Why do so many of the world’s best long-distance runners come from Kenya? How does Estonia produce so many tech unicorns- Skype, Bolt, Wise? Why do so many distinguished writers come from Nigeria and so many classical musicians from Venezuela? The world has no shortage of talent but what it lacks is a reliable way of finding it, nurturing it and giving it the opportunity to flourish. While there can be some easy answers like genes, geography, culture or history, in his book Why Kenyans Win Marathons and Estonians Build Unicorns, author Anirudh Krishna challenges these familiar explanations and asks a more important question: what if excellence is not a product of exceptional people, but of exceptional opportunities?

And that brings us to one of the biggest challenges facing education today: if talent is distributed widely, why is good teaching not? Published by Penguin Viking, this book excerpt explores Anirudh Krishna’s findings and his framework for understanding how societies can identify talent, create opportunity and turn potential into excellence.

Book: Why Kenyans Win Marathons and Estonians Build Unicorns

Author: Anirudh Krishna

Publisher: Penguin Viking

Pages: 264

According to the OECD, Finland is one of the world leaders in the academic performance of its secondary school students (ages eleven to eighteen). The country has achieved this distinction without spending any more money on education than other OECD countries. Students in Finland spend less time in the classroom and less time on homework. There is hardly any standardized testing. Yet, on test after international test, Finnish students outperform their peers in other countries.

Educational experts agree that the biggest contributors to these achievements are highly qualified and strongly motivated teachers. Socialized to be innovating and dedicated professionals, teachers in Finland command a great deal of public respect as highly trained and socially important professionals. Finland’s hard-to-get-into teacher training programme aims to produce ‘didacticians’ who can connect teaching innovations on the basis of sound evidence. As one Finnish schoolteacher has noted, ‘the aim is to educate competent, reflective teachers who develop a mindset of continuous learning and researching’7 and who bring a spirit of creativity and exploration into the classroom.

The Finnish system wasn’t always the envy of the world. The country emerged from Soviet rule at the end of the Second World War with a rundown and deeply unequal educational system, according to Pasi Sahlberg, a leading analyst and public commentator. In 1950, Sahlberg recalls, ‘only those living in towns or larger municipalities had access to grammar or middle schools. Most young people left school after (just) six or seven years of formal basic education’8—a situation not very different from that in many present-day developing countries. A series of reforms undertaken over the next few decades resulted in creating a countrywide network of peruskoulu, comprehensive state-run basic schools, where high-quality education is provided free of charge to children aged seven to sixteen, together with food, medical care and counselling.

Finland’s schools are largely self-regulating. A national curriculum exists and is regularly revised and improved upon, but successive improvements have slashed the curriculum down to a bare set of principles and guidelines.

Local collaboration and local adaptation are the hallmarks of the Finnish system. Within a broad mandate laid out by educational policy, the details of school education are worked out every day by hundreds of teachers.

‘The biggest incentive or reward in the teaching profession is teacher autonomy,’ declares an article written by three Finnish teachers.10 There are no uniform lesson plans; the aim is to stimulate creativity in the classroom. Teachers of younger children often ‘travel’ with their classes, teaching the same group for multiple years. ‘We have our own motivation to succeed,’ says one teacher. ‘We love the work. Our incentives come from inside.’

Collaborations among teachers serve as vehicles for pedagogic innovation. Teachers are members of professional teams. Schools encourage team activities and time is provided within each teacher’s schedule to enable the exploration of ideas about future collaborations.

In one example, Kaisa Summa, a teacher with five years’ experience, was having trouble keeping a gaggle of first-grade boys under control. She had looked longingly into Paivi Kangasvieri’s quiet second-grade room next door, wondering what secrets the twenty-five-year-veteran colleague could share. Each class had students of wide-ranging abilities and special needs. Summa asked Kangasvieri if they might combine gymnastics classes, hoping that good behaviour might be contagious. It worked. ‘This year, the two decided to merge their classes for sixteen hours a week. “We complement each other,” said Kangasvieri, who describes herself as a “calm and firm father” to Summa’s warm mothering. “It is cooperative teaching at its best,” she says.’13 Teachers, like Summa and Kangasvieri, are fully authorized to draw up such cooperative arrangements by themselves without needing anyone’s permission.

At the same time as cooperation is central and constant, there is competition to determine who will move up, who will win awards and who will become Vuoden opettaja (teacher of the year). Both aspects, collaboration and competition, are equally central within other flows, including in Sistema, the programme of musical learning that was pioneered in Venezuela and spread to other countries.

Group learning is central to the Sistema method. Unlike traditional methods of musical training that have students working one-on-one with a tutor and practising alone for countless hours, the group of musicians—an orchestra or ensemble—is the classroom for Sistema children. The central belief is that children in situations of disadvantage will grow organically through music and a pedagogy exists to assist with this development. Everyone learns to play together as an orchestra. Beginners learn by observing experienced players, who, in addition to learning and getting better themselves, feel responsible for mentoring less experienced players.

The Sistema orchestra is a close-knit community. Everyone learns that if they only put energy into their own music, they miss the bigger picture. If they are not helping others, nobody will reach the common goal, whether it’s getting better as an orchestra or putting on a concert. This sense of community, of being part of something greater than themselves, is impressed upon and felt by the children in the system. It is what brings so many of them back after they have graduated to continue the programme for other children. Collaboration is not a one-way street, they learn, with distinguishable gainers and losers. Both sides to the collaboration benefit. The biggest gainer is the flow of excellence.

While it is inbuilt and constitutes a key strength of Sistema, collaboration is not its only guiding ethos. Competition plays an equally central part. Players who demonstrate higher skills are not held back simply because their peers are not yet equally able.