Finland has no private schools – and its pupils perform better than British children
Finland has no private schools – and its pupils perform better than British children
Finland ranked seventh in the world in OECD's student assessment chart in 2018, well above the UK and the United States, where there is a mix of private and state education
Finland ranked seventh in the world in OECD's student assessment chart in 2018, well above the UK and the United States, where there is a mix of private and state education
I think private schools should be banned. Too easy for the rich or even upper income class to gut public schools when you don't use them. Everyone getting the same education chance is what I call equal opportunity.
178Same for health care. If the rich had no other option but to depend on the public system, they'd be more likely to ensure it's properly funded.
84Finland does actually have a private sector for health care.
The difference tends to be in how fast you get appointments for non-critical health issues. If I have a cough I'm worried about, I can go to my employer provided healthcare and speak to a doctor via phone in literally 20 minutes.
The public system atm would diagnose me with an automated quiz and determine my case to be "non-urgent". I would eventually get a doctors appointment, if I'm persistent and find all the right numbers to call, online forms to fill in, etc.
If the matter is urgent however, the public system takes things very seriously. And private sector doctors will even forward you to a public hospital in some cases, if they don't have the staff or equipment needed to help you in a particular case. With concussions for example, I've just walked into the local ER and been taken care of right away. If you need an ambulance, you don't need to weigh your life against bankruptcy.
The public system is also efficient (except when it isn't). That means you won't always see staff spend their time on bedside manner. Their job is to keep you healthy, not happy (unless you're there for mental issues). In my experience the private sector has a higher standard for customer service, because you're not just a patient when you pay for your care. Your satisfaction matters more since they actually care about getting repeat customers.
Meanwhile, public healthcare wold prefer you never come back, which is sometimes a good thing, and sometimes bad.
I use both sides of the system, and as I already mentioned, the two sides inter-operate in many cases. While it's been a huge mess at times, Finland is investing in a patient-data-management system called APOTTI which lets you switch doctors and care-providers seamlessly taking your patient-history with you. I once got x-rayd by my employee healthcare, then got sent to a hand surgeon in the public sector so I could get the diagnosis from those x-rays the same day. I left the private hospital and walked into the public one like they were operated by the same company. It's amazing.
17I love my Canadian healthcare.
1
Well, there are edge cases for private schools that would not make sense being solved by public schools. I moved a lot in my life (still do), and having access to schools in one of my children 's main language is an important thing for them. Those schools are still following local regulations though
6Even if nationwide absolute mediocre student body was a goal banning private schools wouldn't achieve it.
Next you would have to ban tutoring companies, after that you would have to ban test prep, after that private tutors, after that you would need restrictions on funding for all schools (which wouldn't work since not all schools have the exact same funding needs), you would still have advantages. One kid is closer to the library, one kid has a parent who was a teacher, one kid has a stay at home parent with the resources to help them with homework, etc.
Nothing short of an absolute police state of fairness would be able to achieve this.
-4Next you would have to ban tutoring companies, after that you have to ban test prep
Lol no you don't have to. Nice slippery slope. You do what the government can do, which is fund schools. This is really easy, but you want to slippery slope that it must lead to all these other fearmongering things which it doesn't. Like lol at, sorry to say, your absurdity.
So back to schools. You fund them all the same. Where I live all public schools are funded the same in the whole province. This is really easy.
5
Yeah let's pull exceptional students down to the baseline. Every child should be forced to go through the government approved curriculum, nothing can go wrong with that.
Private schools are based. Much better education than public schools. Obviously I don't want public schools to be gutted, so let's make laws preventing that rather than preventing children from getting a good education that public school will never be able to provide.
People here are way to authoritarian.
-12Look at the Netherlands for a good example then. Private schools aren't banned but public schools are so good even the princesses go to them. You're just so used to public schools being underfunded that you think they can't work. The reason you'd want to ban private schools is because it creates an incentive for the rich and powerful to fix your shitty public schools.
7You have gifted programs in the public school. Your thinking shows the exact problem, that public schools can only "pull students down". You can only see public schools as bad instead of, you know, funding them to be good. How about funding them so they pull everyone up, huh?
Then you go on to conspiratorial thinking to vilify, gasp, public schools.
5
There absolutely are private schools here what the fuck
Edit theres literally a set of laws surrounding public and private schools https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/1998/19980634
Do journos even do research anymore?
116Hmm. What's a better, non-misleading title? Or is the article BS in general? I'll delete this post if it's false.
14"5 years ago finland did aight in education but since then we reformed the system and now we're plummeting like the rest of the western world"
16
Permanently Deleted
2It doesn't matter. Truth and journalism don't relate. The only thing that is real is our outrage.
