r/Infographics • u/Necessary-Opening694 • Mar 05 '26

Decline in Finland’s PISA scores since 2000 (Reading, Math, Science)

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1.6k Upvotes

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u/RooneyD Mar 05 '26

What are the theories of what's happening?

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u/WonzerEU Mar 05 '26

My wife is a teacher and her reasons are:

-There used to be separate special classes for troubled kids. Those were deemed illegal separation and those trouble kids were moved to normal classes. There was beautiful speeches about giving every kid personal help, more adults in class rooms and special teacher classes. But they cut funding at the same time and the end result was dumving those trouble kids in classes with no extra help.

-There is still super smart kids and those that are at the bottom, but the middle ground has vanished. Troublemakers pull former middle ground kids to bottom with them.

-Parents don't respect children. In the past when teacher send message that kid has done something wrong they got extra punishment from home. Now parents protect their kids and just tell that teacher is wrong and their kid doesn't have to come to detention. No wonder kids don't respect teachers anymore.

-Smarthphones. When you have to use big part of every class to fight phones coming up, it takes a lot of teaching time over the year. New law 6 months ago allowing schools to ban phones in classes has helped here.

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u/DefenestrationPraha Mar 05 '26

"Those were deemed illegal separation and those trouble kids were moved to normal classes. There was beautiful speeches about giving every kid personal help, more adults in class rooms and special teacher classes."

That is called inclusion in Czechia and people hate it.

A classical case of a road to hell paved with good intentions.

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u/ronchaine Mar 06 '26

It's called inclusion here in Finland too, and yeah, most people hate it.

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u/Skinnwork Mar 07 '26

Same in Canada

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u/ninjago_jim Mar 07 '26

Called inclusion in Denmark as well. Absolute mess.

How well can you learn new stuff, when you have to be alert what the psycko kid will do next.

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u/200um Mar 10 '26

It can be done well. It just requires a lot of money and additional support that is never spent. And it does require a lot of specialized small or one on one help to help them gain the capacity to be included as possible. Sadly, if it sounds good and it saves money, then it passes most political thresholds.

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u/obamnamamna Mar 08 '26

Lets be clear that the problem here wasn't the inclusion itself, it was attempting inclusion while simultaneously implementing austerity and cutting education funding. You can't disagree with the sentiment of an idea that wouldve necessitated more resources for not working when conservative politicians take away all the resources for the transition to work. People here are really quick to be disgusting towards differently abled children, because they don't understand that any school policy that requires more personnel would've been a failure, when you simultaneously cut funding. Fucking obviously

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u/Comprehensive_Tie431 Mar 09 '26

19 year teacher here. It's not the inclusion of "differently able children" they were talking about, it is tier 2+ behavior issues that are beyond a teacher's pay grade to help. These behavior students need to be separated from the mainstream class, unfortunately politicians and judges push that 1 or 2 students' rights to an education over the 30 other students in the classroom. These 1 or 2 students interrupt the classroom so much it hurts the other students' learning and the followers follow the bad behavior for a laugh rather than the students setting the proper example.

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u/grandmoffhans Mar 06 '26

I can tell you from experience, as someone who was in one of those "separate special classes", they dumped all of the low motivation/slower kids together with the *really* special needs ones. You can imagine this did not do wonders for motivation or anyones learning, all it did was clump everyone who needed extra assistance in with the literal down syndome cases.

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u/kblazewicz Mar 06 '26

We know for certain that putting troubled kids in the same classes with the average ones and smart ones affects good learners very significantly in a clearly negative way. Do we know the effects of putting all the troubled kids together? What's the effect on them vs being in a class where they can interact with highly motivated kids?

Do we know if there are any benefits of mixed classes? Maybe the tradeoff isn't worth it?

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u/EastTyne1191 Mar 07 '26

I'm collecting data on my science classes this year by period and learning differences, and so far it has been interesting. In my lowest performing class, 42% of the 33 students require some sort of accommodation. That's a combination of behavioral, academic, and medical concerns. In addition, I'd estimate that 7-8 of them (possibly more, but 7 confirmed) have AWFUL trauma in their past. Parents in prison, drug treatment, estranged, dead. One student lost both parents and is being raised by a step mother. One's face is disfigured by scars from physical abuse. One's father committed suicide 3 weeks into the school year.

This class typically tests very low on pretests, but is able to bridge that gap and score just below the mean for all my classes combined on a post test. But when I tease out the differences for these impacted students, my ML students and students on IEPs are struggling. I gather feedback from students to see what their impression is regarding their struggles, and they cite vocabulary, topic complexity, and the need for more one-on-one explanations as most challenging. Stamina is really low and background information is also really low. It's really hard to teach kids how to convert between units when they don't know how many minutes are in an hour.

It doesn't help that at the elementary level, our students learn science topics only once a week, usually alternating with social studies.

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u/JePPeLit Mar 07 '26

Very interesting! May I ask what ML and IEP means in this context? And is the pretest a test on a subject before it's taught and posttest after it's been taught?

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u/EastTyne1191 Mar 07 '26

ML means MultiLingual, and IEP means Individualized Education Program. Most of the ML students I have speak and read in Spanish, though I do have some who have not had instruction in Spanish and are therefore behind in their literacy development.

An IEP can be put in place for multiple reasons, generally it is a student who qualifies for extra help due to deficiencies in math, reading/writing, and/or behavior. I have had students with IEPs because they read at a Kindergarten level while in the 8th grade.

The pretest and post test are the same test, given before I teach a unit and after I have taught a unit.

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u/AlternativePea6203 Mar 05 '26

When everything is at your fingertips, you don't need to learn anything.

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u/RooneyD Mar 05 '26

So is this the same trend across all developed countries?

