Living abroad, one always thinks of home differently. In the last one and a half years, a period I've spent mostly in foreign countries, Finland has certainly been in the headlines on a specific front: international comparisons of different societal measurables. First it was competitive ability, then transparency (lack of corruption), and now education (follow the links on the right to more detail). I don't know what to think of these first positions, but one thing does strike me as noteworthy: Finnish kids spend less time at school than children in any other industrialised country, and still the results come out like this. Perhaps talent, after all, is not simply 99 per cent perspiration, despite T. A. Edison's famous claim to the contrary.
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