Thammasat University students who are interested in education, sociology, social justice, political science, policy development, gender studies, urban studies, philosophy, and related subjects may find a newly available book useful.

Finland’s Famous Education System: Unvarnished Insights into Finnish Schooling is an Open Access book, available for free download at this link:

https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/61899

The TU Library collection includes other books about different aspects of education in Finland.

The United Nations Development Programme derived an Education Index, a reflection of mean years of schooling of adults and expected years of schooling of children, that placed Finland fourth in the world as of 2019. Finland has consistently ranked high in the PISA study, which compares national educational systems internationally, although in the recent years Finland has been displaced from the very top. In the 2012 study, Finland ranked sixth in reading, twelfth in mathematics and fifth in science.

Last year, The South East Asia Center (SEAC) launched an education initiative based on the Finnish model in 12 Thai schools.

In 2018, Thailand expressed potential interest in adopting other Finnish educational methods.

However, according to one 2019 report,

ASIAN EDUCATION SYSTEMS PULLING AHEAD

As Singapore, China, and Japan overcome Finland, especially in math and science, countries like Taiwan are quickly closing the gap. This has led some to wonder if Asian education systems have improved over Finland’s in meaningful ways.

Finnish native and Asia correspondent Hannamiina Tanninen has attended schools in both countries. She agrees that Finland’s education system is one of the world’s finest, especially regarding its quality teachers. However, in her TED talk she argues that Finland must learn lessons from East Asia if it is to stay relevant:

Students in Asia start their education earlier, work harder, and work longer. Simply put, the more time students put into developing skills and knowledge, the more of both they will acquire.

Finland’s education system lowers the bar accordingly to match a student’s talent and skill set; East Asian systems require students to work to meet a universal standard and catch up if necessary.

East Asian systems promote competitiveness and center educational strategies on excelling. In Finnish culture, such open competitiveness is less socially acceptable.

Finland strives to make learning fun and creative; however, Tanninen argues that this approach may be disadvantageous. It may, for example, sacrifice long-term educational gains if success is always measured on a student’s instant gratification. […]

Oates’s conclusion is fitting: “In the case of [Finland’s education system], people have been seriously misled by stories told by people who have looked at Finland through their own, restricted lens. The real story of Finland is more subtle, more challenging, and far, far more interesting.”

The publisher’s description of the book notes:

This open access book provides academic insights and serves as a platform for research-informed discussion about education in Finland. Bringing together the work of more than 50 authors across 28 chapters, it presents a major collection of critical views of the Finnish education system and topics that cohere around social justice concerns. It questions rhetoric, myths, and commonly held assumptions surrounding Finnish schooling. This book draws on the fields of sociology of education, education policy, urban studies, and policy sociology. It makes use of a range of research methodologies including ethnography, case study and discourse analysis, and references the work of relevant theorists, including Bourdieu and Foucault. This book aims to provide a critical, updated and astute analysis of the strengths and challenges of the Finnish education system.

An introduction to the book states:

Why are we writing such a book, you might ask? Is it an attempt to tarnish Finland’s educational reputation? The impetus for the book came from concern that the grand international narrative on Finnish education seems to be disproportionate. There are some details that have become explanations of Finnish education success, but which seem irrelevant or superficial based on Finnish research and scholarship. Then there are long trajectories and large societal shifts forming education that are disregarded in the international debates due to their complexity and lengthy timeframes. They are just too difficult to sum up in a catchphrase or a slogan. It is important to recognise that stories of success and problems in an education system are not mutually exclusive. There are rich stories reported through research: that the foundational idea of equality in Finnish comprehensive education has been undermined by policies de facto pushing segregation between and inside schools; that the schools’ success can be explained with a history of institutional robustness and political compromises; that edu-business is changing the landscape of public education in Finland. If, based on these observations, we were to conclude that education in Finland is a success or failure, we would be oversimplifying the matter. We need to look at how the comprehensive school system has developed with regards to social justice and its outcomes, which can be measured either by learning outcomes and skills (as in PISA), which are often translated into ‘quality’ in the public discussion, or through measures of equality of opportunity, which relate to questions of systemic  differentiation and stratification.

Another concern that gave rise to this book is that many of the key problems in public and political debates over “Finnish education” derive from methodological nationalism. This is the viewpoint that informs international large-scale assessments, PISA being the most obvious example, which build an understanding of different nations competing with each other in the international forum and the possibility of ranking their order. Yet something being Finnish does not make it a success or failure. Indeed, the proposition of a wholesale national success and failure is oversimplifying and artificial, and thus mostly uninteresting for research. Rejecting methodological nationalism, we pay more attention to schools, as sociological and political phenomena. In this book the focus is certainly on contexts, including national contexts, but we are wary of being too interested in the uniqueness of Finland or whatever we think that is. Hence this book is not only about Finland, rather it highlights how education is enacted in policies and practices in Finland. It draws on a more universal sociology and politics of education and to some extent on comparative education.

Finally, we are also concerned about the motives for the utopian account of Finland’s education system, as well as its impact. Put simply, there is money to be made in peddling a glossy version of any successful approach to education, in this case Finnish. Individuals, institutions and indeed nations, including Finland and those it exports to, all benefit financially from overlooking complexity and contradiction. But as the chapters here will often illustrate, ignoring such detail causes many problems for students, teachers and others in Finland, as well as in countries around the world where products and services sold under “Finnish education” get applied uncritically and without enough attention to the local context or vernacular into which they are being enacted. We hope this book will also give insights into the field of travelling policies and practices and the educational export of any education: how deep one needs to look in order to understand the construction of an education system, and what needs to be accounted for when adopting policies and practices into other contexts. The contributors to this book shed light on the mechanisms that are embedded in the Finnish setting.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)