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But how do they separate the rich from the peasantry?
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Private schools are a privilege for the upper class and a symptom of the unjust social inequality in capitalism. In an egalitarian society with good public schools, private schools are obsolete and every child has the same chance to get good education independently of their heritage.
59Private schools grant an "out" for the wealthy (and by extension, powerful). If they can pay for better results, they're actively incentivised to lobby to defund public schools. If the private option doesn't exist, they're incentivised to lobby to improve public schools (the ones with kids, in any case).
29If there is one thing that my experience living in the UK (having lived in other countries of Northern and Southern Europe) has taught me is that private education as well as non-meritocratic access to higher education are a key component in suppressing social mobility and "keeping people in their place" across generations: in that country the rich and high middle class have this well established path for their children through very expensive private schools (curiously know over there as "public schools", in the same sense of "public" as "anybody can spend a night in the Ritz if they have the £400 to pay for it") and then an "interview" selection process for Oxford and Cambridge where selection criteria are arbitrary such as for example "having attended the right school" (as an aquaintance of mine was told he hadn't, as reason to refuse his application) so that people who popped out of the right vagina and were sent to the "right" (£30k a year+) "public" schools are guaranteed to get in and come out of the other side with a diploma from an "elite" (not quite when it comes to pupils, but definitelly can and do hire some of the best researchers and lecturers) university.
By the way this all continues into their career, since "public" school educated types leverage the connections acquired there (and mommy and daddy's contacts) to literally step into highly paid sinecures purelly on cronyism.
In the UK Education is very much part of a red carpet for life if you were born in the "upper" classes.
My impression there was eventually that, had I been born in the UK to the kind of poor working class parents I was born to, instead of having gone into Physics at Uni thanks to my very high grades at high school and 98% score at the entrance exam (though I ended up switching to and graduating as an EE) and having a successful career across various countries of Europe in Engineering, I would've at best been a car mechanic because the education system in the UK is not at all meritocratic and is designed first and foremost to preserve class membership through the generations.
All this to say that Britain is a perfect example of a very well establish use of private education to maintain the lowest level of social mobility in all of Europe.
PS: Oh, and don't get me started on how "public" schools are "charities" (kid you not!) and thus pay no taxes. It's the very definition of "adding insult to injury" or as they would say over there "really taking the piss out of everybody else".
22Interesting, thank's for the elaboration!
5I’m from a working class family in the UK and my experience has been the opposite of yours. Three of my 4 grandparents are immigrants. I went to a normal comprehensive catholic school and I was the first in my family to even go to college, let alone get A levels. I got into a Russell Group university (equivalent of Ivy League) based on merit, and although I felt poor as fuck compared to the majority of other students, I loved it and did very well. I went on to win a highly competitive full scholarship for a masters and then PhD. Admittedly, the people I’m still friends from my university days tend to be the people I met while working to support myself through my undergraduate - some enrolled at the university, some not. I haven’t kept in contact with any of the super wealthy or middle/upper class people I met there, we just didn’t have enough in common. But as a child born in the 80s to working class, uneducated parents, the system worked very well for me. Same goes for my brother. He has a pretty important job in Westminster now. My late- grandfather an Irishman, the 11th child of a struggling diary farmer, couldn’t believe the success his grandchildren achieved coming from such a background. He planned to get business cards made up saying “Mr X, grandfather to Dr SomeoneElse, PhD” to hand out to his friends back home 😂 unfortunately he died before I completed my studies but the thought still makes me laugh!
Fuck the tories, and fuck a lot of British culture/society, but I’m immensely grateful for the excellent (free) primary and secondary education I received, the excellent (subsidised) tertiary+ education I received, and the lifetime of free healthcare I continue to receive.
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Private schools are a privilege for the upper class and a symptom of the unjust social inequality in capitalism.
Same issue with private health insurance in the US vs. universal healthcare in most other developed countries.
7Private schools are a privilege for the upper class and a symptom of the unjust social inequality in capitalism.
Same issue with private health insurance in the US vs. universal healthcare in most of developed countries.
1With private schools you can choose what you pay for (at least in theory), and with public schools you take what you're given.
Since school education involves lots of contention by different parties over which exact kind of indoctrination and\or mustering and humiliation will the kids experience, I'd say private schools are a good idea in this particular regard.
However, I live in Russia and here both the concept of private schools isn't quite existent (there are some, but they are very expensive and at the same time not very good, and the prestigious ones are all public, and they'll have the same standard program anyway) and I haven't studied in one.
At least somewhere about 9th grade they gave up trying to make me not sleep at all the lessons.
