The teachers and staff at the center are so competent and compassionate. Playing is always at the forefront, but they have educational themes for a full year that are cleverly integrated into the daily rhythm. The children are always doing short trips that reveal new things of their daily surroundings in the city. The social environment mixes children of various ages: there are kids of age 2 and 5 in the same groups.

I know my child's life would be a lot poorer without daycare. And it only costs about 200 euros / month. (We're paying the maximum price since we're two working parents; with less family income the price would go down to nearly zero. Also, children are eligible for daycare even if their parents are not working.)

Giving our kids a rich social life and early education without the pressures of a traditional school model is probably the one thing Finnish society has figured out. (The rest is more or less a mess right now.)

Coming from Slovenia, that's what kindergarten is supposed to be. The word literally means "children's garden" and has nothing to do with school.

To quote wikipedia "literally children's garden, is a preschool educational approach traditionally based on playing, singing, practical activities such as drawing, and social interaction as part of the transition from home to school.".

I don't know what happened in the anglophone world that turned this joyful concept into school. My girlfriend grew up in the US and considers "kindergarten" to be the beginning of school school where they start by teaching you how to read&write. Wikipedia seems to confirm this notion.

Maybe it's just semantics and word-meaning drift.

But the cost is $85 per day, per child. We have two children so it costs more than our mortgage to take our children to day care. It is also one of the more affordable day cares.

The government is supposed to cover 50% of the cost, but only up to maximum of $7,500. Meaning they end up covering far less than half.

What causes daycare to be so expensive in Australia? Wages, regulation, not enough supply, something else?

A good student:teacher ratio for 1-2 year olds is 1:3, for 3 year olds is 1:5 and for 4 year olds is 1:8. Assuming an even mix, that's an overall ratio of 1:4. 350 x 4 x 12 is $17K a year per teacher, and that's only if nothing goes towards rent, supplies and the other costs of running a day care.

My point doing the math was that a day-care as a "real" business has to charge at least double the OP's $350 a month.

I found some average prices for Australia [1]. They list "Long day care (child care centre)" at $70 - $185 per day, which is what we found when looking at prices.

[1] https://www.careforkids.com.au/child-care-articles/article/7...

Edit: looking at some of the other replies, it seems just as expensive in some parts of the US.

This was recently changed so that the "preschool" became obligatory for 6 year olds, so they have to take educational activities for 4 hours a day at a kindergarten but may still have their day care elsewhere.

Btw, the aphorism quoted in the article is better translated as "what you learn without joy, you'll forget without sorrow".

Kindergärten aren't schools in Germany, they don't operate like schools, you don't learn to read or write, there is no math, in fact there aren't any classes nor classrooms. A lot of the time you spend in Kindergarten is purely socializing and playing with other children.

If there are groups, then only so that the educators (not teachers) don't get overwhelmed. Children are grouped randomly and stay in one group for as long as they go to Kindergarten, so you have children from 3 up to 7 in one group.

The activities that are organized or structured in any way are eating, sleeping, singing, getting told stories, making things out of paper like lanterns, a few physical activities and of course activities that happen outside of the Kindergarten.

Kindergärten exist and are important not to learn math but to learn to interact with other people, to make friends and to be a child until you are mature enough to handle a school environment. That means that while typically a child is enrolled in school with 6, some also enroll a year earlier or later depending on the child.

Finnish kids are taught by the parents to read long before they get to school. Sure, it helps that the Finnish language is phonetic... But really, it's a home environment that teaches that reading is fun and enjoyable and can get you what you want.

Same goes for counting and basic arithmetic.

It's a cultural thing.

Teachers in Finland are not geniuses. The caliber of the teachers is, in fact, higher than the USA, but this stems more from seats in schools as opposed to "smart people wanting to become teachers".

The desirability ranking of what the average student would like to do goes like this: Medical Engineer Law French Pyschology ... Education ... Waiter ...

