My old acquaintance, a Russian woman who has been living in Finland for 20 years, boasted to me at one meeting that she had recently found a very good job – an easy and even pleasant one: during quiet hour she works as a 'sleeping nanny' in a kindergarten and thus earns a pension. It's no wonder that I immediately wanted to write about serious and not-so-serious innovations in the Finnish education system – preschool and school.
Where to start? With the rational, the good, the eternal – with books, of course. Schools and the media provide people with a lot of ready-made information, while libraries, these holy of holies of Finnish knowledge repositories, answer the individual questions of each visitor, encouraging research. The more complex the question, the more interesting it is to get a comprehensive answer. If the desired source is not available in one library, it will be delivered from another, regardless of whether it is a public or academic library.
Can all this compare to information obtained from the Internet? It is no coincidence that the country's libraries were included in the government program 'Knowledge-Based Society', and all this partly explains why Finns achieve good results in the international PISA study and why there are so many writers in Finland.
If we take a historical excursion, we can be surprised to learn that for centuries the church was in charge of teaching Finns. This, of course, was not about the initial stage of education, as in Russian parish schools, but it contributed to education. According to the Protestant faith, every Finn had to be able to read the Bible and other religious literature. The only way out was to teach the common people literacy. It is no coincidence that the first book printed in Finnish was a primer, published in the mid-16th century.
Interestingly, a very important decree dating from 1660 had an impact on the literacy level, which stated that reading skills must be a prerequisite for marriage. That is, literally, you cannot get married if you do not learn to read. And they learned, by the way, and how! The church even hired teachers for this. And church clerks were made responsible for checking the knowledge already acquired. Learning was not easy for everyone, but the incentive outweighed.
Today it is believed that one of the serious factors of the success of the Finnish education system is even free school lunches. In Finland, students of basic school, as well as gymnasiums and vocational schools, receive hot meals during the school day. This legally enshrined tradition also has a long history, and today school lunches are one of the main principles of the educational program and care for students. The law was first passed in 1943, but due to the difficult war time, students had to work a certain number of hours growing and harvesting crops for the school kitchen.
In the second half of the 20th century, even more attention began to be paid to children's health. When compiling menus in schools, health and even the growth and development of students began to be taken into account. To ensure more vitamins in food, all school kitchens were required to use healthy seasonal products. In the 21st century burger age, a new problem emerged – excess weight in children, so emphasis was placed on individual menus for each student with metabolic disorders.
Interestingly, students themselves could (and can) take part in preparing lunches. They get acquainted with the work of cooks during practice, and some teenagers, having tasted all the delights of this profession, go to specialized culinary vocational schools.
If someone doesn't know, compulsory education in Finland consists of two stages: lower/alakoulu (students from grades 1 to 6); upper/yläkoulu (grades 7 to 9). Then each student, based on his/her academic results, must decide what to choose: a vocational college or further study at a lyceum (lukio). The municipalities bear full responsibility for the basic education system and its development, and this system is already over a hundred years old.
Finland is divided into 317 municipalities, so the school boards include thousands of parents, and schools automatically become part of the people's power, which confirms the principle of closeness to the people. This fact is one of the most striking examples of Finnish social innovation and brings people together.
According to Kari Uusikylä, professor of pedagogy at the University of Helsinki, 'good education should be given attention every day.' In Finland, this principle is held sacred. Natalia Vinogradova, correspondent of STOP in Finland in Helsinki, shares her personal experience:
– In the municipality of Mäntsälä, where my family lives, there are two unusual kindergartens. One specializes in all possible types of physical activity. And the other has a preparatory group where children spend all their time after school outdoors, even eating and drawing in the open air. In case of rain, there are gazebos. Of course, temperature restrictions are taken into account.
Surely many of you have heard about exchange students. In Finland, this is also widely practiced; sometimes children are not at home for a year. But it turns out there are also exchange teachers. At our school, a teacher from Japan teaches. She not only teaches grades 7-9, but also manages to give joint lessons, the so-called 'Japan on Skype' – for Finns and her temporarily left Japanese students.
By the way, about Skype. In sparsely populated areas of Lapland, unlike other areas of the country, there are fewer teachers and students, and distances are much greater. And in the Finnish education system, there is a mandatory rule: all children have equal opportunities for learning. Therefore, the lesson proceeds as follows: there are three or four students and a teacher in the classroom, and two more classes are present via video conference.
Much has been written about higher education in Finland, but now I will tell not about its successes, but about how the state financially supports students. The history of state benefits dates back to 1969, precisely from the time when student loans became widely popular in Finland. Scholarships began to be paid a little later, in 1972. And in 1979, students began to receive a meal allowance. This happened after President Urho Kaleva Kekkonen learned that more than half of university students had health much worse than his own. Today, the amount of the scholarship is influenced by factors such as the educational institution, the student's age, type of residence (with parents or separately), marital status, and even the parents' income.
Overall, the amount of the scholarship (before taxes) ranges from 38.50 (for a gymnasium or vocational school student aged 17–19 living with parents) to 335.32 euros (for a higher education student aged 18 and older living independently or married). The study loan ranges from 260 (for gymnasium and vocational school students under 18) to 700 euros (for students abroad). Housing allowance – from 26.90 to 201.60 euros per month (covers up to 80% of rent).