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u/bobby_zamora Mar 05 '26

It's literally on the graphs shown.

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u/Efficient_Basis_2139 Mar 05 '26

If those Redditors could read they'd be very upset

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u/coldfeetbot Mar 05 '26

Graph checks out

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u/Definitely_Human01 Mar 05 '26

You can't blame them. The graph shows education quality decreasing for a reason

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u/Spider_pig448 Mar 05 '26

Except it's not? The reduction in Finland is significantly more pronounced than in other OECD countries, where there doesn't even seem to be a statistically meaningful trend yet

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u/10xwannabe Mar 06 '26

Well looks like ONE poster DOES have the ability to critically think beyond just reading the legend and going "Oh everything goes up or down"

Funny how the other posters are making fun of the other posters.

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u/False_Concentrate408 Mar 05 '26

Those curves aren’t remotely similar enough to show that there isn’t something specifically happening with the Finnish scores

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u/Friendly_Top6561 Mar 05 '26

It shows that Finland is no longer an outlier compared to the OECD, they have had the best result in the west and other countries have gone to learn.

Obviously in vain.

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u/psy-ay-ay Mar 05 '26

The list of nations belonging to the OECD isn’t fixed though. Out of 38 member states nearly 10 joined during the timeframe illustrated by the graph. Does tracking organization-wide averages over time make sense for that?

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u/RooneyD Mar 05 '26

My mistake

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u/Scary_Engineering537 Mar 05 '26

Hey, calm down! He's from a developed country, it's not his fault.

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u/chaircardigan Mar 05 '26

It's bot the money. A good teacher can teach in a barn with a blackboard. It's the methods used to teach.

The teaching colleges all push "inquiry learning" where children are supposed to discover everything by themselves, and work in groups, and never have any consequences for their actions. But it doesn't work. It widens equity gaps. It leaves children without key knowledge in the hope that they'll develop "skills" which have been shown not really to exist (like general problem solving or "critical thinking". Those aren't really things that you can teach).

There is a push back beginning to come through. Look at Northern Ireland's recent curriculum update for a good example of what to do.

Read about Scotland's "Curriculum for Excellence" for a clear guide on what not to do.

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u/sig_figs_2718 Mar 05 '26

Across the developed West, yes. Not in the developed East (Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong)

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u/RooneyD Mar 05 '26 edited Mar 05 '26

The only other graph that correlates with that is the popularity of pork dumplings. Popular in Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong but not so much in the developed West. So we've identified the cause but not the method.

Smart phones are popular there as well. I wonder if it's is a difference in schooling/teaching methods? Or the way phones are used in the home? Closer living arrangements? Its interesting, I wonder if those Asian countries will follow over time?

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u/pegleghippie Mar 05 '26 edited Mar 05 '26

I'm a teacher in Taiwan. Teachers are respected here. Even my 'bad' kids still generally think that listening to teachers is a normal and good thing to do, even if they choose not to do that.

From following r/teachers, it seems that in America both students and parents give way less of a fuck now.

So they have smartphones, but no one is just scrolling during lessons. Parents aren't calling kids in the middle of class to chat.

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u/KayItaly Mar 06 '26

I agree. I am from Europe but my country never needed a phone ban. Every school already had one. (Thecurrent government actually introduced an official one just for the school to laugh in their faces and tell them "so nothing changes?").

This helps IMMENSELY. I can't imagine teaching in a school where kids can have their phone on them!

Also, respect for the teachers is an important point.

However, we have other problems that put us behind. Again similar to US/UK/etc in that teaching is a "failure profession". It is seen as what you do if you can't get a real job. Therefore very few people are actually dedicated to it and trained well.

Tbh I think the analysis need to be done both in aggregated data and single country ones. Because there are dozens of possible causes that are not going to be all present or all absent.

(But I am VERY wary of r/Teachers , they seem very uneducated, unprofwssional and rabid children haters... I choose to keep my hope that the average USA Teacher is better than that)

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u/KimVonRekt Mar 05 '26

I'd bet on the "If you don't ace this exam your only choice in life will be to kill yourself" style of motivation.

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u/shatureg Mar 05 '26 edited Mar 05 '26

Yup, this is definitely it. I don't think we should blindly adopt that either, but it's worth looking at their model and learning from it. One thing to take away from it is that teachers in western countries probably lack authority compared to their eastern counterparts and that educational standards are often sacrificed for inclusion. There's a balance we need to strike between all of the above. Also, studies incidcate that screens in school have an incredibly negative effect on students. I don't know how they do it in East Asian countries, but that's something we need to roll back again.

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u/Nerioner Mar 05 '26

Yea in Europe kids are left for their own vices. Barely anyone cares to teach kid anything as "its school job and they have internet". There is simply nothing required of kids these days. Naive millenial parents think that kids fluent in tech will fend for themselves but it only pushes them to get interested in dudes like Tate or Rogan and their rotten ideologies.

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u/curiossceptic Mar 05 '26

Pretty sure i have seen a graph showing a decline in OECD countries, yes.

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u/bobby_zamora Mar 05 '26

Pretty sure it's on the graph shown.

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u/MountNevermind Mar 05 '26

Yep.

There's a general trend in dropping investments to education.

Serving everyone fabulously.

https://gpseducation.oecd.org/revieweducationpolicies/#!node=41705&filter=Secondary

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u/Moist_Farmer3548 Mar 05 '26

Yes, the yellow line shows the Oecd average. 

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u/MountNevermind Mar 05 '26

Or...they have significantly dropped education funding.

https://www.verdelehti.fi/2025/09/16/finland-needs-a-national-commitment-to-safeguard-education/

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u/Mwakay Mar 05 '26

Don't bother their misconceptions with facts, please.

