Comment by Zigurd

Reductiveness is under the surface of many of these numbers. Finland has high teacher salaries, which is a contributing factor but entirely outside of the way teaching methodologies are evaluated.

Chinese students can work like fiends because they are in competition for a shortage of seats at elite universities. Not too surprisingly they burn out or they slack off once the pressure is off.

My personal experience with self-paced learning in middle school tells me that some students are capable of blazing through a curriculum at 3X the normal pace of classroom instruction, under no pressure at all. Technology can enable self paced learning, and it's really the only answer to scale it up. So it's hard to blame technology for screwing up education.