How does that work? If you're so educated and skilled, can't you make loads more money in industry than teaching snot-nosed teenagers to solve linear equations? Or does making lots of money not matter as much in Finnish culture?
Finland both pays and respects its teachers. This is not so much the case in the US, where teaching is viewed as overpaid babysitting.
Also, prestige/symbolic capital is a powerful motivator. It seems to me that in the US, wealth is a major contributor to prestige, so they're often not dissociated in professional attainment.
I'd vehemently dispute that chartacterization. I've never once in my life run in to anyone who felt that way, with the possible exception of some politicians and union heads.
While you're correct in that teachers in better districts are respected, teachers in the inner city literally are babysitters (although I would argue that they earn every penny of their paychecks; they aren't overpaid). They spend so much time and effort keeping order that they can barely teach the classes. No parental involvement, kids with mental disorders who cannot be disciplined, insanely high class sizes, and an administration that shrugs and says, "Just keep us from getting closed."
Just get 'em to 18 (or earlier - a lot will drop out) and get 'em out the door. Someone else's problem now, probably the state penitentiary.
I think you need to expand your horizons. There are large portions of the US population that view our public schools as little more than glorified daycare. While I agree for the most part, I admit that there are exceptions where we do have really solid public schooling. The exceptions are for the rich kids in schools like New Trier, etc.. There is a nearly unlimited number of edu startups trying to address this very problem, they wouldn't exist if we had good schools.
Dispute it all you want. It's true. This plagues the lower echelons of society which you may be too distanced from to be aware of. Ask anyone from a school with a large population of students from poor families. When a kid's parents are illiterate and innumerate they tend to not rise above their station.
I think it's also an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which parents think that just because they have kids, it makes them experts at education.
This is ultimately harmful because it makes parents feel superior to educators in their respective field.
That said, 'Finland's teachers have high status, professional support, and good pay'[0], teaching 4 hours a day for 190 days a year. One can also presumably make that wage pretty much anywhere in the country, where the wage will go further than private wages that are likely mostly available in higher-cost areas.
So basically, it's a job with an average wage, but high respect and good working conditions.
Quite difficult. Generally, in Finland, firing a teacher requires an incidence of gross misconduct, such as violence towards pupils.
This is quite rare, though actual statistics are hard to come by. I know of one case in Helsinki area two years ago; this made headlines after a teacher physically removed a disruptive pupil from school cafeteria (generally, touching pupils is a no-no) and someone posted the scuffle in Youtube. The teacher was dismissed by headteacher, but it turned out that at least a partial reason was an earlier schism (perhaps political) between this teacher and the headteacher, and eventually the teacher was reinstated by the local school board.
Generally, firing a teacher is not very different compared to individual dismissals in other jobs in Finland; generally, processes for downsizing companies are not that complex while usually an individual dismissal is tricky.
Teacher salaries in Finland are not particularly good, but the profession is popular because pay in other university-trained professions is low (compared to US, or Germany, for instance) and therefore there are lots of applicants to teacher training. And the students can be assured that there are jobs, which is not the case for many other professions.
Maybe. I'm sure the idea is that "I might be fired, better not get that job" is easy to imagine, as is people running away from the industry at high speed if they could be fired. Somehow most other professionals deal with the ability to be fired just fine.
But there are other forces at work that make less job lock good for workers.
First is coworkers. Education is a team activity, where your coworkers screw-up means more work for you. I've worked at places where management refused to fire people who needed fired, because of friendships or pain aversion. It was not fun fixing all their problems. Fortunately I quit and watched them circle the drain.
The biggest is the ease of entry and exit. If the only job available is one of a selected number where you have to wait for the current person holding it to retire, you have a situation like postdocs trying to get tenure track positions in American academia. On the other hand, if there is a flow of teachers moving around in job market -- including people new to teaching, and people stopping teaching to do something else -- there's plenty of room to find openings. It also makes it easy to move around: if your boss sucks, or your spouse wants to move elsewhere else in the country, you can find openings.
Well, if you make loads of money in Finland, the taxman will take a significant part of it. That decreases the incentives to work in industry.
And yes, making lots of money indeed matters less in this culture than (it seems, I don't know for sure) in America.
But I wouldn't say that teachers are paid that well in Finland. It's just that the expresssion (Finland.compare_compensation(teacher, engineer) > US.compare_compensation(teacher, engineer)) evals to 1.
Overall, the current Finnish political climate seems to be hostile to industry, and I see no signs of improvement. Elections in a few months, and everyone is a friend of the public sector employees, because they are such a significant part of the workforce and voting base.
