The Wall Street Journal’s featured Friday piece on Finnish education didn’t strike me as being quite as trenchant as the paper’s economics coverage. It tried to address why Finnish kids score at the top of the league table for international high school academic testing, in spite of the fact that:

High-school students here rarely get more than a half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted. There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over college…

To neurotic, hyper-competitive parents of private school children in New York and Washington, this is otherwise known as summer vacation (other than the lack of ever-present agonizing over college).

The article keeps dropping hints that describe a life for students that sounds like an idealized version of American childhood circa 1955: well-trained teachers and responsible children … love of reading. … While many U.S. parents worry about enrolling their toddlers in academically oriented preschools, the Finns don’t begin school until age 7…. first-grade students trudge to school through a stand of evergreens in near darkness …. at home even the very young are expected to lace up their own skates or put on their own skis. Somehow, though, the researchers that the author cites keep looking for the curricular tricks that explain strong Finnish school performance.

One could be pretty safe in stating a formula for educational success: intact, functioning family that loves reading + halfway decent school = well-educated kids.