The Finnish Education Mystery

Historical and sociological essays on schooling in Finland

Hannu Simola

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135084080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

Finnish education has been a focus of global interest since its first PISA success in 2001. After years of superficial celebration, astonishment and educational tourism, the focus has recently shifted to what is possibly the most interesting element of this Finnish success story: that Finnish schools have been effectively applying methods that go against the flow of global education policy with no testing, no inspection, no hard evaluation, no detailed national curriculum, no accountability and no hard competition. From a historical and sociological perspective the Finnish case is not merely a linear success story, but is part of a controversial and paradoxical struggle towards Utopia: towards egalitarian schooling.

Bringing together a collection of essays by Hannu Simola and his colleagues, this book analyses the key dimensions of schooling in Finland to provide a critical, analytical and uncompromising picture of the Finnish education system. Going beyond the story of success, the book reveals the complexities of educational change, but also identifies opportunities and alternatives for smart political action in complex and trans-national societies.

Including a selection of key chapters on Finnish education policy and governance, teacher education and classroom cultures, the book will be of interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in comparative education, teacher education, educational policy and educational reform.

Part I

---

Education policy-making and governance

Struggling between egalitarianism and market liberalism

---

Chapter 1

---

Firmly bolted into the air

Wishful rationalism as a discursive basis for educational reforms?¹

---

Reforms in public education have veered towards ‘steady work’ in recent decades (Elmore & McLaughlin, 1988). One reform succeeds another at an increasingly hectic pace. A new, politically correct educational language may substitute an earlier one before field workers have learned the latter. Even the most eager reformers note the ‘considerable evidence that good teachers with a moral purpose become victims of either cynicism or burnout’ because of new demands, promises, and wishes (Fullan, 1993: 54). The situation of a classroom teacher often resembles the famous ‘double bind’ outlined by Gregory Bateson (1972) as a condition for schizophrenia: a person meets such contradictory and diffuse demands that he or she is no longer able to cope with them and becomes ill (cf. LeCompte & Dworkin, 1991).

It is strange that so few scholars have analysed this compelling logic of educational reform (see, however, Greenman, 1994; Hunter, 1994; Popkewitz, 1988). Even fewer have questioned it (see, however, Meyer, 1986; Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Two stances seem to predominate. First, some people hold the firm belief that we have finally found some theoretical foundations for real change in schools. A good example of these optimists is Michael Fullan, who states in his book Change Forces: ‘Development … has brought us to the beginning of a new phase which will represent a quantum leap – a paradigm breakthrough’ (Fullan, 1993: vii). Second, there are critics who refer to empirical evidence that optimism in school reform has been overestimated. Pedagogical ideas and theories seem to come and go, but teaching remains unchanged (e.g. Hoetker & Ahlbrandt, 1969; Leiwo et al., 1987; Sirotnik, 1983). This disappointment is crystallized in the title of a book written by the grand old man of school reforms, Seymour B. Sarason (1991), The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform. Critics even see recent reforms as deficient and insufficient: something has always been lacking, according to them. What is common to both optimists and critics, however, is that once again, a new and more comprehensive reform is considered necessary.

The subject of this chapter is the paradox of educational reform: although it appears to be final and conclusive, at the same time it seems deficient and insufficient. I propose that one explanation for this vicious cycle can be traced to ‘discursive dynamics’, to the specific ways we speak about school reform rather than the reforms themselves. The chapter is based on empirical findings and theoretical constructions developed in a study of official Finnish school discourse from the 1860s to the 1990s (Simola, 1995). Although the case is limited to a peripheral and small country, I will argue for its more general relevance. In what follows, I will first describe my approach and material. In the main part of the chapter, I identify four discursive changes in official Finnish school discourse after the Second World War. These changes then form the basis for a tacit discursive principle of school improvement that may shed light on the paradox of educational reform.

