Jacob Christensen

Fun fact of the day: The Finns are sociable and upbeat.

Just a couple of notes on BBC World Service’s programme about education in Finland

1. Finland is a Nordic, not a Scandinavian country.
2. I would have liked to hear more specific details about the education of teachers and teaching practices.
3. The Finns have the goal of a non-divisive school in common with the Scandinavian countries – but the results of the PISA-tests diverge. Why?

Listen to the programme here – also available as a download.PS to Finnish readers: Yes, I know the title of the post is misleading. It’s a play on how Swedes traditionally see Finland and Finnish education.

More for possible German-reading visitors: Die Zeit visits Finland and wonders how and why Finnish schools seem to have succeeded where others have failed.Maybe some points could be:

• Learning, not elimination, is the aim of schooling (an obvious lesson for the conservative German educational system which – at least in my view – has yet to leave the 19th century).
• Pedagogy is based on subjects and student teachers are selected on the basis of questions like “how will you bring knowledge about this subject on to your pupils?”, not “how much do you know about this subject?” (a fundamental problem in all kinds of teaching).
• Teachers are still figures of public authority.

A topic for discussion could be:

• Can the Finnish model be transferred to other countries? Are some of the successes due to factors unique to Finnish society rather than to the Finnish schooling system?

One point is that the Finnish system shares some important characteristics with the Danish and Swedish systems for primary and secondary education but the Finns seem to succeed where the Danes and Swedes, if not fail, then have some performance problems.Is this due to the relatively high degree of homogeneity of the Finnish society or have the Finns managed to create models for learning that could be applied in other countries as well.A final point could be that school teacher education programmes in Denmark and Sweden have a hard time attracting qualified students while Finnish programmes are sought-after. Why is this? Wages, working conditions or the status of teachers in society-at-large and in the schools?

As always, the Finns provide us with an interesting government coalition. That Matti Vanhanens new government will be an oversized coalition is hardly surprising, but that Mr. Vanhanen’s Centre Party will be joined by not just the Conservatives and the Swedish People’s Party but also the Green Party could be counted as a surprise – and a very interesting one.

I wanted to say a few words about the Finnish elections at today’s class in Swedish Politics, but as I have caught a cold and have a really sore throat, I had to cancel the lecture.Here are instead a link to Tapio Rauno’s notes sent to the PSA Scandinavian Politics Specialist Group.

Dagens Nyheter wouldn’t be Dagens Nyheter if it didn’t bring us a daily dose of Swedocentrism.

Back in 2000, DN made a memorable effort to convince its readers that there was no chance in hell that the conservative (=underdeveloped) Finns would elect an un-married Socialist woman as president. The woman in question was Tarja Halonen. Today, columnist Karin Rebas faced a similar problem. Finnish economic growth is projected to be higher than the Swedish (4,9% against 4,2%) and, believe it or not, Finland’s GDP per capita is higher than Sweden’s (USD 32,900 against USD 31,600). If anything, the Swedes ought to be copying the Finns.

This is of cause a no-no to any progressive Swede and fortunately Rebas was able to find a fatal flaw in Finnish democracy: The turn-out in national elections.

In 1998 and 2002, any enlightened Swede would be agonising endlessly over the low turn-out in national elections. In 1998, the turn-out was 81,4% and in 2002 a measly 80,1%. Disaster was looming. (Things improved in 2006 when turn-out increased to 82%)

But how about Finland? Well, the Finns are less keen to vote as the following table shows:

(Source: vaalit.fi)

Is this a problem? And if it is: What can be done about this?

Unsurprisingly, Karin Rebas thinks this is a sign of a profound crisis in Finnish democracy and prescribes a Swedish solution: Instead of a three-way contest between the Social Democrats, the Centre Party and the Conservative Party, Finns would be so much better off if they only had the choice between the Social Democrats and… and… and… well, who?

If Rebas had bothered to do her homework instead of projecting Swedish desires on Finland, she would have noted that

1. turn-out increased in Denmark during the 1990s and early 2000s when it was stagnating or falling in Sweden (hint: The Danish People’s Party mobilises blue-collar voters)
2. that turn-out in Finland has always been 10-15 percentage points below the level in Sweden
3. that turn-out in Norway – which is also lower than in either Sweden or Denmark – only rose marginally between 2001 and 2005 when Norwegian voters faced the desired clear choice between left and right – and, finally:
4. that first-past-the-post systems – which are said to give the clear left-right choice – usually have a far lower turn-out than the Nordic PR systems. Check the British 2005 election for a case in point.

But the idea that Swedes might have one or two lessons to learn from Danes or Finns is of cause unthinkable.