So somewhere along this spectrum, you get a bunch of qualified people who become teachers. There's only a limited number of seats for each profession (driven by free education... you can NOT become anything you want to become, you have to do better than the others on the entrance test). So you don't get a disproportionate group of people getting a degree in History or Biology or Pyschology. The number seats are arranged according to the needs of the society.

And kids would rather be teachers than waiters (yes, there's a school for that).

In Finland, teachers do NOT make more than engineers or doctors. They make about one third (pre tax) of what doctors or engineers make.

Also, Finland is incredibly homogenous. Take that for what you will...

She also did basic arithmetic with me as well, and I ended up pretty good at math and logical thinking.

I think a huge part of the education problem today is lack of engaged parents. They don't concentrate on teaching their kids before they send them to school, and once they're in school, they leave the teaching up to the teacher and do not assist really.

At 3 I was able to do math (addition, subtraction and basic multiplication) quite easily but basic reading only came to me at around 5 years old.

Kids are different, some learn to read earlier, others later, same with math, same with diapers, same with everything really. My 3.5 year old can climb trees like a 7 year old (better even if the kids around here are any indication). Do basic math (he has the concept of multiplication and can do most numbers times 2 or times 10). Recognises flowers and various different birds. He knows most traffic signs. He can almost cook his breakfast with just a bit of help with the oven. He does physics experiments (with our help). Are we worried that his peers at school know more letters? No. Kids develop at different speeds, but unfortunately, schools/kindergartens/parents expect their little treasures to be the smartest, brightest unique snowflakes and push them to it.

The limited number of seats per profession is a new one, but kinda makes sense. However, by doing this the nation "locks in" their capacity for growth in these areas. It would seem that this is somewhat misguided. An economy cannot be very efficient if it makes decisions a decade in advance.

The views of the value of studies also differ quite a lot, but luckily it's way more common for uneducated parents to value a better education for their kids than the way around. It of course helps that all studies are free and students in universities are actually paid to attend (though less than they would get for being unemployed).

What average uni students want to study actually does not affect the quality of teachers as much as you suggest. In 2014* a total of 1649 applicants took the entrance exam for becoming a class teacher in Helsinki University, and 146 were selected among them. I don't believe many of the 146 best applications would rather study engineering or biology.

http://www.studentum.fi/Kasvatustieteellisen_paeaesykoe__d62...

Sure, some kids might learn to read, write and count before school, but it is definetly not a norm. The first two years of school here is mostly spent learning those skills.

If you're going to have a child-led education system where you assume that if the child isn't reading it's because they're not ready yet, you better be damn sure you're not missing the signs of something more serious, because if you do, when you come to address it it will be much more difficult the later you intervene. It sounds like the teachers in Finland are probably good enough to catch this - ours were not.

The written Finnish being very easy to spell and read also probably contributes. There are only very few peculiarities that differentiate from the logical 1-1 mapping between letter symbols and vocal sounds. Practically all children all able to attain at least the basic functional literacy skills in a couple of years. (I really couldn't understand the concept of spelling bee competitions in US TV shows, like that one Peanuts animated film, until we started English.)

Yes, the teachers (not tests or rigorous standardization) are the keystone of the finnish school system.

That is, this article 'gloss[ed] over an important cultural norm' because it is mentioned in other Atlantic articles. Specifically, the text "Finnish schools have received substantial media attention for years now" links to another Atlantic article which says:

> For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master's degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.

and the text "because of the consistently strong performance of its 15-year-olds on international tests like the PISA" links to another Atlantic article which says:

> Teachers have a lot of autonomy. They are highly educated--they all have master’s degrees and becoming a teacher is highly competitive.

Instead, and in the same paragraph, the author says that this article will more specifically provide 'coverage on Finland’s youngest students', which the author thinks has been missing, and not cover the entire topic of Finnish schooling.