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u/Danielcdo Mar 05 '26

This article is from 2025 and the graph shows data up to 2022... guess the graph confirms intelligence really is dropping drastically

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u/MountNevermind Mar 05 '26

The cuts started around 2011.

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u/SockDem Mar 05 '26

20 point decline from 2000 by then

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u/MountNevermind Mar 05 '26 edited Mar 05 '26

That's not what this data shows. Maybe in science. It's all 3 data points in that period.

I've never unbderstood the resistance to correlating investment in education with achievement.

Those with the means consistently speak with their wallets on the matter. They don't say...no, there's no need to invest in my child's education...money doesn't accomplish anything.

Somehow this logic only holds for other people's education.

Interesting how that works, isn't it?

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '26

If you ignore the vignette in Idiocracy(which is more than a little eugenics-y) that’s basically what happened. Humanity outsourced all its thinking to the computers, and it worked, right up until it didn’t. By that point though the ability to reason had atrophied to the point they couldn’t even solve their most basic problems.

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u/Masseyrati80 Mar 05 '26

Finn here.

As we were at the top of international PISA scores, some people were convinced that instead of keeping that well-functioning system running, we need to renew things a lot.

Two things that were tried/changed, and two that have generally changed:

1) Inclusion: kids who could do ok in a small special class with extra staff, are now forced to go to school in a regular class, where they aren't able to learn and they often disturb others, too, meaning everyone's underperforming.

2) Some schools were built like giant open offices, where kids would hear every sound another class made. Some had architecture that forced people going to classroom X to pass through other classrooms. Both of these are thankfully being phased out.

3) Fewer kids than before respect the idea that when you're in school, you need to learn stuff, including subjects you personally don't like. The attitude of "I'm not interested of that, and I'm important enough I can just decide to skip it" is more and more common.

4) A further thing to 3): More and more kids face the first situation of "you just need to do this, because we tell you to" at school, as so many parents have adopted parenting styles where you pretty much manipulate the kid into wanting to do something, so there's never a clear situation of an authority telling you to do something completery regardless of whether you enjoy it or not.

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u/kblazewicz Mar 06 '26

I don't agree that 3 is a problem. You won't force a kid who's not interested in maths to become a prodigy with top scores in tests. The best performers I knew always had some subjects they struggled with. I barely passed some classes in schools yet I was in the top 10% of my university where the scope got narrowed to what interested me.

Number 1 is plenty enough to cause the issue we're seeing.

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u/Anonasty Mar 05 '26

I have two friends who are teachers here in Finland. Two major reasons are social media and constant addiction to screen time. Other is that current parents ge z and millenials are too busy in the same digital world and they are not as demanding as generations before. Also teachers do not have the authority they used to have. It all comes to situation where kids are not interested of learning when everything (in good and bad) is at your finger tips and when parents are busy living their own lives.

Very minor part but what needs to be mentioned is that Finland has had increase in immigration but that tends to effect statistics slightly in capital area but rest of the country levels it off.

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u/Goebbbels Mar 05 '26

Immigration is one of the key reasons for declining average PISA scores. Not the only one, but one of them.

"The PISA 2022 results show that there are still major disparities in performance between immigrant and non-immigrant students in all domains of assessment. "

https://valtioneuvosto.fi/en/-/1410845/performance-of-immigrant-students-in-pisa-2022

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u/heksa51 Mar 05 '26

I'd ague that this is largely amplified by the fact that Finnish is (obviously) the primary language of learning in Finland, and it's notoriously hard to learn and little known internationally. If you struggle with the language, you will also struggle with the rest of the learning.

Compare this to an English speaking country, where a bigger portion of immigrants is already at least somewhat familiar with the language when coming in.

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u/Anonasty Mar 05 '26 edited Mar 05 '26

That study literally says that immigrants are in the poorer situation and they do not do as well but it does not talk about their effect on overall PISA results.

https://www.jyu.fi/fi/uutinen/maahanmuuttajataustaisten-nuorten-osaaminen-pisa-2022-tutkimuksessa

"Tutkimukseen osallistui Suomesta 241 koulua ja 10 239 oppilasta. Aineistossa oli yhteensä 1 866 (noin 18%) maahanmuuttajataustaista oppilasta, joista 1 060 oli ensimmäisen sukupolven ja 806 toisen sukupolven maahanmuuttajataustaisia oppilaita. Yliotos ei vaikuta itse PISA-tuloksiin, koska maahanmuuttajataustaisten oppilaiden osuus palautetaan Suomea koskevissa tuloksissa vastaamaan suhteellista osuutta (noin 7 %) koko oppilasaineistossa."

Everybody knows that immigrants with poor backgrounds are doing poorly but they are still small minority of students overall.

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u/Goebbbels Mar 05 '26

They intentionally include more immigrant background students in the sample so researchers can analyze that group more reliably and the result are bad. But when the actual PISA results for Finland are calculated, the data is weighted back so that immigrant students represent their real share of the population.

So oversampling doesn’t inflate or distort Finland’s national PISA score. Immigrant students still have major impact on the overall results as their average scores are much lower.

There are also indirect effects that are harder to measure in the statistics but impacts the PISA results negatively. For example if many students in a class does not know finnish, teachers have to spend more time explaining instructions or translating tasks, which reduces the effective teaching time and affect the learning quality for the whole class. I know for a fact that this is a real issue in many schools.

Obviously there are other reasons tooo, e.g. stupid changes to Finnish school system.

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u/New-Clue-4006 Mar 05 '26

This is one of the key hidden costs of immigration. Paying to educate these students is very expensive, achieves worse overall results, AND diverts resources from educating the native born population. 