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My father went to one of the oldest English "public" (i.e. private) schools. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latymer_Upper_School He didn't talk about the academics, which is surprising for an academic- he talked about the antisemitism he faced every single day from kids, teachers and staff. I'm sure it didn't help that his parents were poor and he was there on scholarship.
I went to a private school in the U.S. for elementary school. I was bullied every day, not just by the kids, but by the only teacher I had from first through sixth grade, and he terrified me so much that my parents didn't know until I was an adult and my mother ran into another kid I went to school with who talked about how sorry she felt for me.
My daughter goes to an American public school. She is bullied a lot too (we're an eccentric family), but at least the teachers are mostly on her side, and if one isn't, I have someone to complain to about it. I wouldn't even think of risking her in a private school.
48Your family is not eccentric. It's exceptional. There is a big difference. Unfortunately people are afraid of that,that seems different to what they are accustomed. When they cannot do something the other can, they ridicule it. Being bullied feels like shit. Be there for your daughter and help her steam out all the feelings she has. Help her make alliances with other kids in the school. let her choose to do sports or art she likes. teachers may take her side, but don't imagine that they'll do something, no mater how much you complain. I hope my response has some meaning for you
11I'm sorry you experienced that, but to be honest it's entirely circumstancial. There are a lot of teachers in certain districts who normalize teasing students.
2
Not a huge bar to clear. UK education has been slashed to the bone.
Two out of three teachers I know personally have gone abroad to teach instead. If the teachers hate it what chance do the kids have?
43The problem with private schools is that they have to sell themselves to the parents enrolling their children in it. You don't sell yourself by putting down those important to your customers. Private schools are pressured to give an impression, not an education.
28Paid for schools sell themselves to parents with their exam results more than anything else.
They may have a lot of equipment and resources that state schools don't have, but it's pretty irrelevant if they don't have grades to back it up. Paid for schools I'm familiar with will often measure their results by what percentage of pupils are successful Oxbridge candidates, particularly if they're studying classics.
The gimmicks such as laser cutters, 3d printers, green screens, recording studios, gym and sports facilities, personal laptops, art supplies etc etc. are pretty good for pupils who were never going to be accepted to a highest level university regardless of education. So you have selling points for higher and lower ability pupils.
10They get those results by excluding dumb kids. Public schools don't have that "luxury". It's all an illusion.
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Government sure is trying to fix what ain't broke with their funding cuts, tho. For now, schools seem to still be doing their thing, but I'm not all too certain on how long that will continue.
25No country is safe from the “we shouldn’t educate children unless it’s profitable” and “women only exist to have said children” situation, unfortunately. You would hope that examples like this would push forward a universal agenda of better public schooling anywhere, but instead the agenda coming off it from the rich is generally “oh no, we don’t want everyone to be well educated, just my children, who will specifically act like me as they age and increase the gap”
6Never-mind that that a lot of the upsides of living in Finland, even as a member of the upper class, are thanks to the extremely high average level of education.
Where exactly do these people think all these highly competent workers able to fuel highly profitable and innovative companies are coming from?
But because the return on investment of education is paid back over a life-time, not quarterly, I guess it doesn't count. I pray these dinosaurs die off and allow new generations into government before it's too late. Luckily, that IS slowly beginning to happen.
8Except there have been a ton of studies that show it IS profitable…in the long term. But it’s profitable in that it saves a ton of money in things like prison systems. So it’s not profitable to the right people. If we spend money on education, private prisons get less money and oligarchs have to actually pay people a living wage to make their clothing and street signs.
1
I wish that PM Sunak was right about the result of this, because a class war is exactly what the UK needs. Unfortunately, his track record tells me that he'll be wrong about that as well.
Also, I always lol at the rich trying to appropriate class warfare language to mean that the poors will make fun of, or bear greater resentment to, the ruling class.
It's like saying that global warming is actually ecological terrorism, and that the rain must be held accountable.
3Finland has great schools.
They've also solved homelessness. (Minus 1000 or so people who are willfully homeless, but that'll happen anywhere.)
2Cold Winter takes care of the homelessness.
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Duh?
1Finland has great schools. Sweden also had it until 1990s then something happen and suddenly swedes IQ dropped by 20 -30 clicks. Hmm wonder why.🤔😉
-4Permanently Deleted
8Correct but that was not the biggest reason. And correct again, i refering to mass imports of people with learning problems 😉
-3
You moved there?
6Nope i live there and i saw when the fall of the schools started.
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Wait are you telling me that as the country moved away from ethnic homogeneity that social structures began to fail? interesting
-3LOL.. crickets 👌
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Finland is also small and ethnically homogenous. A lot easier to make social programs work in that context.
-9