Isn't this the case pretty much everywhere? In reality, if a teacher is bad, there is precious little the principal can do about it in Finland. Almost all teachers are fortunately good, but I have met a couple who were completely hopeless. The schools absolutely couldn't get rid of them once they had been hired to permanent positions.

Personal experience (Finland): my grade 3-6 teacher was himself the principal in a two-teacher school, an electrician by profession, and had been quick-trained to take a teacher's job after being discharged from the army at the end of the War - no master's degree, no degree from any university. He actually did close-order drill for PE. And if I was unruly, he hit me in the head.

Yes, teachers are better trained nowadays (what I describe was 1970's and the man retired in 1980's).

Though it's not the complete truth. In the US, some school districts have policies that a teacher can be fired for having a bad score based on a 'value added model', where the scores of the students are compared to a model of what the scores "should" have been, and used to assign an effectiveness score to teachers (including, say, the score for an biology teacher when the tests have nothing to do with biology - https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04...) and even the custodial staff (https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04... ).

The principals have little say in the results of these decisions.

The philosophy seems to be that teachers are independent, heroic, commodities. That is:

"independent" - any problems can be attributed solely to the teachers (after some normalization based on the socioeconomic class of the students), and not to the school system or other large scale system;

"heroic" - the teachers are the biggest factor in education, and it's up to the teachers to individually supply everything;

"commodities" - a teacher can easily be replaced with another teacher, with no effect on learning, the teaching work culture, or long-term community stability.

The reason for this philosophy seems to be that it's well-aligned with certain view of a free market. By casting education in this framework it encourages the idea of replacing a socialized public school system, whose goal are the long-term needs of the students and the culture, with a state subsidized for-profit system with less local democratic control that is able to transfer more money to private owners.

Part of that is the cultural status of teachers. But another large contributor is the policy status of teachers w.r.t rate of pay, autonomy, and educational requirements.

All teachers must obtain a Masters. They are paid in line with expected median or greater for those of their educational level. They are also, by policy, the main driving force and final say on curriculums and educational program design. Further, they are expected to remain current within their field and often publish throughout their career.

In other words, the pay and job preference is the type that attracts the academically minded. And does so without requiring them to assume standards of living far below their educational investment.

Society at large lends respect to fields based, by and large, on superficial reasons. In the U.S. we offer teachers pay and respect (within the job) more in line with short order cooks with a G.E.D. than professionals. Society's treatment of the profession reflects that.

By my observations, pedagogy is considered one of the most applied sciencies taught in university and I would say that it attracts the least academically mind of those applying in university.

Fact is, they cannot live in many "reasonably priced" housing markets (let alone the Bay/SF) on a typical teacher salary in the US.

What is also very meaningful to notice is that due to high income taxes, income redistribution, and generally flatter pay scale overall compared to most other countries, a corporate lawyer isn't that much better off than a teacher.

The most important aspect of this is that when your nation's best and brightest choose a career path, massive disparities in quality of life is not a mitigating factor detracting from careers in education.

Many of the best and brightest stay in academia, but at the university level. Many others go into engineering and finance, but make no real lasting impact mostly working on the day to day tasks of making the cogs turn. Currently many of the smartest engineers in silicon valley have dedicated their careers to selling targeted ads.

In the scheme of things, I'd be hard pressed placing selling X more power drills a year or "yet another CRUD app" over building the foundation of a quality education system.

Meanwhile 55 engineers at WhatsApp can write software used daily by 700m people. Or a handful of financiers can find a new way to securitize debt, lowering interest rates for 100m borrowers.

Or they could find a new way to ignore investment risk in the interest of naked greed, causing suffering for millions all over the globe.

First, arguably, the engineers at what's app quite possibly might not be the best or brightest. Not saying they're aren't very good, but that's not necessarily what drives an app like WhatsApp into popularity.

Second, even if it's assumed that the WhatsApp engineers are literally the best 55 engineers in their field bar none they only represent a minuscule fraction of a pool of many, many talented individuals.

In other words, there's room for WhatsApp (and all the other comparable unicorns) and the teaching profession.

