Finland’s education system

In the last blog post, I mentioned how the United States’ education scores were improving every year domestically but not in comparison to other nations. One nation in particular that  has been doing exceedingly well with their world renowned education system is Finland. Finland’s education system has been known as one of the best in the world for the last few decades. They were thought of as one of the worst in the 1970’s and they really took it to heart making significant changes to their system. The United States, on the other hand, hasn’t made any real substantial changes in many years. They do a lot of things differently than the United States, and many people think that we should adopt their ideas.

One of the main differences between America and Finland is the structure of schooling. America has always subscribed to the traditional K-12 structure, but Finland does something different. Students don’t start school until they are at least 7 years old. There is a large emphasis on kids being kids and enjoying their childhood without being brought down by the stress of school. They provide a strong emphasis on play and they actually have play time everyday during school. They also only require students to go to school up through freshman year of high school.

These seemingly small changes are actually very significant as many children in America seem to view school as a forced obligation and may even sometimes refer to it as prison. In Finland, school can actually consistently be something that is seen as fun without interfering with student’s social lives. Finland also has significantly shorter school days especially when children are younger. On average, the school day for Finnish children is about 3 hours and 45 minutes including lunch and playtime which means that they outperform the United States in every major educational category while having a little over half of the school that they have.

One of the largest differences between the United States’ education system and Finland’s is that the U.S gives their kids hours of homework every night while Finland’s kids only have around 30-45 minutes of homework each night if that. Their thinking is that student’s shouldn’t have to deal with the stresses of school at home. Finland wants their citizens to be children as long as they can. They also care a lot about the happiness of their citizens and that is thought to be the greatest reason why their students do well in school.

If you think about the culture associated with schools in the United States especially high schools most of the things that come to mind are negative. The number of school shootings has risen drastically in our country to the point where we averaged about one a day. Also, when you think of high school you can see the stereotypes about cliques, bullying, suicide, etc. All of the shows and movies set in high school deal with these themes. If you’ve ever seen Mean Girls or Thirteen Reasons Why or any number of other teen dramas then you know exactly what I mean.

When I researched Finland on the other hand, I could only find records for three school shootings ever. This may not actually be true because I couldn’t find that much information on it, but you get the point. Schools in Finland rarely ever get shot up. They are seen as fun and peaceful places of learning in contrast to American schools where people are sometimes fearful for their lives. If we want to improve the United States’ education system then we need to change the cultural perceptions and stereotypes associated with it.