The material and the approach

One might ask why somebody in the so-called international academic community should pay attention to empirical findings from such a seemingly peripheral country as Finland. Although space restrictions prevent detailed argument, I would claim that the Finnish case could be seen as an accelerated, compressed version of the global process of mass schooling (e.g. Meyer et al., 1992b; Simola, 1993a). The Finnish comprehensive educational system was developed only recently, and at the same time very rapidly and systematically. Moreover, the Finnish political culture is even more statist than the cultures in the other Nordic countries. As one reflection of this, German ‘state ethics’ and étatiste philosophy dominated the academic field until the Second World War, after which Anglo-American influence took over, as it did in other Nordic countries. Given the evidence of new features of globalization in education discourse (see, for example, Lundgren, 1990), it is reasonable to treat the Finnish case not only as interesting and curious for an international audience, but also as an example of a more general phenomenon.

This chapter concerns official school discourse in Finland during the decades after the Second World War. The focal period is the 1970s, sometimes characterized as the ‘Golden Era of Educational Reforms’.² Three major reforms were carried out. First, the Comprehensive School Reform (1972–1977) replaced the dual-track school system of eight-year compulsory schooling and parallel grammar school with the single, mixed-ability comprehensive school in which all pupils are schooled for nine years. Second, the Teacher Education Reform, which was put into practice from 1973 to 1979, radically changed the training of primary school teachers (those who teach at the lower level, from grades 1 to 6, in comprehensive school). Their training was removed from teacher training colleges and small-town ‘teacher preparation seminaries’ to new university faculties of education, established as part of the reform, and was raised to the level of Master’s degree in 1979. This dramatically increased the role of educational studies in teacher training, and education as an academic discipline expanded rapidly. Third, the General Syllabus and Degree Reform in Higher Education (1977–1980) abolished the Bachelor’s degree (although it returned in 1994): since 1977, all those wishing to become teachers require a Master’s degree (Simola, 1993a, 1993b).

The discursive changes accompanying these reforms, both as their product and their producer, were no less dramatic. The comprehensive school presented itself as the ‘New School’ and did its best to distinguish itself from the old elementary school. Similarly, new teachers and educational scientists distanced themselves from their predecessors. A new school discourse materialized in the national curricula, governmental committee reports, and in legislative and administrative texts. It is this discourse that is the subject of this chapter.

Educational reforms do not merely come about – they are made. In the case of Finland, governmental committees have been the key instruments through which they are planned and justified. According to a Finnish study, education

has traditionally been an area in which government committees have played a particularly central role in the planning and preparation of government action and in drafting government policy for the sector as a whole. It is through the institution of the committee that education has been brought under strict governmental control, and the committee has become a vital instrument of educational policy as practiced by the state.

(Hovi et al., 1989: 243)

The authority of the committees has been reflected in the fact that, in some cases, their proposals have become the official curriculum, for both compulsory education and teacher training. Some reports have also been scientifically legitimized through the important role that educational scientists have attained in the committees, particularly since the late 1960s.

The material in this study includes the national curriculum documents for elementary and comprehensive schooling from 1925, 1952, 1970, 1985, and 1994, as well as the committee texts on schooling and teacher training. The former were written as models for the national curriculum with more precise documents to be formulated on the local level: in 1925 and 1952 by the school, in 1970 and 1985 by the municipal authorities, and in 1994 again by the school.³

The committee and curricular texts are serious, authoritative verbal acts of experts who speak as such and who thereby express the ‘official truth’ on schooling. They are, to quote Michel Foucault (1972: 49), discursive ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’. Although these verbal acts are the products of individuals, they have (especially when circulating as legal texts, administrative orders or state documents) the appearance of anonymity. This kind of text has the guarantee of the state as the ‘geometrical locus of all perspectives’, as ‘the holder of the monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 137). As such, it also has coercive force in relation to the reality of schooling.⁴ My main focus, however, is not on the ideas, paradigms or premises presented in intentional or explicit forms, but rather on something from the ambiguous area between words and things that are often taken for granted or are self-evident. Thus the approach of my study could be characterized as an ‘archaeological stance’ or a ‘history of truth’ in the Foucauldian sense.⁵

