There is not three stages of education (elementary, middle, and high). It’s actually called comprehensive edu. (ages 6-15), high school OR vocational school, and then college OR polytechnical school.

Finnish males have mandatory conscription, usualy at age 19 or 20. Thus, it is a concern and problem for higher educational institutions when students must leave for 6 months to a year while enrolled. However, their placement in the school is retained for their return.

There lacks elite colleges and poor colleges. Education is quite equal throughout all schools.

Public schools are govt. funded of course. The meals are free, but the students are requried to purchase their own school textbooks, either at the school itself or at a bookstore. Schooling begins at the age of 7 years old, and continues until they are (generally) 19 y.o.

Like us, they have three stages: elementary, middle, and high school. They have different terms for the school stages except for high school.

Class sizes are small in the smaller towns. And you remain with your class throughout elementary and middle school, so you get to know the same people very well.

They have a huge variety of classes that have access to webcams, internet, etc.

Students begin learning English in third grade, swedish and finnish are taught from the beginning of schooling because they are the national languages, and later in middle and high school you have the options from spanish, french, german, italian, etc. Everyone knows how to speak around 3 languages, but to what extent varies.

They also use a different grading system, using numbers instead of letters on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the highest).

They choose 6 classes and keep them for half of the school year. They may decide to change courses or keep the same, or a combination, as they desire. But they must have the essential balance. For instance, under History, one could take European studies or history of whatever (I’m not certain on all of their options). And after six weeks, there are examinations covering the topics taught and self taught (the learning is considerable and students must use textbooks at home to cover subjects that had no time to be covered in the school time).

There are no school clubs nor sport teams nor physical education.

College and universities are also paid by the govt. I’ve heard that the process to get into a top university is grueling, filled with exams. But most students tend to take a year off between high school and higher education; and that may be longer if they decided to do their conscription service then.

I’ll stop there because I think that’s a lot already. But if you have specific questions I might be able to answer. Hope that helps and answers your question.

A few months ago, reports about the educational system in Finland, and its successes, were all the rage in our popular media. I guess the publicity was supposed to serve as some sort of inspiration to Americans — as if we’d actually consider shifting our values and implementing something like what the Finnish do here.

Since you were there, did you get any personal insights about their public school system?