The overwhelming majority of very talented engineers are not impacting 700 million users. And as I mentioned, many are impacting them only insofar as what they see in their google sidebar. . . which I'm not sure is very socially impactful.

The crappier alternative(s) would have to be written by an engineer too.

Anyways, I think you're missing my point: there aren't enough exceptional 'best and brightest' to do everything. You want the 'best and brightest' to have maximum leverage as individuals over the world and that means politics, finance, and engineering, not teaching.

To examine the equation in the "work for an existing SV tech giant" case: a hugely smaller impact on people than what the WhatsApp engineers had. And getting a job at Facebook or another similarly impactful place is still at ~ 1:100000 odds for the world's 20 million software engineers.

Only this time you'll have even less confidence that you're actually making things better and not worse. At least in the WhatsApp case they made Facebook have $19 billion less money in the end. And if they're really out to make the world a better place they can spend that in some Bill Gates-esque way. I guess we'll see about that.

The observation that one learns more easily in playful manner is probably well-known in (but hardly exclusive to) hacker circles. In a way, it is baffling that people would forget this, especially as it is not excactly a brand-new discovery.

The idea of "play" as "having fun without any particular goal orientation" is a thoroughly modern idea. The idea that school should be a form of "play" in the modern sense is an even more recent one. It has no basis in ancient Rome.

Thank you very much for the explation!

EDIT: In Latin class, our textbook was called "Ludus Latinus", and our teacher made a big point of explaining how that meant learning was supposed to be a kind of game. It made me groan at the time, but in later years, I always thought it made perfect sense.

It is a game, in the sense that it's not the real thing, it's practice for later doing the real thing -- it's a structured, goal-directed game with a particular practical outcome in mind (building Latin skills), not a "let's go have fun in the park without any particular motive other than having fun" kind of a thing.

Kids play act scenarios all day that they're learning about. It's a way of internalizing what they've learned. Take away time for unstructured play, and you'll find a lot of kids have less ability to learn, simply because their brains need the play time to absorb the relevant facts.

We're using a curriculum-free homeschooling approach, and while my kids aren't on the exact same learning timetable, they're close enough to the normal education track -- and well beyond it in the areas that most interest them -- that I'm not worried. And they play all the time.

This article uses the terms 'spontaneous and free form' and 'guided and pedagogical'. It doesn't sound like the former requires children to interact with others, though I can't tell from the article. Certainly the latter isn't unstructured.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32302374

To me the author sounds like they have this exact misconception.

Maybe it is easier if stakeholders have high levels of trust, and similar performance expectations, work ethic, language skills, etc.

Your objection has been raised before. As http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-sc... points out:

> Some of the more vocal conservative reformers in America have grown weary of the “We-Love-Finland crowd” or so-called Finnish Envy. They argue that the United States has little to learn from a country of only 5.4 million people—4 percent of them foreign born. Yet the Finns seem to be onto something. Neighboring Norway, a country of similar size, embraces education policies similar to those in the United States. It employs standardized exams and teachers without master’s degrees. And like America, Norway’s PISA scores have been stalled in the middle ranges for the better part of a decade.

No country is an absolute monoculture or absolutely multicultural, but Finland is a remarkably monocultural country compared to most industrialized nations, with a strong social cohesion and rather minor ethnic divides. Swedish-speakers are very similar in culture and values to Finnish-speaking Finns, they just speak a different language.

Right now there is a huge migration going on - about 50 000 asylum seekers will come to the country within the year and it looks the pace will just increase. That means 1% of population, which is a rather significant demographic change in just one year. It will definitely have an impact.

I do not really believe Norwegian results are that much different. PISA is just one metric. In the most recent PISA (2012) Finland is #12; in the previous one it was #6 and the one before that it was #2. Did the quality of teaching drop that much in just a few years? Hardly.

