[pavlov]

Having spent the better part of my life in various Finnish schools, I would say "no". It's nothing like in many Asian countries where students are either strongly motivated or strongly pushed by their parents to do well in school.

But perhaps it's this relative lack of individual ambition that allows the system as a whole to perform well? I.e. the Finnish school system delivers a high mean with fewer of the excellent outliers. (Personally I think that's a reasonable goal for an educational system because measuring students doesn't work all that well, so it would be dangerous to optimize for exceptional performance on a broken metric.)

[kyberias]

Good point. Mean performance, that is used to compare countries, may rise while variance shrinks resulting in fewer if any extremely high and low performers. Reminds me of Stephen Jay Gould's book "Full House".

[Kudzu_Bob]

I'm confused. If you're saying that Finns do well in school even though nobody forces them to, then they would seem to fit the definition of excellent students to a tee.

[Jhsto]

It's worth noting that the students in the article have already expressed some level of interest towards school. Unless they wouldn't be in 'lukio'.

The other part consists of students who are normally thought to be worse in school. In contrary to their lukio peers, they do not have matriculation examination and therefore do not contribute to the statistics shown on the article.