Individual or Group Excellence?

Yen Yen has made an interesting post on the Finnish education system. It brings up a very important point re:

Basically, out of 41 participating schools, 15 year-old Finnish students topped the world in Math, Science, Reading, and Problem-solving skills (participating countries included Japan, Korea and Hong Kong – no mention of Singapore).

And what’s very interesting is that they also have a very small percentage of difference between the top performing students and the lowest performing students.

In other words, the Finnish school system has managed to get all their students to perform at a fairly high level rather than focus on only a top group of ‘elite’ students.

I find it rather ironic that Singapore, with its strong emphasis on conformance and not rocking the boat, pushes an elitist meritocracy quite so strongly. Rather than putting boats on stilts, why not raise the tide?

I have strong views on the utility of specialists -- they're great in a given context, but they're useless once the context shifts. The rat -- the ultimate generalist -- does a lot better in any environment than the lion.