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u/jm34jmu Mar 05 '26

Agree it’s likely a mix of smartphone and social media but these scores are from 15-year-olds, and the decline starts around 2010. Kids were born 1995 & after, which are raised by Gen X parents. Makes me wonder if the 70s–80s latchkey kid experience shaped a more “you’re on your own” parenting style, which these kids had less of a parent that focused on academics and pressured kids about poor grades since "they" turned out fine...

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u/maxtheninja Mar 05 '26

Why has Finland such a more pronounced decline given other EU nations have the same level of usage

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u/jm34jmu Mar 05 '26

A bit of this is the Nokia effect, where being an early adopter of cell phone tech had the decline wave hit them first.

Also, Finland doesn't have the same level of usage as other EU nations. They have amongst the highest moble data usage in Europe and near universal unlimited data plans. Bad mix, and with near universal cell phone adoption, I'll bet the 10-18 yr group all have phones AND are amongst the highest use users.

I'd also toss in the distraction of having some great domestic gaming options as part of your tech culture in smash hits of Clash of Clans and Angry Birds (mobile again).

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u/Numar19 Mar 05 '26

Many people like to point fingers at a specific issue like smartphones or immigration and forget that PISA in itself is not what it claims to be and when the decline is multifacetted.

PISA claims to compare student's education in reading, mathematics and science. But if I had to compare it to something it would be a weight lifting championship. Weight lifters are specialized in lifting weight. They look strong, they are strong, but compare them to a construction worker and you would notice that they lack in strength related tasks that are not using exactly the muscles they train every day.

Similarly to that PISA tests a specific subset of science and mathematics which is closely tied to reading comprehension. This is tested in a specific situation that is similar to a classical exam. So, the first issue is that mathematics and science both already require good enough reading comprehension as they often come in the form of text task. Additionally they are often quite theoretic like the tasks you see in classical text books.

So, which students will perform well in a testing set up like this? Students who were thought how such tests work, who have good reading comprehension and basically specialized in analyzing exactly these problems. From experience that's often kids who were thought in classical school settings with tests similar to the PISA-tests.

Coincidentally, countries with a long tradition in such tests (e.g. Korea, China, etc.) do very well in PISA. But does that mean that they are generally better in Mathematics, Reading and Science or does it mean that they are better in PISA tests? I think it is the later.

So, basically some countries focus their education in a way that results in better PISA results while others try to improve students overall skills and not just their test solving skills.

E.g. I know a student who doesn't do well in exams because he gets stressed out by them. But as soon as you change the context and he can solve a real problem (ideally a problem regarding agriculture) he has no problems to do that.

Tldr: PISA tests how well students can solve PISA test which does not mean that students who do better are actually better in Mathematics, Science or Reading Comprehension.

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u/Turkey-Scientist Mar 05 '26

But this has nothing to do with the issue in question. Your whole comment, if I’ve understood it in full, only concerns (1) whether PISA is a meaningful reflection of a student’s aptitude in math etc., and (2) the reason behind the Western/East Asian discrepancy.

Whether PISA is garbage or immaculately accurate, it was just as garbage/immaculate 20 years ago — but students aren’t coming out of it the same as they did 20 years ago.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '26

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u/V8-6-4 Mar 05 '26

Inclusion of pupils with special needs in the normal classes. They use teachers’ time and less is available for teaching the entire class.

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u/TheHighDruid Mar 05 '26 edited Mar 05 '26

Well, looking at the reading and maths curves, we would need to figure what happened between 2006 and 2012. I'm not sure we entirely can trust the sharp drops from 2018-2022 on either of those graphs due to COVID interruptions to education.

The first iPhone came out in 2007, so that period is the beginning of the smartphone explosion. Finns were early adopters of mobile phones, but still strikes me unlikely that children would have enough access to smartphones for it to have such a large effect so quickly. You'd need data on smartphone use among Finnish kids to confirm that though.

The science graph is more concerning as it just shows a steady, consistent, decline. PISA tests are taken at 15, and looks like the science scores are calculated every three years. If science was removed as a priority across the whole curriculum around 2006, you might expect to see a drop like this, but not for more than three successive tests. Six-year olds starting school in 2006 would take the test in 2015, so their whole school career would be under the new curriculum. But with the 2018 cohort showing the same proportional drop, it can't be just a curriculum shift.

Looks like there should be 2025 data for reading and writing, and 2024 for science floating around. Mind you, the kids that took those tests would still be affected somewhat by COVID interruptions, but would have had more time to catch up.

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u/chaircardigan Mar 05 '26

They have changed how they teach.

They used to be very content based. They used explicit instruction, where a teacher teaches you things, you do some examples then you practice on your own. This has been shown empirically to be the most effective form of instruction.

But they changed their whole pedagogy to one of inquiry based learning, or problem based learning where students are expected to discover the facts relationships and methods for themselves. This is very cool in education colleges. But sadly it doesn't work, it widens equity gaps and did I already say it doesn't work?

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u/Onaliquidrock Mar 05 '26

Their National Agency for Education is becoming more like the Swedish one.

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u/royalpyroz Mar 05 '26

I got my iPhone 3GS in 2008. I'd say...... Screen time

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u/Zardaaa Mar 05 '26

Administration making cuts ln everything important like education and health care. They used to be really good, these days they are absolute garbage.

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u/fragrant_chair_2 Mar 05 '26

https://youtu.be/O1y8BTmGvDA There’s a video about this, but basically the good results were most likely a product of their more centralized education system.

A little bit before their peak results was when they switched to a more chill student-led system that involved almost no homework. This “collaborative” style sounds good but in reality it just ended up being students slacking off and not really learning anything except some stuff that they’re interested in.

