Michael Lawrence and Dr. Fabio D'Agostin | Creating Schools…

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Myths of Finnish Education Pt.III

PROGRESSIVE?

One of the most common responses I hear when talking about the Finnish education system is the use of the term ‘progressive education’. In a recent discussion with an educator in Finland, he told me that the term progressive is never used in Finland. Surely, he argued, all education should be progressive – unless it is regressive?

My involvement in Finnish education began when Finnish educators quizzed me on my (by which they really meant ‘my country’s methods’) methods and whether they ‘worked’? Decades of PISA and NAPLAN left no doubt to the answer to the second question.

Their next question: ‘Well why do you keep doing things that way?’

There was no reasonable answer to this, and despite many hours of research on my return to Australia, I could not find a reasonable response to it.

Hundreds of hours researching the Finnish education system revealed that rather than being ‘progressive’, for it became obvious that its strength was that it was not any one thing, the real essence of Finnish education is a genuine adherence to innovative and creative learning methods. Education students are encouraged to learn the best practice, and then see if they can improve on it. As one Finnish education lecturer told me, “If you are not being innovative in your practice, how can there possibly be any improvement?”