The Finnish Education Revolution

The Finnish Education Revolution

Author

Korea Education Research Network Series Planning Team

Publisher

Sallimteo | Published 2010-01-19

Category

Humanities

Book description

Why Finnish education? People who dream of a new Korean education met ...

Author's rating

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Every child and young person in their growth years should be educated equally, regardless of race, region, or social origin. p.47

It is said that the government's gift bag for newborns always contains, along with baby supplies, a storybook to encourage reading. Helsinki, with a population approaching 600,000, has 36 municipal libraries, and the law requires that a library be built within 5 kilometers of any residential area. p.48

A teacher does not teach alone. Two or three people always form a team and teach together. Depending on the students' needs, assistant teachers and the main teacher divide the group and teach. p.86

Students must draw up a high school study plan according to a manual.......They must have the ability to create their own study plan taking into account their academic level, subjects of interest, and career path, while the teacher plays a role of supporting and helping the student understand well. p.91

Finnish teacher education is research-centered. Elementary school teachers are teachers who have carried out experimental research methods and plans. A way of thinking like PISA is not at all unfamiliar to them. Finnish teachers are politically conservative and believe in traditional roles, and students determine the teachers' position. Teachers are respected by their students. There is an atmosphere of believing in and trusting teachers as a professional occupation. In Finland there is such an atmosphere of trust toward teachers. In Finland, this trust in teachers fosters creative teaching methods and stirs up passion. p.110

Children with disabilities are always educated together with ordinary children. There are special classes for children with disabilities too, but depending on the parents' choice they can study just as well in an ordinary class. Children with disabilities also always spend time with ordinary children. They play together, eat together, and study together. Only students who need more attention and support go to special classes. p.152

In our country's school education, under the conditions of ordinary classroom education steeped in a thoroughly competitive climate and educational culture, students with special education needs become an obstacle to maintaining the achievement-centered competitive system, and so the reality is that they cannot help but be ostracized. p.261

The Finnish system: ECEC - Early childhood education and educare: places the child's rights first, and is based on an educational philosophy of 'slowness.'

Finland, without inspection and audit.

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Roughly that much is what I jotted down of the important parts from the book. In various respects, Finnish education has great implications. The greatest implication for me is the prioritizing of the value of 'cooperation' rather than 'competition.' Since childhood I have had something like a disgust for competition. The reason is that I hated being discriminated against over the fact that I wasn't good at something. If they had given more support even when I did poorly, that would be one thing, but it wasn't like that; rather, in an environment with less support, I think I never quite got a sense of what I should do to be okay. Thoughts like 'they don't even care about me, so what's the point of doing well' and 'so they keep helping the kids who do well keep doing well' persisted until I was in my second year of high school. Because my grades rose noticeably starting around when I became a third-year, it now feels like a thing of the past, but it was not so long ago. And education differentiated by grades is still happening right before my eyes.

The Republic of Korea is now a country where more and more people come to hate 'going to school' and hate studying. Who on earth would say that the high school entrance exam brought them the 'happiness' of a lifetime? That is merely a phrase pointing to a small minority of the highly educated; it makes me agonize over what to say about the people who, rather than the high scores within relative grading, received other, lower scores. When I think about how even I myself raised my grades just to adapt within that relative grading, there was never a moment that was simply comfortable.

Very, very fortunately, I was in one of the few decent school districts with a library right in front of my house. In the part I quoted above, it says Finland has legislated that a library be installed within 5 kilometers, but in Gwangju where I lived, I have no idea how many dozens more would need to be built to reach that. Most residential areas have no library, and only a few residential areas have one. It is a regrettable thing. Canada is like this, France is like this, England is like this; the 'library' is usually one of the most basic standards of the so-called decent countries we speak of, but here we are still far from that. We are still a country that keeps replacing sidewalk blocks, spends more money on repaving roads, and charges corporations low electricity rates.

I learned about this book back when I was in the military, but I never had a chance to read it; then, thinking about 'welfare,' I remembered this book. After reading it, systems like the 'assistant teacher,' and ways of thinking such as granting schools autonomy without inspection and audit, seem to be systems that require considerable professionalism and voluntariness to be secured. When I ask myself whether it would really be possible for us too, my distrust of this country is so great that a negative answer comes out: that it would be hard to do so. Because the demand for high morality is low, and it is still a country where in more cases 'money' takes precedence over 'people,' it feels like too vain a hope to say it would be possible.

When I go down to Gwangju at the end of the month, I want to talk about this book with Gihwan-hyung. I need to think more about how my brother, who is a current teacher, is taking in this book, and by what methods he is putting into practice the things he wanted to practice.