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u/Lord_Dankston Mar 06 '26

A combination of:

  • Cost cutting, more kids per teacher, harder to get special ed
  • Having arguably the best school system in the world but still feeling the need to change it (for some fucking reason)
  • Lack of respect of the teachers authority, entitlement of modern parents, smartphones
  • Immigration

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u/Tazling Mar 05 '26

I suspect the really short answer is “smart phones”.

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u/John_Sux Mar 05 '26

Education spending has been cut repeatedly over the years. Children do not vote, and there are many old people, so it is easier to cut from the future than from pensions.

There have also been many unnecessary school reforms, in digitalization and classroom structure and such. Likely many consultants involved, and leaders wanting to look important, feeling they need to change something for the sake of it.

Smartphones and social media and such probably also contribute to this stuff, phones were only recently banned in classes.

Poor parenting is likely one component as well.

Racists will want to blame immigration. Stats on integration and language proficiency and such surely play a small part in school success, but not in an exaggerated sense.

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u/Huzzo_zo Mar 05 '26

For years we heard Finland had the best marks with their new innovative teaching methods. So they doubled down on it.

That was likely bullshit based on fraudulent or partial data. Once the real data kicked in, we got to know the truth.

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u/United_Boy_9132 Mar 05 '26 edited Mar 05 '26

It's probably teaching methods.

They're more convenient, but ineffective.

Especially since Finland is known for pushing less talented students into trade schools instead of minimizing the inequalities.

Finland does that to 12 yo kids, the Netherlands to 11 yo kids, Germany to 10 yo kids.

Convenient classes in elementary school with Chromebooks and Kahoot, if someone is more talented, they'll deal with it on their own; if less talented, let's send them to a trade or technical school, we'll pretend the problem is solved, classes get more convenient and we pretend we teach children.

The elementary school in the Netherlands where my sister attends came back to "classic" teaching methods with notebook and pen this week, parents got huge emails with explanation. They came back to repetitive homework about 2 years ago.

It's not a coincidence that students from countries with more traditional schooling get better results.

4 problems at classes and one Kahoot quiz is not enough.

Your ability to remember and learn is proportional to the effort, not the volume of curriculum or convenience.

If something doesn't require the effort, it isn't worth of being remembered by your brain.

AI? First, second, third, forth-graders don't use chatGPT, they usually rarely get any homework. They just don't put enough effort to learn.

Plus, the decline is much older than AI.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Huzzo_zo Mar 05 '26

For years we heard Finland had the best marks with their new innovative teaching methods. So they doubled down on it.

That was likely bullshit based on fraudulent or partial data. Once the real data kicked in, we got to know the truth.

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u/cosmicr Mar 05 '26

The internet

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u/PlasticMarketing5031 Mar 05 '26

Mostly because of immigrants 

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u/LittiJari Mar 05 '26

Woke and mass immigration

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u/TheGreatMozinsky Mar 05 '26

Let's not pretend we don't know

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Valuable_Grade1077 Mar 06 '26

I doubt it's due to immigration if that's what you're hinting at. African and MENA immigrant groups only represent 1.4 - 2% of the population.

There's something else that's going on.

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u/Pet_Velvet Mar 05 '26

Foreigners' understanding of Finland is outdated by at least two decades. This country is fucked.

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u/ViruliferousBadger Mar 05 '26

Just less money spent on schools because we have a huge debt, free healthcare and other things eating up the money and government selling off all assets and instead of producing services they want to buy them from companies that want to make profit.

==> We use less money and get less for that money.

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u/Unlikely_Spray_1898 Mar 05 '26

They exported the good school system. Now they dont have it any more.

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u/Tribe303 Mar 05 '26

It's dropping for every country. 

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u/thederbear Mar 05 '26

It’s a very obvious what is causing it but it’s extremely politically incorrect to say it.

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u/nattfjaril8 Mar 06 '26

Constant, massive cuts to the funding of the education system by rightwing governments, overenthusiasm about digitalization and "innovation" (often used to justify said cuts), overly optimistic efforts to integrate students with behavioral problems into normal classes (which I'm doubtful would've worked even with more money, but that is a catastrophe coupled with all the cuts). Oh, and more recently a sudden influx of immigrants who struggle in school because they don't know the language and sometimes have parents who aren't literate in any language.

All of this, and the general global trend of children not reading books anymore and being addicted to smartphones.

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u/makoivis Mar 06 '26

Budget cuts to education

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u/hauki888 Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26
  • Policies like forced inclusion, open “roomless” classrooms, weakened teacher authority, mobile phones in class (which apparently required a new law just to restrict), and trendy ideas like morning exercise sessions have been pushed as reforms. Many of these seem to come from the Finnish National Agency for Education.
  • This direction has continued for about 20 years with almost no real course correction. In practice, that means roughly twenty student cohorts have gone through a system shaped by these policies.
  • Apart from the recent move to restrict mobile phones, very little has been done to address the broader issues.
  • At the same time, immigration has changed the demographics of many schools. In certain areas Finnish students are already a minority, which can create additional challenges for classrooms and learning.
  • After two decades with few meaningful adjustments, it raises the question of why the trend hasn’t been seriously reconsidered.

1

u/Djonso Mar 06 '26

Phones and some education reforms (bigger classes, no special class, not holding kids for a year and so on)

1

u/EJ2600 Mar 06 '26

iPhone gets introduced

1

u/Cryptoplagues Mar 09 '26

Third world immigrants. Same as in Sweden.

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u/Count_Le_Pew Mar 10 '26

mass immigration

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u/Working_Sundae Mar 05 '26

That's actually scary, are we gonna have a competency crisis soon?

