Connect Eddie HoltSo, the Finns are top of the class when it comes to education. At least, this week's Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report, "Education at a Glance", claims they are.
Mind you, the Finns refuse to countenance school "league tables" so the league table of the Paris-based OECD, a club of 30 mostly wealthy countries, may not greatly interest them.
Still, the report has clear lessons which do not endorse Irish education's characteristic bean-counting. There's an undeniable relationship between Finland's performance and the reported fact that teaching is "usually in the top two in Finnish opinion polls of desirable professions". Teaching there is among the most difficult careers to break into and become established within.
In Finland, there's an average of 10 applicants for every teaching job and all candidates must have a postgraduate degree in education. In contrast, many other wealthy Western countries risk a shortage of teachers in the future. As a generation of older teachers retires not enough young people want to replace them, the OECD reports.
In Germany and Italy, for instance, almost half of all secondary school teachers are aged more than 50. Clearly, teaching is not sufficiently attractive in many countries and it's not just because of the profession's relatively diminishing pay in increasingly privatised economies. The lure of any job also depends on the autonomy it offers and how it is valued by the wider society.
"It's not about the money in Finland," according to Andreas Schleicher, head of the OECD's education indicators and analysis division. After all, Finnish teachers are comparatively poorly paid. Alongside autonomy and respect, working conditions are primary incentives.
Those conditions allow teachers to timetable and teach the Finnish board of education's core curriculum in whatever way they believe best. "Finnish teachers aren't constantly watched and monitored," adds Schleicher. "They don't have to comply with masses of government bureaucracy. They have freedom to teach the way they want. Above all, they are valued and respected."
Clearly, the system expresses trust in a teacher's training and ability. It doesn't believe in "hot-housing" either.
Pre-schooling in Finland begins when children are six years old and formal education begins when they are seven. Thereafter, pupils remain at the same school until they are 16, when, for three years, 70 per cent of them will go to the "lukio" (upper secondary) and 27 per cent to vocational schools. Just 3 per cent quit formal education at 16.
Throughout, there is no streaming by ability either - all students are taught in the same class. The result is that more than 60 per cent of them progress to a university or polytechnic in a country where almost everyone attends a state school because the private education sector is miniscule. The first national exam undergone by any Finnish student is the matriculation at the end of "lukio", by which stage he or she is aged 19.
Before that, there are, of course, in-house tests to monitor progress. But such tests are not used to brand children as successes or failures. Instead, they are used to make timely interventions so that children who are struggling are helped as soon as possible. Remedial education is taken seriously and properly funded.
Minister for Education Noel Dempsey welcomed the findings of the OECD report, which placed Ireland fifth of 27 countries in literacy rankings for reading, ninth in scientific literacy and 15th in mathematical literacy. Finland, by comparison, placed first, third and fourth in the respective categories examined.
So, while Ireland expresses expected and, in fairness, not utterly unmerited self-congratulation, it is clear that education here still has some distance to go to equal the Finnish marks. More funding would help, of course, but a reform of the fundamental ideology governing education - still authoritarian and class-bound here - is required.
It's required because the prevailing system still betrays a significant section of Irish youngsters. We all know that some kids attend rodent-infested schools or are taught in crumbling pre-fabs while others go to plush private schools costing thousands of euro a term. Such abject discrepancies do not occur in Finland.
Then again, there is less of a gap between rich people and poor people in the world's most educationally advanced country. That, of course, is to be expected because one implies the other. Ignorant societies, on the other hand, remain obscenely stratified, not just between the financially rich and poor but between the educationally rich and poor.
Ireland has choices to make in relation to education but the OECD report renders the overall lessons very clear. Make education similar for everybody, fund it properly and, crucially, trust well-trained teachers, not political careerists, to make decisions about the job.
That way, we could all have a Finn-ishing school education without the abject snobbery the term usually implies.