Title: Why Are Finland's Schools Successful?  | Innovation   | Smithsonian Magazine
Headings: Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful?
Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful?
The country’s achievements in education have other nations, especially the United States, doing their homework
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Content: When Besart was not studying science, geography and math, he was parked next to Louhivuori’s desk at the front of his class of 9- and 10-year- olds, cracking open books from a tall stack, slowly reading one, then another, then devouring them by the dozens. By the end of the year, the son of Kosovo war refugees had conquered his adopted country’s vowel-rich language and arrived at the realization that he could, in fact, learn. Years later, a 20-year-old Besart showed up at Kirkkojarvi’s Christmas party with a bottle of Cognac and a big grin. “ You helped me,” he told his former teacher. Besart had opened his own car repair firm and a cleaning company. “ No big fuss,” Louhivuori told me. “ This is what we do every day, prepare kids for life.” This tale of a single rescued child hints at some of the reasons for the tiny Nordic nation’s staggering record of education success, a phenomenon that has inspired, baffled and even irked many of America’s parents and educators. Finnish schooling became an unlikely hot topic after the 2010 documentary film Waiting for “Superman” contrasted it with America’s troubled public schools. “Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education.