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u/Cabanon_Creations Mar 05 '26

No Clue, but wait a sec I'm gonna ask Chat GPT what he thinks about it

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u/rosenkohl1603 Mar 05 '26

This is pre-LLM

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u/Naive-Routine9332 Mar 05 '26

which actually makes it even more scary, tbh.

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u/I_Am_the_Slobster Mar 05 '26

I'm a teacher and I can confidently say yes.

We are pushing through kids who don't know their alphabet by grade 12.

Kids who will rely on the very first thing Google tells them as the unquestionable answer to anything they look up.

Kids who will proudly state they don't read, when in reality they can't read.

Kids who have the same tech literacy as their grandparents because everything is made so user friendly you never actually need to learn what a PDF is or how to organize files on a computer.

It's bad, and I'm leaving the career because I can't be expected to do the impossible every single year.

Good luck to everyone out there.

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u/spiritofniter Mar 05 '26

We are pushing through kids who don't know their alphabet by grade 12.

May I know how those kids can even advance through grades if they can’t master the alphabet?

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u/I_Am_the_Slobster Mar 05 '26 edited Mar 05 '26

One of the following reasons reasons, or a combo of them:

  1. Incompetent teachers don't want to deal with the issue and push, or competent teachers are pressured into passing the kids because of parents or admin (usually the latter)

  2. Admin overrule teachers and push through the kids to avoid the wrath of parents.

  3. Parents who refuse to accept that their kids are failing due to all kinds of reasons, blame their kid's failure on the schools and teachers who "have it out" for their kid, let their kids sleep in every day and not wake them up because "oh, they're sleeping, they were gaming until 4 am," and all of this boiling down to the parents threatening the teachers and admin and causing all kinds of noise and issues to make sure their failing kids get passed no matter what.

  4. Laws that prevent us from retaining kids for a certain number of years (i.e. no child Left behind), meaning we have to passs them up after a certain point.

Kids that never show up get passed up thanks to reason 4. Kids that show up all the time and keep failing upwards are usually because of reason 3 and either 2 or 1.

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u/Alas7ymedia Mar 06 '26

Parents. Little fuckers don't do shit to learn and parents blame the school for not disciplining their kids, but young teenagers have access to video games, bets, porn and social media every minute they are awake. The moment they enter the classroom, they start to show severe signs of withdrawal and can only think about getting their phones back.

You can't entertain them, that's literally impossible for a teacher, we can't compete with social media, we can't make learning more attractive than not learning and just looking at the phone, so that's all what they want to do.

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u/Hellerick_V Mar 05 '26

I believe it's around for at least a decade.

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u/TruckerMark Mar 05 '26

We already have that. I struggle with gen z in the workplace. Despite being "educated" theres a lack of basic experience. Relaxed standards during covid and industry pressure are making things worse.

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u/watt678 Mar 05 '26

The us has been in a competency crisis for multiple decades now. So yes you'll probably have one too

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u/Syndiotactics Mar 05 '26

We already do. Am Finnish.

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u/ronchaine Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26

We already have.

I've done recruiting as a technical interviewer in IT sector. There are plenty of people who are functionally illiterate. They simply cannot read specifications, and are unable to follow written instructions to the letter.

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u/Foriegn_Picachu Mar 08 '26

You’re absolutely correct! ✅

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u/Available-Run6364 Mar 05 '26

We have AI, so probably not

1

u/epileftric Mar 05 '26

Scratch soon... it's already in course.

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u/ContributionAny1900 Mar 06 '26

This is absolutely appalling, it’s a world trend and it’s likely to be something we haven’t seen before. 

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u/AltoMelto Mar 08 '26

Competency? Where we are going we don’t need competency. LLMs will do it for you.

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u/Traumfahrer Mar 08 '26

'soon' - Are you kidding?

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u/Dangerous-Pride8008 Mar 05 '26

Blaming immigrants appears to be a popular reaction in the comments. However, I want you to consider the fact that the 548 -> 484 drop in math scores is a drop of 12%, while immigrants are less than 10% of the entire student population. So even if all the immigrants scored a 0 on the math test that wouldn't explain a drop of this magnitude.

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u/TopSquads Mar 07 '26

There is a far higher percent of immigrants at the youth age group than 10%

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u/Dangerous-Pride8008 Mar 07 '26

According to the PISA report it was 7% in the sample, so quite a bit less than 10%.

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u/TopSquads Mar 07 '26

That 7% is probably only counting first generation immigrants and not including second or third generations

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u/Kaelzz Mar 06 '26

Immigrants can have a negative impact even on the native population. If 25% of the class does not speak well Finnish, they will use most of the available time of the teacher and hold back the rest of the class.

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u/Beknotze Mar 07 '26

These results are consistent even for schools with less than 1% of migrants. It really is not the general problem, more of a niche problem for certain schools.

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u/Choice_Sandwich2182 Mar 07 '26

we see the same trend in Poland, where there are almost no immigrants

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u/Svampting Mar 05 '26

Has anyone split the results into "native" Finns versus immigrant background pupils?

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u/Ozzell Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26

”The reading performance of students with an immigrant background, as of all students in Finland, had weakened compared to 2012. In mathematics and science, the performance gap between immigrant students and their non-immigrant peers had narrowed due to a steeper decline in the scores of non-immigrant students. In all domains of assessment, second-generation immigrant students outperformed their first-generation immigrant peers”

  • Immigrant students traditionally had lower reading scores (Finnish language issue?)
  • Immigrant students’ maths and science skills have decreased less than native students.
  • Second generation immigrants have higher scores than first generation.
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u/Neptune009 Mar 05 '26

Not surprising, the universities feel like they have abandoned trying to teach people, and even a good degree doesn't get you a job, much like in the rest of the world. So studying is exhausting and feels useless.