The individualized pupil

Finnish curricular and committee texts from before the Second World War rarely mention pupils as individuals. It was not the individual, but a group of children who were to be educated. When a child or a pupil is referred to in the singular, it is in the sense of the generalized individual. Although the benefits of mass schooling are mentioned, this type of education is principally legitimized by the needs of society, the nation and/or the fatherland. The Elementary School Committee in 1946 saw it as the task of the elementary school to train workers; the task of the lower secondary (middle) school to train foremen and forewomen; and the task of the secondary school (gymnasium) to train managers (Committee Report [CR], 1946: 17). The aim was to educate pupils in the established religious and peasant way of life in which – as a Finnish study phrased it – ‘work and faith are the central concepts of the curriculum, and home and fatherland, [its] solid ground’ (Rinne, 1987: 109).

The modern individual did emerge as the legitimating basis for compulsory schooling after the Second World War, but was still clearly subordinated to the interests of society. The school was seen as a ‘miniature society’ and a ‘working place for children’ (Curriculum [CUR], 1952: 28). Life in school was to be moulded into a completely educative training ground for civic rights and duties. These features were to be utilized to make school life totally educative. The main task of the school was to train ‘individuals for society’ (CUR, 1952: 13–14, 28).

Only since the late 1960s has the modern individual surpassed society as the primary authorized target of schooling. The main ethos was found in the new promise to respond to individual learning needs and the individual qualities of each pupil. The focus of pedagogical problematization in the 1970 curriculum (CUR, 1970) shifted from the number of pupils to the diversity of individual personalities: pedagogical expediency and flexibility thus assumed more importance than pupil numbers. This type of discourse might be crystallized as a ‘family tutor illusion’ (Simola, 1993b: 179), as if the basic social relation in school were one teacher to one pupil.

The focus of the teacher’s work changed from moulding the school life of a group of pupils to become an individual-centred task. Before the late 1960s, the need for individual observation focused on pupils who were labelled ‘behaviourally problematic’, rather than on every pupil. Since the 1970s, however, teachers have been required to know every single pupil intimately: to ‘be aware of the study-related factors in the individual pupil’s home environment’, to know ‘the previous learning results, abilities, attitudes, expectations and the health of the pupil’. This same requirement applied to the primary school teacher with 20 pupils and the subject teacher with 200 pupils (CR, 1975: 32–3).

The promise to respond to pupil diversity culminated in the texts since the 1990’s, which reinforce the individual-centred task of the teacher in emphasizing the ethical character of the teacher’s work. The 1994 curriculum depicts the teacher as a ‘counsellor of learning’ or a ‘designer of the learning environment’ for individual ‘learners’. The school now carries the rhetoric of offering ‘individual study plans’ or even ‘personal curricula’, in accordance with the needs and abilities of pupils (CUR, 1994: 10, 20).

According to Anderson (1994), attempts to individualize instruction in modern pedagogy can be traced to the work of Frederic Burk in San Francisco at the beginning of the twentieth century. The yearbook of the prestigious National Society for the Study of Education, published in 1925, was devoted entirely to individualized instruction. This pursuit has been at the heart of various well-known reform programmes, such as Winnetka, Illinois, the Dalton and the Decroly, ever since.

It is therefore an interesting question why progressive individualization, or the ‘family tutor illusion’, arrived in Finland so late. With regard to Sweden, for example, it has been said that in the 1940s the public school was already seen as being in the service of the individual rather than society (e.g. Broady, 1981). Key words, even in the Finnish progressive ‘New School’ movement after the 1930s, were Die Arbeitschule, workbooks and social education rather than ‘child-centred’ individualism (Lahdes, 1961). The principle of individualizing teaching was not part of the Finnish pedagogical vocabulary before the 1960s (Lahdes, 1966). I refer elsewhere to two intertwined reasons for this (Simola, 1995). First, the transition from an agricultural to an industrial society and subsequently to a post-industrial society began in Finland only after the Second World War, although its rapid growth among European countries was also exceptional. Second, the Finnish elementary school became the school for all children only in the late 1950s. Up until the 1940s, some 20 per...