In the early 1970's America's education system was at the highest of any other country. Since then America's scores have slowly plunged to which it now stands at thirty sixth in the world, while Finland a country whose education system was once one of the worst in the ˜70s has slowly made its way to the top. So what is it that Finland has figured out that the America has not? Some may say that it's the lack of motivation teachers give into their lessons or the lack of students wanting to learn, either way Finland's education system is out performing the U.S. in every category possible. To try and solve this problem we must look at the difference between the to in the top three categories that affect the system: the teachers, the students and the curriculum. .
To be able to understand the difference on how the teachers differ from one another in their countries we should look at their qualification. For a person to become a teacher in the U.S. she or he must have obtained a Bachelor's degree, a supervised teaching experience and completed basic writing and math skills tests. All the while in Finland a teacher must have a Master's degree and complete up to 60 credits of the subject they are to teach or 120 for secondary teaching and go through an interview investigating their integrity and passion. Only one out of ten applicants will become a teacher due to their demand of the best. Finland does have the benefit of doing this because of the population size is not that large. Finnish are highly respected and are praise as highly as doctors and lawyers. They are given full control of their classroom on how they want to teach their students because they are seen as the masters of their field. Meanwhile, in the U.S. teachers are losing both control and respect. The U.S. education system has been set up so that a teacher must follow a certain routine on what and how to teach. So it should be no surprise to see that the teachers in the U.