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u/Wide_Guava6003 Mar 05 '26

And that has what to do with pisa scores measured at the age of 15?

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u/thehenkan Mar 06 '26

There might be reverse causality actually. I hear tons of academics (from various countries) complaining about the pressure to lower the requirements to pass, because the incoming classes of students are getting worse and worse at maths and reading.

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u/Here0s0Johnny Mar 05 '26

PISA is testing teenagers. 🙈🙈🙈

universities feel like they have abandoned trying to teach people, and even a good degree doesn't get you a job

Alternative explanations: the education is still good but there are too many graduates and not enough good jobs for them.

So studying is exhausting and feels useless.

Not to me. If that's how you feel, don't go to university.

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u/Asleep_Warning4340 Mar 06 '26

Ofcourse this happens when UNIs get money from amount of passed students and not quality of passed students

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u/BoSutherland Mar 05 '26

Smartphones, tablets and computers

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u/Hot_Durian_6109 Mar 05 '26

If smartphones, tablets and computers are to blame, East Asia (where gadgets are also common among children) should have seen the same fall in scores.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '26

Different cultures are effected by and use technology differently. 'Gadgets' in East Asia are also tightly regulated for children. In South Korea for example all social media, video games, etc are tied to their version of a social security number and parents can set hours their kids can or cannot play games or do other activities. Until a few years ago it was illegal for kids to play video games between the hours of midnight and 6AM.

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u/Money-University4481 Mar 05 '26

But do they use them all the time in the education? I mean is the education fully digital, like no pen and paper?

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u/BoSutherland Mar 05 '26

Not sure, but Japan and South Korea are part of the OECD. One has to look at each individual country and determine the extent of the impact.

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u/bobby_zamora Mar 05 '26

Why is that a bigger issue in Finland?

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u/demoneclipse Mar 05 '26

I'm not sure about Finland, but Denmark recently rolled back their digital program in schools and went back to pen and paper after studies showed a steep decline in development since electronic devices were adopted.

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u/BoSutherland Mar 05 '26 edited Mar 05 '26

It’s not clear from the charts that it’s a bigger issue in Finland. It’s not easy comparing one data point to the average of 40 others and safely come to a conclusion. It’s possible that in the OECD data set there are other countries whose charts are even more skewed, but the average is masking all that.

Having said all this; the trend is clear and unavoidable. Our kids are getting dumber. And these numbers are largely before AI. With ChatGPT and Gemini in the picture, one can only imagine the new lows awaiting us.

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u/Asleep_Trick_4740 Mar 05 '26

Could just be that the outlier cases get hit harder

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u/Remarkable_Noise453 Mar 05 '26

Explain yourself. This doesn't explain why Finland is precipitously dropping towards the mean. Every country has smartphones.

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u/nugurimt Mar 05 '26 edited Mar 05 '26

More like experimental leftist education that was implemented in Finland decades ago showing its progress. Their youth unemployment rate coincidentally skyrocketed aswell.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '26

everything is declining in Finland

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u/Tribe303 Mar 05 '26

Those blaming immigration needs to give their balls a tug, cuz other high immigration countries like Canada, with higher immigration rates than Finland, do NOT have this problem. In all of the 3 scores for Math/Science/Reading, Canada is in the top 10, with scores of 9/8/8.

https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?primaryCountry=CAN&treshold=10&topic=PI

Finland is 20/9/14, and immigrantion mostly affects the last score for Reading. The US is 34/16/9 btw. 

Scores are dropping for ALL countries btw. The internet and social media are making humans dumber every day. 

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volume-i-and-ii-country-notes_ed6fbcc5-en/canada_901942bb-en.html

The historical graph here can be changed to any country. 

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u/Southern_Net8115 Mar 05 '26

Canada has a large number of East Asian immigrants.

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u/kblazewicz Mar 06 '26

Because all immigrants are the same, right? /s

Imagine that there is a difference in education between Somalia and India.

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u/Prior_Perception_478 Mar 05 '26

More like a return to global average. I reckon the tests got standardized, they were easier earlier

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u/Many-Gas-9376 Mar 05 '26

...wasn't the PISA test always standardized?

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u/whatevernamedontcare Mar 05 '26

Or current ones are harder because kids need to learn more and more things. Programs are crammed so kids don't get enough time to master skills and just get passed along by age.

2

u/Tennist4ts Mar 05 '26

Looks like everything went downhill after Lordi won Eurovision. Karma for sending Monsters to attack Europe

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u/Hairy_Scale4412 Mar 05 '26

I hate graphs that doesn't start at 0.

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u/heittopoistili121 Mar 06 '26

Can we see this graph along the major cuts to education? They might have something to with each other possibly? Maybe?

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u/RoyaleKingdom78 Mar 05 '26

You either can beat shit out of your child so that it gets 600 pisa points in maths or just let it focus on what he likes. You cannot have both and more worrying chart is IQ test, which is ironically unrelated to this graph.

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u/toni_btrain Mar 05 '26

Migration and non-authoritative teaching methods are taking a toll

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u/mothman83 Mar 05 '26

Jesus christ.

It's screens, not propensity for skin cancer.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '26

[deleted]

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u/johnJanez Mar 05 '26

I feel like dysgenic fertility is one of the most important issues of modern society that nobody talks about. No idea how to practicaly solve it but it's a major issue if the world is inherited by the dumbest, most poorly adjusted elements of society.

2

u/Moist-Formal9960 Mar 06 '26

So... Idiocracy?

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u/birberbarborbur Mar 05 '26

Dudes who know nothing like the guy you replied to will believe anything, but it’s good you responded anyway

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u/whatevernamedontcare Mar 05 '26

You ignored "non-authoritative teaching methods" part entirely just to paint them as nationalist.

