The Story of Finland’s Education Success (and How to Reboot the System)
The BBC just broadcasted this new video report documenting the success of Finland’s education system and the story behind it. Finland, as a country, consistently scores at the top of international education ratings – this despite the fact that its pupils spend the fewest number of hours in class relative to the rest of the developed world.
The video is short and succinct, but captures well what makes Finland’s education system work. I’d encourage everyone to watch it. In short, though, Finland’s success really all comes down to a few things: a strong sense of trust – both in students and in teachers and schools; a pedagogy based on deep, meaningful, long-term relationships between students and teachers; and a relaxed, non-competitive culture of education, where learning is seen as natural and is valued and encouraged by everyone in society.
Those may sound like simple solutions, but, as anyone within the education field can tell you, that kind of culture takes a lot of hard work to establish – especially when you’re working against the status quo. That may be one reason why private or chartered alternative education settings – like Montessori, Reggio-inspired and Waldorf schools, and democratic schools like Summerhill and Sudbury, as well as Unschooling – often do so well; they start out with a blank slate when creating that culture, and the people whom these settings draw are either already devoted to a culture of living, breathing democratic education or are open to questioning the status quo and searching out new ways of education. That’s not the case with regular public schools, where the ideologies and frameworks of education are firmly entrenched and to question them is to go up against a vast, monolithic 100-year-old system.
That’s why, in a culture of competition and faux-accountability, with an ‘education’ system that has strayed so far from the real nature of education, alternative settings offer a chance to reboot the system entirely.