What does Finland do right?

[politicus]

They also invest more in education than most countries. School teachers are university trained and have high status in society + there is a "can do" attitude in Finnish culture. 

[politicus]

It's not easy to become a teacher in Finland.  Literally any jackass can become a teacher in the US.  Make becoming a teacher more difficult and you will get better teachers, better pay and better results.  We'll never be able to reach averages states like Finland and Sweden pull, but they'll never put men on the moon by themselves.

This. Education is viewed as a "soft" subject in the USA, filled with mediocrities. For example compare, LSAT/GMAT/MCAT scores of the various majors, education is usually near the bottom.

1. Its absurd that teaching is a low status job in a knowledge based economy and raising the status of teachers is extremely central to achieving better education, but it is a chicken and egg problem.

If you want to attract more capable students with better grades into teaching you will need to offer better wages and work conditions, but as long as you got mediocre and bad teachers out on the schools the public wont accept pay raises for teachers and they wont suddenly start to respect teaching as a profession. In principle it should be possible to reward good teachers and not bad ones, but in reality this isn't always easy.

2. There is no contradiction between excellence at the top and a high average level. Its a false dichotomy. The US could put a man on the moon because you are a large country with enormous ressources, if Finland or Sweden had a similar size they could do the same.

3. Raising the status of teachers is not the only reason to Finlands success.

- They also give teachers much more responsibility and drop the "accountability" and control stuff that wastes so much time in most countries education systems instead relying on the teachers professional ethic.
 
- They are not obsessed with testing, but leave it to the teachers to conduct their own tests often tailored to the individual student or group of students.

- Teachers produce/mix their own teaching materials. Not the "one size fits all" centralised systems.

So basically attract good people to teaching, pay them a decent wage and allow them to teach in their own way without controlling them all the time, just rely on their professional ethic.

It sounds simple, but countries like Denmark have many of the same elements without getting nearly the same results, so its also a matter of how you implement such a system.

[politicus]

For a while, I've noticed that Finland, as well as its neighboring Scandinavian countries, tops the world on a variety of things, such as education, corruption, and child poverty.  Is there anything behind its success, such as an economic or political model that other developed nations haven't tried yet, or did they just get the luck of the draw?

Scott as you can see your highly interesting question is not generating much quality debate. Linus and I tried to answer the education system part, whitout really getting to the bottom of it, and Franzl gave the obvious structural answer. But its far more complicated than that.

Its really two different things.

1. The Nordic universal welfare model, which has been historically successful at solving many societal ills, but is also under pressure in a globalized economy and can not be copied in its whole in other cultures - not even other Western countries.

This is the least interesting element IMO, since you are probably already familiar with the basic elements of this model.

2. Why, and to what extent, Finland does better than other Nordic countries in a range of fields. Education being the most famous.

This is a more complicated, but also far more interesting question. Since it may show part of the answer to how the Nordic model can survive and develop in today's world.

If we are to qualify the debate I think you need to be more specific about what areas you are interested in and we will have to look at them separately.

But I don't know how deep your interest in this is. Anyway, its too broad and complex an issue to debate in very general terms.

[politicus]

You can afford to have curriculums decided at the local level when you're a unfiromly progressive, liberal, intelligent country.

Local control would be a disaster for America. It would mean half the country would learn creationism.

I get your point about creationism, but 19% of the Finns voted for the right wing populist True Finns in the last election, so they are not all "progressives", but there is a consensus about certain aspects of society, especially the proper role of religion, which doesn't exist in the US.

[politicus]

Ethelbert, would you agree that Finland is a more succesful country than the other Nordic states? (perhaps excluding oil rich Norway) and if so, what are the factors that makes the Nordic model work better in Finland?

[politicus]

The fact that Finland at the same time has relatively high structural unemployment and an ageing population is definitely something that speaks against Finland as a model society.

You are right that there are clear differences between the four countries (Iceland was a special case even before the crash), but seen from the outside it still makes sense to talk about one Nordic model since our societies share so many characteristica.
 
We also use our societies to define what we are not to an even greater degree than its normal among neighbouring countries. Enlarging differences in the process and I think thats especially true regarding Denmark/Sweden. Your post reflects that tradition.

Most Danes would disagree that Denmark is more sexist than Sweden instead claiming Sweden is just more PC and even has more stereotypical gender roles than us.

Denmark is definetly more homogeneous than (urban) Sweden with less and more recent immigration and less acceptance of multiculturalism = stronger pressure to assimilate.

[politicus]

Denmark is generally more continental and thus liberal in certain ways. For example the attitudes to public sex, prostitution and drugs is much more lax in Denmark. With this comes also a somewhat more sexist society, at least such is my impression.

It's how you look at it, Denmark are more conservative in implement gender quotas, rules against prostitution and drugs. We are also more willing to implement immigration restriction. The problem here is state versus public opinion. When we talk with Swedes in private they usual come with opinions about gender and foreigners, which tend to be more extreme than anything we have implemented. Plus we lack the large active extreme right Sweden have.

So our more open/harsher debate are simply seen as a way to let the pus out abscess before it become bigger, rather than letting it fester and become something much uglier and harder to control.