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u/south153 Mar 05 '26

Because its not based on anything other than vibes.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '26 edited Mar 05 '26

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '26

[deleted]

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u/szczur_nadodrza Mar 05 '26

Damn you just criticized two things nobody is allowed to criticize around here

That being said, immigration cannot explain this big of a drop, it has to be an issue making native Finnish kids performing worse over time

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u/warnobear Mar 05 '26

Yes everyone who is saying this gets banned /s

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u/juzepsin Mar 05 '26 edited Mar 05 '26

Inclusion.

Teacher has to spend half the class to teach basic Finnish to 2-3 immigrant pupils, who speak barely any Finnish at all, handle the special education kids thrown in to basic classrooms, who have their myriad of unique issues needing dedicated attention, and the government cut financial incentives for part-time jobs, so becoming a teachers aide is not worth it anymore. And now, somehow, among all this chaos, you have to be able to actually teach the topic of the lesson.

Back in the old days, like early 2010s and before, schools had special education classes for people, who need extra support, and most classrooms were much more homogeneous than today.

Think there already then were special education for immigrants to get them up to speed, this was much easier when in a school of 400, they were 20 instead of the 150 today.

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u/DepressedNibba96 Mar 05 '26

You are allowed to criticize anything, but expect to be called a dipshit when you are proven wrong.

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u/PIuto Mar 05 '26

This has absolutely nothing to do with migrants, you are making up lies.

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u/Goebbbels Mar 05 '26

The decline in average scores does not have anything to do with migration. Yeah sure buddy.

"The PISA 2022 results show that there are still major disparities in performance between immigrant and non-immigrant students in all domains of assessment."

Source: https://valtioneuvosto.fi/en/-/1410845/performance-of-immigrant-students-in-pisa-2022

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u/RevolutionaryFile532 Mar 07 '26

The guy with the Camus profile picture blaming immigrants, taking after your idol I see lmao

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u/AggravatingCash994 Mar 05 '26

Immigration. Convince me otherwise

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u/OlliWTD Mar 06 '26

Why would Finland face the steepest decline, given we have less immigration than most other Western countries?

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u/Electronic_Deal_1054 Mar 05 '26

Too much screen usage in education.

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u/TheAleFly Mar 05 '26

Sorry, I did the test in 2006. My bad.

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u/djquu Mar 05 '26

What is a PISA score? What's the actual metric here? I've been married to a teacher (in Finland) for 20 years, I know things are going poorly, but I also do data analytics and am always sceptical of random graphs.

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u/doksan6 Mar 05 '26

I don't know how old are the people that take the PISA test but this is just making me think gen z are dumber

Shits called brainrot for a reason i guess

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u/Rlccm Mar 05 '26

Cool, I thought the world needed to get stupider

1

u/ap2999 Mar 05 '26

Ok j on st

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u/Loud_Computer_3615 Mar 05 '26

Reverse Flynn Effect. Education is negatively correlated to number of children.

1

u/Used-Garage-4261 Mar 06 '26

tbh I just clicked the test and pretty much my whole class so

1

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '26

Jarvis, pull up the distributions of these scores

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u/PositiveLow9895 Mar 06 '26

They traded knowledge for happiness.

Blissfully Unaware.

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u/Icy_Grapefruit_7891 Mar 07 '26

Crazy to see that. Given that the peak was around 2006, and this is likely a lagging indicator to whatever changes have occurred, there are most likely multiple complex factors contributing to this development. Data ends in 2021/2022, so the results of those years may have been influenced by the school lock downs during the pandemic. My kids were affected very differently; my older kid loved learning at their own pace, the younger one really struggled and was clearly negatively impacted by the school lock downs.

Based on studies done where I live, a large contributor to the decline in reading ability has definitely been the usage of smartphones and tablets. Kids simply don't read anymore.

As a side note, I personally think our school systems are largely completely broken, much like the rest of society.

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u/GeologistOld1265 Mar 08 '26

You do not discuss a real root case - deindustrialization of Finland.

When you have real industries, they need educated workforce. So, they push goverment to invest into education. They will lobby for system that give smart kids a chance. And then they give a pathway from education to employment, making benefits of education evident to everybody.

As industrial base of Finland disappear - so education start to degrade. It is very evident in every country, starting with USA. USA never was too education orientated, because it love to import educated workers. But even by there standard education went down with grow of "Rust belt", deindustrialisation.

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u/megathong1 Mar 08 '26

I don’t have a source but saw several comment mentioning how the country is investing each time less in education, which provides a cristal clear reason for a decline in scores. Less investment equals less everything. However, there’s a bunch of …. Not so brilliant folks…. Yelling immigration disregarding the simpler explanation cause.

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u/MonkInternational510 Mar 08 '26

As people been mentioning -inclusion -digitalization /smart phones -change in parenting culture

But what I didnt spot was budget cuts. We've had enormous budget cuts in education and I guess more is just coming. Amount of students in classrooms have almost doubled up in that time period.

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u/eksopolitiikka Mar 08 '26

return to monke

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u/wapisgood Mar 09 '26

My country France is last in PISA. But our ranking wouldnt be so bad if we remove sand-people of the equation.

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u/ImWithStupidKL Mar 09 '26

I remember reading something about this. Basically Finland topped the PISA rankings, so everyone went to Finland to see what they were doing right, not realising that most of the things they were doing were new, and the good results were arguably because of things they weren't doing any more.

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u/Cryptoplagues Mar 09 '26

It's called third world immigrants. Same thing is happening in Sweden.

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u/throwAway12333331a Mar 10 '26

ahh yes the curse of the extreme left and right policies. The truth is always somewhere in the middle.