Has Finland Proved that Comprehensive Schools Work?
In the endless debate about how comprehensive education has failed (which it certainly has in Britain) I am often told about the supposed success of that sort of schooling in the rich (high GDP per capita) and tiny city state which is Finland.
Well, one point is precisely that. Finland is not blighted by the industrial and agrarian revolution which gave Britain so many harshly-divided big cities, nor by recent mass immigration on an unprecedented scale, Finland does not (I believe) have a snobbish class system comparable to ours. It would never have wasted so many of its bright children in the first place. A fully comprehensive school system (if such a thing can exist) would not be half as damaging there as it is here.
But leaving all that aside, the Economist (which I often deride for its bumptious liberal certainties on foreign and domestic policy) has done one of the things that it *is* good at, namely dispassionate coverage of a country which is barely reported in the British press.
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Which shows that the great Finnish comprehensive triumph is not quite so triumphant after all. The PISA study( dubious but all we have) suggests declining results and a widening gap between rich and poor .
And, wouldn���t you know ���well-off parents are renting flats near good schools and entering pupils for competitive music classes to game the system.���
You mean that, despite being so brilliantly comprehensive, Finland has ���good schools��� and not-so-good ones? Well, I never. I wonder if they could possibly be found in areas where better-off people live?
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