That is, andyl said Finland 'achieves better educational outcomes'. This is (in my experience) based on PISA. Indeed, much of what I've read coming out of the US is that students must get more 'academic' education, backed by large-scale testing, in order to compete against the countries with high PISA scores.

You use the term 'do not really believe Norwegian results are that much different'. Could you explain the basis for that statement? The thesis is that a (near) monoculture is a reasonable explanation for high PISA scores. The example of Norway was to show there isn't a simple, direct correlation.

I don't think you don't believe the scores aren't difference. Instead, your objection seems instead to be that PISA isn't a stable/useful metric in the first place, so that comparisons aren't relevant. I think your suggestion is that there simply isn't data one way or the other on how homogeneity affects education.

Which means, I think, that you also disagree with andyl's hypothesis, but for different reasons.

I merely meant that in my experience, the school education that Norwegians get is not noticeably worse than the one Finnish kids get. They speak foreign languages, they can solve an equation, they know where Arkansas is.

Of course this is just my view, nothing you could call a scientific view substantiated by formal research. I just see that Norwegians are generally better (knowledge-wise) educated than Americans, on level with Finns, even if the PISA ratings of Norway and USA are very close to each other and significantly behind Finland.

I did not quite understand when you say you've read that students must get more 'academic' education, backed by large-scale testing, in order to compete against the countries with high PISA scores when the supposed strength of Finnish education system is lack of large-scale testing. Particularly early on - pupils generally don't even get any formal scores or ratings until 6th grade (as 13-year-old).

"I did not quite understand when you say .."

Sorry, I see the confusion. I meant that in the US, in discussion about changes to the US school system, one of the arguments is how US schools need more 'rigorous' testing with a more 'academic' goal, in order to improve PISA scores. Those making this argument often point to a country like South Korea with a very academic/test-centric education system and high PISA as a model for what the US should be. Those opposed point to Finland as a counter-example.

To edit what I wrote slightly, "much of what I've read coming out of the US is that US students must get [a] more 'academic' education ..."

Stictly speaking, maybe, but, c'mon, compared to the United States it is.

Also, AFAIK, the sort of extreme rich-poor divides between schools that is so characteristic of the USA is far less common in Scandanavian countries.

But there is a lot to be said for smart, well-trained teachers. It all starts and ends there.

This is due to the "leveling down" social philosophy prominent in Scandinavian societies.

Nobody is poor, nobody is rich, and this is not optional, enforced through mandatory wealth transfers (punitive taxation for those of above average income, to fund generous social welfare benefits for the below-average.)

Likewise, overachievement in schools is actively hindered just as much as underachievement is given extra assistance. Smarter students' learning is slowed so that they learn no more than about the normal level. This is usually overlooked by the we-love-Finnish-education crowd.

See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

You're going to need a citation of some kind for this.

It depends. My son (8) seems to have a class where they support the strong learners and slow learners at each of their own pace. Some people who I knew talked of eager teachers who gave the all the material they could consume.

Personally - 30:ish years ago I finished the second grade math book in a few weeks and the teacher berated me for consuming all the material she had ("What on earth are you going to work on now?") and I ended up bored and idle for the rest of the math class. Never again did I try to pace up...

So, it depends on the teachers - nowadays the situation seems to be much more supportive of strong learners. A couple of decades ago though this was a political thing - areas where social democrats were strong _prohibited_ people being taught at their own pace because it did not fit with social democrat ideology of complete equality.

So, historically, yes, this was a thing but I think it's better nowadays.

The borders of nations are a bad separation or aggregation for cultures, we'd have to look at cultures by themselves and compare results there. But for now the immigrant percentage of the population has to do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_immigrant...

China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Madagascar, Cuba, Lesotho, Philippines, Burma, Morocco, North Korea, Somalia, Eritrea, Colombia, Afghanistan, ... That's where you can find regions with pristine mono-cultures.

Comparing these to truly multi-cultural countries like Switzerland, Hong-Kong and Australia I strongly doubt your hypothesis.