Yes, it’s Möbius Strip Jack Naked time again. Why do we need to wind him up when he does it all himself?

Incidentally Jack, I notice your mate Volker Weisse scored Italian IQ ratings at the bottom end of the European races.

All problems to do with education everywhere are reducible to ethnic homogeneity if it’s Jack-certified ethnicity.

found my joke pretty side-splittingly funny, Jack, yes.

Liam laughs to himself at his own jokes. Ahh well, to each his own.

Liam says:

Lynn is not exactly the most reputable source either.

Lynn is the most reputable source in this area because he is basicly the only source for international IQ comparisons. Lynn is also one of the first people to notice the so-called Flynn effect, which should clear him of straw-men genetic determinist accusations.

Post-modern liberal arts professional malpractice and the ideological antics of their sub-competent camp followers (no names, no pack drill) has caused psychometry to be vastly under-researched. This means ignoring the gold mines of data on special nature and its relation to social structure.

The vacum gets filled with ignorant moralisers and Liam’s version of the moulding, stale liberal ideology that launched a million cliches.

Liam says:

Volkmar Weiss has played with his figure…From your link: Why? He’s adjusting it up *from* Lynn’s already questionable numbers to suit his own eugenicist assumptions…

When you have some “empirical measurement� let me know, and we’ll talk about it.

Weiss has not played with any figures in this case, whatever his geneological assumptions. The PISA-adjusted IQ scores are an alternative way to measure IQ which avoids the cultural bias criticism. Since it is mainly maths-based it is more suitable for global comparisons.

And indeed, as London School psychometry predicts, North East European Finns come in near North East Asians since both have similar high intelligence in the logical sciences. Here is a link to more detailed “empirical measurement”. It is the rotten racist OECD, so be careful of ideological contamination.

But wait, there’s more. Finland has more Mensa members by ratio of population than any other country. A visit to an international nerd convention, hosted by Linux, reinforces this impression. That is what a high IQ meritocracy looks like, as anyone who has had anything to do with programming firms will know.

Liam says:

Seriously now Jack, anyone who publishes stuff like this on their site is *not your friend*.

As I said above, I neither know or care of what people like Weiss do in their spare time. I leave ad hominum attacks to intellectual slum dwellers, such as yourself.

Nor am I am not interested in making new friends, I have more than enough to catch up with all over the world. I am interested in the facts, just the facts, ma’am.

Seriously Liam, try for once to critique without relying on baseless assertion and ad hominum attacks. You might learn something and slightly diminish the void of ignorance in which you currently spin.

Now once you have absorbed all this information, “let me know” and then we will continue with filling in the glaring gaps in your education (and back-filling the nonsense).

Q. Whats the difference between educating Liam and playing a drum machine.
A. With the drum machine you only have to key the information in once.

Poor Eliot Ramsey clearly knows nothing about education. but it suits his peurile idelogical prejudices to blame teh evil union for all the perceived ills of education.

So what do these results tell us, Eliot Ramsey, about what we should do in Australia? Select a cultural group we like and then send everyone else to another country? Shrink Australia? Give everyone a million dollars (that might work!!).

It probably tells us that comparing countries like the USA, Australia and the UK to tiny, culturally homogenous outposts like Funland and Lichtenstein is meaningless for purposes of developing national policy. But handy for buttressing the selective propaganda claims of special interest lobbies like the Teachers Union.

Don’t leave it up to school teachers to do this for you.

You’re a hippie home-schooler, GregM.

So what do these results tell us, Eliot Ramsey, about what we should do in Australia?

What they tell us, if we are parents, is to teach our children to read from an early age. Rejoice with them in the complexity and beauty of your language, whether it be Finnish or English or any other language.

And that’s not hard work if you believe in your children and love them,regardless of the competition they may face when they enter public school education.

Don’t leave it up to school teachers to do this for you. That leaves them to make up for your abdication of responsibility as a parent.

That being said two things stood out like beacons. One is that the Finnish experience was very rich in terms of literature and exposure to reading. Particular mention was made of the excellence of the public library system and the cultural value placed on books.

Well, per capita expenditure on education certainly doesn’t guarantee a result. It helps too to be small and culturally homogenous, judging by the result.

If you look at this New Zealand report on their per capita level of expenditure of education, it’s impressively high by OECD standards, ranking up with the UK and the USA. Ireland’s by contrast, is low.

http://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/indicators/resources/total_investment_in_education

However, if you look at this breakdown of PISA results for both 2003 and 2006, with outcomes separated out by Mathematics, Reading literacy, Science, and Problem solving, the results for New Zealand are fairly patchy and uneven. Australia outperforms New Zealand in Literacy in 2003, for example.

And Britain and the USA don’t even rank in the top ten in any catgory.

An evaluation of the 2003 results showed that the countries which spent more on education did not necessarily do better than those which spent less.

Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Japan, Korea and the Netherlands spent less but did relatively well, whereas the United States spent much more but was below the OECD average.

New Zealand performs fairly well, but then Ireland gets a mention too in the 2006 results, yet oddly Britain and the USA, both investing above the OECD average don’t appear in the top 10 in any category.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment

For many countries, the first PISA results were a rude awakening; in Germany, for example, the comparatively low scores brought on heated debate about how the school system should be changed. Other countries had an agreeable surprise.

What seems apparent from the results is that small, wealthy, culturally homogenous nations like Taiwan, Hong Kong, Finland and South Korea do best by far.

Probably not the sort of message that would be welcomed by teachers unions and the like.

About three years ago I read a study done by and an English university and HM Inspectorate, where they looked at the early years (about age 5-6) in England, Denmark and Finland. Denmark was chosen because kids didn’t perform as well as the English in later standard tests (I thought age 13, but it could have been 15) and the Finns performed better.

Of particular interest is that the Scandinavian kids, Germans too I think, don’t tackle formal learning until they are 7.

The main thing I remember about the Danes is that they don’t staff their prep schooling with trained teachers. They have two adults for every class of 25, but both are trained in a generic 3-year diploma type courses for ‘helping services’ at that level (I’m a bit vague about that).

In Finland they had two adults for each group, one a teacher, who had great respect in the community and professional standing in the school. The groups were limited to 13, from memory, so the staffing was double that in England. The space provided also seemed about twice as large, with better resources and more flexibility for creative and informal-type activities. (My wife who works in this area likes a group of about 20. She would say 13 is too small to provide enough variety of experience in the group.)

That being said two things stood out like beacons. One is that the Finnish experience was very rich in terms of literature and exposure to reading. Particular mention was made of the excellence of the public library system and the cultural value placed on books.

The second was the passionate egalitarianism, whereby no special provision was made at that level for smart kids. It was felt important that they all had the same activities. The English, of course, were critical of this, it being an obvious waste of human development potential - or something.

What they didn’t see, and what happens in our schools too, is that children are sorted and classified from the outset in terms of their aptitude for academic learning. So very powerfully all are getting to know their place in the pecking order. In fact some are being taught to cope with their mediocrity and some with failure, often just because developmentally they are a bit later in coming to the party.

Some learn very fast that school learning is really not for them. Some outwardly comply but quietly die inside. A few can resort to outright rebellion.

Maybe I should start pontificating about workers in ‘the health sector’ the way you pontificate about teachers.

Well, I don’t know if you’re from New South Wales, but the health sector is a very topical public issue right now and pretty well everyone’s got an opinion on it.

Then there’s public transport - but I’m not a train driver, so I won’t express an opinion on that. It wouldn’t be democratic.

According to this Australian Education Union summary, education expenditure under the previuos Federal government represented 7.6 per cent of its budget for 2005/2006
http://209.85.175.104/search?q=cache:j1kM0HJK844J:www.aeufederal.org.au/Publications/2006Budget.pdf+Education+expenditure+as+percentage+of+Australian+budget&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=au

And according to the NSW Budget of 19 June 2007, education expenditure “closely follows Health at more than 23 per cent of the State Budget.” Which makes sense as it’s largely a State responsibility in Australia.

According to the Finnish Minsitry of Education, education expenditure in Finland “is average OECD level” and that in 2003 educational expenditure in Finland amounted to 6.1% of the GDP, which is “close to the OECD average”.

http://www.minedu.fi/OPM/Tiedotteet/2006/9/OECDx_Suomalaisen_koulutuksen_tehokkuus_maailman_kxrkex.html?lang=en

According to the following Earth Trends site, education expenditure in Australia as a percentage of GDP is 4.8 per cent.

http://earthtrends.wri.org/searchable_db/index.php?step=countries&cID%5B%5D=9&allcountries=checkbox&theme=10&variable_ID=643&action=select_years

But this site puts Australian expenditure on education as a percenatge of GDP at 4.0 per cent and the OECD average as 4.5 per cent
http://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/indicators/resources/total_investment_in_education

That is, more than Ireland or less than the USA.

No doubt that includes yourself.
Maybe I should start pontificating about workers in ‘the health sector’ the way you pontificate about teachers. But I probably know as much about the health sector as you do about the education system so I’ll restrain myself.

Isn’t “IQ� a flawed and discredited concept these days, anyway?

God knows I haven’t met anyone with an IQ for years. I attribute that to the education system and the fact that I work in the public health sector. Also, I’m not sure there’s any evidence that the blonde, downy flecked Fins take education any more seriously, nor prioritise it any more than say Australians, Belgians or Canadians.

They seem from the evidence provided merely to have more money to splash around and fewer cultural variations to contend with than most. Oh, and the whole country is about the size of Melbourne.