After my last posting which suggested a relationship between nations that rate high on the Global Peace Index and also rank high on student acheivement on reading, math, and science tests, I had a comment from someone suggesting I check out the National Happiness Index. I did and found that of the top 16 ranked countries for performance on the science part of the national academic tests 8 showed up in the top 16 on the "National Happiness Index".
Iceland was the #1 happiest place. I have a friend staying with us who had been living in Iceland for the past couple of years. He told stories of how the Icelandic people really like to drink, so I checked the ranking of nations based on their per capita consumption of alcohol. Of the top 16 countries on the science test 12 rank in the top 16 for per capita alcohol consumption. The other 4 countries (Canada, Japan, New Zealand, & Sweden) all finished within the top 26 nations ranked on per capita alcohol consumption with 7 liters or more consumed per person per year.
I'm not quite sure what this says about education or academic achievement, but it is certainly something to put in your shot glass and sip on.
Maybe an alternative explanation:
ReplyDeletehttp://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/10/chart-of-the-day-.html