The Finland Phenomenon

We had an assignment on our exe English course to watch a video and read an article about the Finnish school system. I chose an hour long video called The Finland Phenomenon, it was about how Finland is number one in a lot of areas of education and ranks high in the Pisa tests as well. The video was in four parts so it was easy to watch, the reporter in the video was amazed how different Finnish lessons are and how much trust the teachers have for the students.

One good point they made in the video was that in Finland students are equal and everybody, no matter how rich or poor, gets the same education and it's free for everyone. Also we do a lot less work and school hours than for example American students, but still we rank a lot higher than they do.
I think a lot of it has to do with our teachers because here in Finland teachers are required to have a high education and a masters degree. After the ninth grade, which is the end of mandatory school for us, students choose if they want to go to a more academic high school or a vocational school. In the video the reporter said that the most of the students chose the vocational school, probably because after that school you have a profession and you can start working immediately.

One point that stood out to me was that they said the Finnish school system doesn't rely on testing... we have  a lot of tests. Now in high school we have test weeks after every period and we have five periods each year. In the lower grades all though  we didn't have test week I remember that we still had a lot of tests back then too.

I was actually surprised to know that Finland is so high up in the statistics and how well we do in the Pisa tests, because I don't think we do exceptionally well in school here and we don't have as much work to do like South Korea.

All in all I quite liked watching the video because it looked at the Finnish school system from an outsiders view and it had a lot of interesting points that I hadn't noticed before.