The winner was none other than the unheralded underdog country of Finland. Just a generation earlier, Finland had been known as an education backwater—on par with Malaysia and Peru, and trailing behind the rest of Scandinavia. As of 1960, 89 percent of Finns didn’t make it past ninth grade. By the 1980s, in international comparisons of graduation rates as well as math and science Olympiad performances, Finnish students were still mediocre.
