The Finns…They Got It Right

Depending on where you are, and depending on who your friends are, most conversations eventually turn toward a discussion on education. Most people in a group of 60-year olds are vociferous in their opinion that education after they left school “stank”, but in their time “it worked JUST fine”. Oddly enough, if there is a group of 40 years olds chatting, this opinion again holds true. If there is a group of 20-year olds, this opinion does not change.

These sets of opinions can only be valid if the following algorithm is true: that the quality of education has been progressively declining over the last few decades. And this is not just in the non-performing countries. It is heard all over the world. Should we not be able to at least maintain status quo? Ah, but no! It seems that if the system of education does not change and stays the same, the system is actually and inexorably slipping backwards. So status quo is not good enough, we have to be cranking forward all the time.

The Finns have done just this for the last 60 years. And they have done it again, this winter. They scrapped what was a stellar system of education to go back to the board to start all over again. If they have thought through a system that works, I think we should take lessons from them, we should not try and reinvent the wheel. So what can we learn from the Finnish system of education?

The first thing they did was to make all curricular and systemic decisions from research findings from empirical studies done in over 300 field schools with over a 1000 teachers. It became clear to them that policy decisions in most countries were made by people who were informed by the best practices of their own education, most of which had happened in the misty past. This ensured that the policies that came out of this were already completely dated when they were released.

There seems to be many persuasive foci of attention in the Finnish intervention. One focus was on their social structure; the other was concentrated on their teachers. This is not rocket science, is it? Their dream for the last sixty years has been that they could provide a good school for all. They were not designing Points of Excellence schools, or Nobel laureate incubators. They were focused on flattening the field of education.

A second focus was clearly where it should be and that was to grow a cohort of completely professional set of teachers. So teacher education was modernized. The curriculum in teacher colleges was informed by the need of the hour and designed to produce students who left school with highly developed skills and knowledge.

The elephant in the room, of course, was the curriculum and this needs a whole blog post devoted to it. So, see you next week…

– By Jo Jyoti Thyagarajan, Founder Trustee

Meghshala

This article was first published on meghshala.wordpress.com on Sep 9, 2015