every fucking thing.
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